Wine Bottles and Bladders

Jock O’Connell

Nearly every year over the past twenty or so years I have learned something new by attending the annual Unified Wine & Grape Symposium that’s held late each January in Sacramento. The UW&GS is the largest wine industry trade show outside of Europe. It’s held in California’s state capital because Napa lacks a large enough convention space and because San Francisco is, well, too expensive.

Apart from panels of industry experts sharing their thoughts on a wide range of topics like the latest consumer trends to strategies for coping with the latest vineyard pest or mold, the show features hundreds of suppliers of often arcane products and technologies used in wine production. More often than not while wandering up and down the trade show aisles, I am obliged to ask: What’s this thing do?

So, over the years, I’ve learned from the people running the labs officially certified to measure the ABV (alcohol by volume) content of wines that the actual alcohol content listed on the label may legally be off by one percent point either way. That hearty cabernet sauvignon from Napa that boasts of having an alcohol content of 15.0% could actually be veering into fortified wine category.   

I have also chatted with coopers from here and abroad and listened patiently while they argued why oak barrels are far superior vessels for aging fine wine than tanks constructed of steel or aluminum or even cement. And while I’ve been left baffled by chemists trying to explain to a non-science major what it is they do to maintain product quality; I was delighted to meet the falconer displaying how his birds can rid a vineyard of vine-eating rodents. Drone for keeping a close eye on maturing grapes have been a major addition to the show for the past couple of years.

I have also stumbled on intriguing stories of logistical legerdemain.

Back before COVID-19 came along, I encountered an elegantly attired but insufferably snooty Parisienne who was at the UW&GS representing a bottle manufacturer that traced its roots to the late 19th century in Normandy’s Bresle Valley. She was clearly irked at having to stand at a trade show booth in Sacramento when she had been counting on a visit to San Francisco or Napa.

Here, based on memory, is how our conversation went.

So you are an exporter of wine bottles from France?

Yes and no. We also export wine bottles to California from Dubai.

Really? You manufacture wine bottles in a country that forbids the consumption of alcoholic beverages? I suppose you’re there because of the abundance of desert sand.

No! [You stupid American was what I inferred from her tone.] The sand in Dubai is not suitable for making wine bottles. We source the sand from Australia.

Of course you do. Now let me get this straight. You are a French company that makes wine bottles...

No, [she interrupted me], we make only the finest wine bottles for the very expensive wines you Americans think are fine wines.

Okay, but you make these bottles in Dubai solely for export by using sand you import from Australia, which is like five or six thousand miles from your factory.

9000 kilometers, to be precise.

Merci. This all makes perfect sense. Have a nice flight home.

Months later, I was enlightened by an old friend in British intelligence who had spent much of his career in the Middle East. The Dubai factory, he told me, was likely a money loser. Its real purpose was to help the French government sell more advanced fighter aircraft and other military hardware to the United Arab Emirates.

I still haven’t figured out what the Aussies got out of the arrangement other than a contract to sell sand.

Anyway, back to this year’s trade show.

The topic of conversation that pervaded nearly every discussion was the fall-off in wine drinking, especially among younger people in America and Europe. Beer and spirits sales have also been receding, as anti-alcohol sentiments are spreading. Compounding the wine industry’s woes right now is an over-production of grapes, especially the grapes that are typically found in bottles or boxes lining the bottom shelves of grocery stores. Premium wine sales are evidently holding their own despite frowning newspaper headlines that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

These developments are affecting international trade in empty wine bottles and the bulk wines that are generally shipped in bladders holding as much as 25,000 liters of wine.    

The Empty Bottle Trade

As Exhibit A shows, seaborne imports of empty wine bottles grew almost steadily over the last two decades until plummeting in 2023. The chief port of entry has been the Port of Oakland due to its proximity to the wine-producing regions that stretch from California’s North Coast to the southern San Joaquin Valley. Nationally, the trade peaked in 2021 at 801,807,160 kilos before slipping by 3.0% in 2022 and then plunging to 328,534,563 kilos last year. At the Port of Oakland, import tonnage, which had crested in 2022 at 514,394,249 kilos fell some 70.0% to 154,079,747 kilos last year.  

Despite the sharp fall-off in imports from China, it remained the top overseas supplier with a 30.8% share of the maritime import trade last year. Chile was next with a 10.8% share, followed by India (9.4%), Taiwan (8.7%), and the United Arab Emirates (7.0%).   

Chateau de Firebaugh

California’s exporters of bulk wines have also been seeing declining volumes of trade. Produced largely in the southern San Joaquin Valley between Lodi and the Grapevine, these unpretentious wines are usually blended with other wines to alter taste, color or alcohol content or packaged in bottles or boxes at the lower-end of the wine market. When shipped abroad, bulk wines travel not in bottles but rather in large bladders loaded into containers for ocean transport. The largest overseas market for California bulk wine is the United Kingdom  

As Exhibit D reveals, the top market for bulk wine shipments from the Port of Oakland has long been the United Kingdom. That’s not necessarily because the British are enchanted with relatively cheap wines from California. It’s because much of the trade involves bottling facilities in Britain that ship bottled wine on to markets throughout Europe. The labels on these bottles seldom allude to a winery anyone cognizant of California wines would recognize. Instead, the labels often bear the name of a fictitious winery from an indistinct appellation.

Is it any wonder that Europeans – including those flogging empty wine bottles at a trade show in Sacramento – might instinctively regard California wines as just so much plonk.