WineWorks’ new bottling warehouse in Onehunga suburb Auckland city, New Zealand, became operational in October 2016. The new plant will allow the wine bottling company to serve its growing customer base in the New Zealand wine industry.
WineWorks invested multi-million dollars in the new bottling warehouse. Construction on the facility was commenced at the end of 2015 and completed in the third quarter of 2016.
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Planned eight years ago, the new site replaces the old plant in Auckland’s Penrose suburb. Production at the old plant was completely terminated in September 2016 and transferred to the new building.
Details of WineWorks’ new bottling warehouse
Covering 16,000m², the new site houses a wine bottling line and a warehouse in a large building, featuring truss structures and spanning 85m. The building incorporates state-of-the art equipment and advanced technologies for both bottling and satellite racking storage.
First wine bottle was rolled out from the new bottling line in July 2016. The bottling line uses electro-pneumatic filling valve technology to lower dissolved oxygen levels. It incorporates New Zealand’s fastest wine filler, which has the ability to pump-out two 20ft shipping containers of wine an hour at full speed.
The warehouse is capable of storing millions of wine bottles and is installed with pallet robots that lift and store bottle pallets in the floor-to-ceiling satellite racking system. Palletised bottles are moved using forklifts.
Production and packaging
The new facility will be able to manufacture different wine bottle types such as glass, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), paper and aluminium. The wine bottles are fitted with closures manufactured by Stelvin Lux, Cork, Zork Closures, and Vinolok.
WineWorks uses Tetrapak / pouches / bag-in-box for flexible packaging for its wine bottles. The finished products are labelled and then distributed to both small and large wineries.
Location advantages of WineWorks’ new facility in Onehunga
The new bottling warehouse is located in Neilson Street in the Onehunga suburb, which is well connected to industry suppliers and supermarket distribution centres through ports, airport and railway stations.
Contractors involved
ENGEO provided a range of services for earthworks at the new site. The services included construction monitoring, environmental and geotechnical investigation and sampling. It also served as a technical supervision inspector for a production water bore at the facility.
Envivo was contracted by WineWorks to perform surveys such as topographic, redefinition, earthworks volumes, and construction set-out. Envivo was also responsible for as-builts and for the establishment of a new right-of-way easement.
Marketing commentary
Headquartered in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, WineWorks serves more than half the wineries in the country. With an employee base of 340, the company owns and operates nine bottling lines at plants in Hawke’s Bay, Auckland and Marlborough regions.
The company produces more than 120 million wine bottles a year at its bottling plants, while its wine storage facilities are capable of storing more than 60 bottles of wine. It makes 110,000 cases a day.
WineWorks offers a range of services including wine bottling, warehousing, wine transportation, distribution and laboratory services.
