Most Australian Wine Exports Ship in Giant Plastic Bladders

Hardys became Britain’s best-selling Australian wine brand by selling for as little as £3.40 ($5) a bottle despite the 37 percent surge in its home country’s currency since 2009. To do that and still earn a profit, the winemaker turned to plastic bags. No, not those bag-in-a-box jobs found at your local Sam’s Club or Costco. We’re talking 24,000-liter plastic bags, each able to carry the equivalent of 32,000 bottles of vino. Accolade Wines, the maker of Hardys, pared shipping costs that can amount to as much as $3 a case by ditching glass bottles and shipping its fruit of the vine in giant plastic bladders. After the 10,000-mile journey, the wine is bottled at a plant next to a scrap merchant a two-hour drive from London.

Australia’s A$5.5 billion ($5.8 billion) wine industry moves more than half its overseas shipments in bulk, which make the 40-day journey to Europe safely ensconced in plastic. The practice is reshaping logistics and the flow of wine between the Land Down Under, the largest exporter outside Europe, and the U.K., the biggest net importer. Richard Lloyd, Accolade’s global manufacturing director, said in an e-mail: “We don’t ship glass around the world, we ship wine.”