California: Winery spending $300 million on expansion in Lodi

(Recordnet) - There's more than the usual fall-harvest buzz at Trinchero Family Estate's Westside winery.

Besides the flow of trucks delivering gondolas full of grapes to be crushed and fermented into wine, there are hundreds of construction workers on site raising a massive new bottling plant and distribution center.

Visible to thousands of motorists passing daily on Interstate 5, just north of Turner Road, the building towers over the surrounding farmland, its floor-to-ceiling interior height of 85 feet able to accommodate pallet racks eight layers high.

The $180 million building project - along with an ongoing $120 million expansion of the facility's winemaking capacity - is a major commitment for Trinchero, but it makes sense, given that most of its wine comes from grapes grown in Lodi and the surrounding region, said Robert Torres, Trinchero's senior vice president of operations.

"This is where we need to be," he said last week while touring the building site. "Napa is our home. This is our second home."

St. Helena-based Trinchero - ranked the fourth-largest U.S. wine company in 2012 with estimated case sales of 18 million - used to ferment, bottle and distribute all its wine in Napa County. It started the Westside facility in 1999 but had only installed a number of storage tanks when an oversupply of grapes and wine, as well as the uncertainty and recession following 9/11, led Trinchero to put its expansion plans on hold.