Incredible bulk: why are we bottling foreign wine in Britain?

(Telegraph) - Increasingly, wine is shipped to the UK vacuum-packed in huge tanks, then bottled here. But how does this affect the taste?

Ch-chink. Clatter. Burrrr. Ah, the sound of bottles being filled with liquorice-and-eucalyptus-scented Australian shiraz at the highly efficient rate of six million a week. Step outside this gleaming facility and you won’t be hit by warm air, though. There are no kangaroos, just a few raucous grey seagulls and a flat, damp dockscape. We’re not in New South Wales but Avonmouth, the port on the edge of Bristol.

The bottling plant, owned by Accolade (formerly Constellation Wines), is the biggest of a handful around the country that receive wine shipped in vast flexi-tanks and repackage it into bottles and boxes destined for supermarket shelves. The phenomenon of “The Incredible Bulk”, as it has been called, has led to global bulk wine exports rising from 560 million to 1.24 billion litres in a decade, according to Rabobank which published a report on the subject, noting that the main demand comes from Britain, Germany, the United States and China.

You can tell if your wine has been bottled on these shores because the label on the back must by law announce it, though it usually does so in minuscule print. Chances are if you buy wine in supermarkets you will have had one. Accolade in Avonmouth bottles not just its own brands (which include Hardy’s and Echo Falls) but also those of Treasury Wine Estates (who own Lindeman’s and Beringer), Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. Last February Asda became the first retailer to own its own UK bottling plant, in Norfolk. Greencroft Bottling in Co Durham packs around 100 million litres a year that go into pub groups as well as retailers. Tesco, which estimates that about a quarter of all the wine it sells has been bottled on these shores, uses a facility near the Manchester Ship Canal in Cheshire. You may have seen its head of wine (a former naval officer) on Gregg Wallace’s Supermarket Secrets standing astride a barge and prodding the large 24,000-litre polypropylene bags in which the stuff arrives, “Look! It’s vacuum-packed so it feels completely solid.” My more acidic colleagues have been teasing him about his “performance on HMS Plonk”.