Haere Ra 2024: WineWorks
Slowing wine sales have impacts beyond growers and wineries. WineWorks Group Chief Executive Peter Crowe looks at some of those consequences.
"We are going to be sitting on quite high inventory for both our packaging and export wine customers, I think, in the next few months, leading into the vintage 2025 bottling season."
The Riverlands facility, gifted the name Honomai by Rangitāne, is a partnership between Port Nelson, logistics firm QuayConnect, and trucking company Central Express. It includes a 5,000 square metre warehouse amd storage space for 350 empty and full 20-foot containers.
Jaron says that with about 80% of New Zealand's wine grown and produced in Marlborough, the facility is a game-changer for the region's exporters, importers and logistics operators, and supports the QuayConnect model of moving packaging across to Marlborough and full trucks of wine back to Nelson.
Peter Crowe, Chief Executive Officer at WineWorks, says Honomai has given the industry more resilience. "We want to continue adding value to this New Zealand product here in New Zealand, rather than going offshore. And so anything that we can do from an infrastructure perspective that helps with that will be a good thing.”
Speaking after the late February launch of the facility, Jaron says QuayConnect is seeing a boost to inbound packaging and a “long tail” to the bottling season, as wineries create tank space for harvest. While not everyone will have export bookings “locked and loaded”, there appear to be green shoots in the United States and United Kingdom markets in particular, “so they have enough confidence to put stuff in a bottle... Normally we see everything empty out for a few months before filling up, but I think we will be needing all the space we can get our hands on.”
Peter is also seeing signs of recovering export levels, and a return to normal shipping patterns and sales. “We’re not seeing the orders drop away like we did this time last year, which is promising,” he says in early March. “But we are seeing inventory start to build in our warehouses.” Stock levels of the previous year’s vintage normally go down to near empty before harvest, “but we are still seeing quite a bit of 2023 sitting in store, which is not a good position for us to be in”. Individual companies may have their 2023 inventory in hand, but added up across all WineWorks’ clients, there’s a backlog, he says.
As well as managing bottled wine, the new port will facilitate “more seamless flows” of bulk wine, Jaron says, referring to the storage of flexibags in 20-foot containers. Port Nelson’s bulk wine facilities have been busy over summer, with container trucks lined up at the gate most days. “We’re seeing unprecedented amounts of bulk wine exported at the moment.” Jaron says 2024 was a very challenging year in terms of logistics, with a slump in sales affecting wine movement in September and October, when QuayConnect is normally at its peak. Things “cracked into life” from November to February, “so that’s made those months particularly busy for us”. They now hope to work with wineries to bottle earlier in the year to smooth out the logistical load, he says. ‘That’s good for you and it’s good for us. It means that imports and exports and the movement of goods in the region just happen a lot more seamlessly.”
