Accolade Wines on track for new $40 million bottling facility for Riverland
ACCOLADE Wines is on track to build its new bottling facility in the Riverland.
ACCOLADE Wines is hoping to soon begin building its new $40 million bottling facility in the Riverland, five years after closing down its former operations in Reynella and laying off 175 workers.
A company spokeswoman said discussions were underway with industrial design and warehouse fabrication experts and it was hoped work would begin in the first half of this year.
“While no final decision has been made at this stage, labels likely to be bottled in the facility include Hardys and Banrock Station among others,” she said.
The nation’s second largest wine company, which owns brands including Hardys, Leasingham, Grant Burge and Banrock Station, has previously announced that construction at the Berri winery, which currently focuses on producing cask wine, would take between 18 months and two years.
Once completed, the company said it would employ about 40 people and have bottling capacity of up to eight million cases of wine annually and storage capacity of more than 22 million pallets of inventory.
When Accolade Wines shut down its bottling works at Reynella, operations were moved to Wolf Blass Winery, at Nuriootpa, sharing plants with Penfold’s owner Treasury Wine Estates.
This deal is expected to cease once the new facility is in operation.
Chaffey MP and Opposition trade and investment spokesman Tim Whetstone is keen to see the new glass bottling plant and warehouse facilities at Accolade Wines’ Berri site up and running as soon as possible.
“The creation of 40 jobs at Berri would provide a much-needed boost to the local economy at a time when unemployment in the Riverland is high,” he said.
“I’m hoping this investment into Accolade’s Berri facilities will see growers who supply the winery rewarded, by opening greater access to export markets, and generating opportunities to reinvest in their businesses.
“A large investment of this kind is a vote of confidence in the Riverland as a key export region for South Australia’s wine industry.
“South Australian wine exports continue to show positive growth. This is an area which has been a shining light in our economy, as the state’s exports remain relatively stagnant.”
According to Accolade Wines, Berri Estates has the largest wine bag-in-box, or cask manufacturing, facility in the country, producing 85,000 casks a day and about 70 million litres a year.
Berri Estates is the largest grape processor in the southern hemisphere, crushing about 220,000 tonnes of grapes annually, around a third of SA’s entire crush.
Accolade Wines’ HQ is in Reynella but chief executive Michael East and general manager for Australia and NZ Rick Wilson are based in Sydney.