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Re: New wine warehouse American Caynon
Author: Tom H
Date: 10-28-2009 - 07:37
JDM Wrote:
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> Wine moves in insulated cars and with the new
> types of dunnage and bubble wraps that insulate
> the loads the heat and cold probelm is solved. 4
> trucks to a RAIL CAR is a big cost savings
Of course you have to ship the wine to someone on the other end that has a rail spur. I have a hard time believing that bubble wrap will keep heat out for very long. They should bubble wrap the warehouse as a green alternative and save some electricity money. Why not ship in a mechanical refrigerated car? The truth is that shipping is the dirty little secret of the wine business.
I really think that the disconnect here is the difference between fine wine and grocery store wine. No one I know would buy wine shipped in a boxcar. I was at a wine storge facility yesterday and the Kendall-Jackson warehouse came up right after a truck dropped off a couple of pallets of wine. Everyone was appalled at the idea of shipping by rail, one person said they were shipping vinegar. I'm sure some of them don't realize that wine they are having shipped UPS is riding a train also, but they recognize that shipping season is short in the fall and spring. Also the wineries that produce fine wine are generally proud enough of their product that they wouldn't ship it when it could suffer from temerature extremes. Most of them couldn't fill a boxcar with their entire production anyway
I have seen plenty of wine shipped in boxcars when I worked at the railroad. The wine cars were always easy to spot because you can smell them and they were frequently broken in to. When I was a trainmaster in Chicago we served a distributor that had a rail spur, they could only handle 2 cars at a time. We warehoused their wine in the yard with a track set aside for wine that had 5-15 cars at any given time. They could sit weeks at a time in the hot summer sun, the smell wafting over the yard as the wine seeped past the corks as the bottles baked in the heat. In January the 0 temps forced the corks out of the necks of the bottles.
Grocery store wine is for housewives that want to get a little buzz, the quality or taste doesn't matter.
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> Wine moves in insulated cars and with the new
> types of dunnage and bubble wraps that insulate
> the loads the heat and cold probelm is solved. 4
> trucks to a RAIL CAR is a big cost savings
Of course you have to ship the wine to someone on the other end that has a rail spur. I have a hard time believing that bubble wrap will keep heat out for very long. They should bubble wrap the warehouse as a green alternative and save some electricity money. Why not ship in a mechanical refrigerated car? The truth is that shipping is the dirty little secret of the wine business.
I really think that the disconnect here is the difference between fine wine and grocery store wine. No one I know would buy wine shipped in a boxcar. I was at a wine storge facility yesterday and the Kendall-Jackson warehouse came up right after a truck dropped off a couple of pallets of wine. Everyone was appalled at the idea of shipping by rail, one person said they were shipping vinegar. I'm sure some of them don't realize that wine they are having shipped UPS is riding a train also, but they recognize that shipping season is short in the fall and spring. Also the wineries that produce fine wine are generally proud enough of their product that they wouldn't ship it when it could suffer from temerature extremes. Most of them couldn't fill a boxcar with their entire production anyway
I have seen plenty of wine shipped in boxcars when I worked at the railroad. The wine cars were always easy to spot because you can smell them and they were frequently broken in to. When I was a trainmaster in Chicago we served a distributor that had a rail spur, they could only handle 2 cars at a time. We warehoused their wine in the yard with a track set aside for wine that had 5-15 cars at any given time. They could sit weeks at a time in the hot summer sun, the smell wafting over the yard as the wine seeped past the corks as the bottles baked in the heat. In January the 0 temps forced the corks out of the necks of the bottles.
Grocery store wine is for housewives that want to get a little buzz, the quality or taste doesn't matter.
