Whenever I drive a certain 300 mile stretch of Highway 101 along California’s central coast I am always astounded that there are enough people in the world to consume the vast oceans of wine produced by the endless expanse of vineyards that surround me every mile of the way. But even that isn’t as difficult to comprehend as the millions of glass bottles that are needed to contain this bounty every year. Millions of acres of grapes and as far as I can tell, not a single bottle factory. Are the bottles made in wine country or are they imported by the shipload from far away places like China?
You know, I have never wondered this but it’s a great question.
ETA - you don’t have to wonder anymore - my mom and I drink most of that wine.
They’re around, just not conspicuous. Not many people interested in tours of bottle factories. Here’s a list, several of which are near the wine country (pdf):
You wouldn’t need that large of a factory, and a machine could mold a dozen a minute.
So for instance, with 320 million people in the US, if each drank a bottle per month(remember we are counting kids and non drinkers), then that is 3,840,000,000 bottles per year. It seems like a lot, but there are 525,949 minutes in a year, so production only needs to be 7300 per minute.
If a factory makes 100 per minute using several machines, you only need 73 factories. Chances are there are fewer, they make them faster, and they produce more. They could be few in number that you don’t encounter them.
Hell, the wine I drink comes in a box. (I go for quantity, not quality)
Yeah, and where are all the box factories near other farmland?
Seriously, a good question? It comes as a surprise to people that producers of consumer goods, especially farms might purchase packaging?
AFAIK, the leading producers of glass packaging are world-wide industries with manufacturing facilities around the globe.
Until recently Coca Cola returnables were made in Minnesota.
Perfectly serviceable wines are available in a box. He said, defensively.
It is a good question but it applies not just to wine bottles but also to thousands of other products that most people don’t think about much. A lot of products, especially labor intensive ones, are produced overseas but it is a myth that American manufacturing is dead. In fact, it is thriving but it tends to be the high-tech or highly automated manufacturing that doesn’t require all that many people or that much space to produce huge amounts of product.
I am a high-tech manufacturing consultant and get to see how these operations work and it is fascinating. The most striking thing is how much output a single manufacturing facility can produce. Manufacturing facilities tend to be out of the general public eye because they go unnoticed in the industrial sections of cities or tucked away out of sight somewhere.
I don’t know exactly where wine bottles are produced but I do know that they wouldn’t necessarily need to be made anywhere near the vineyards although they might be. With modern trucking systems, they could be made outside of say Pittsburgh just as cost effectively as Napa Valley. You can fit a whole lot of bottles on an 18 wheeler (over 50,000 according to my rough calculations) so the cost of transport is negligible even across country.
I agree that it would only take a few factories to produce all the wine bottles needed for the entire country. They wouldn’t necessarily need to be all that large either if that is all they made but they are probably made in larger glassware factories that produce lots of different types of glass containers.
ETA: I found some sources for bulk orders of wholesale wine bottles. Judging by the names, it looks like most of them are made in Asia and shipped to the West Coast via container ship.
There are links to a few pictures of the actual factories next to the bottles. Many of them don’t look that big.
One difference is that something like cardboard boxes can be shipped flattened but wine bottles cannot. I also wondered about how food and beverage cans are manufactured. Does a Coca-Cola bottling plant get deliveries of empty soda cans, or do they have a spool of sheet aluminum and the equipment to make the cans on-site? Similarly, where do the cans for soup come from?
Yeah, that’s the thing that throws me. Glass bottles are non-compactable, heavy, and fragile. And it’s not like the California coast lacks the raw materials needed for making bottles.
BTW, thanks to yabob for that list. It’s nice to know that there are some local bottle manufactures. I’d think transport costs would allow them corner the market in wine country, unless bottle making is more labor intensive than I suspect.
Interestingly, during a tour of a Virginia winery it was mentioned that rarely do any of them do their own bottling. The kegs are trucked off to various plants who do the bottling for them. Do you see a lot of trucks on that specific California highway? Possibly carrying kegs of wine.
Tangental question: Where do all the natural corks come from? I know there are a lot of wineries switching to plastic/synthetic corks, or twist-off lids for even premium wines, but there are still a lot of wines with natural corks. There must be a forest of holy cork oaks somewhere.
Portugal is the world’s largest cork exporter:
http://www.cork.pt/cork-industry-in-portugal.html
That article’s a few years old, but I doubt that anybody else has overtaken them in the cork market.
Plenty of trucks, but rarely any way to tell what they are hauling. I do know that the storage unit businesses in the area primarily cater to vintners who need a place to park their casks and cases while they age or await sale.
Yes, the declining use of natural cork stoppers is something of an environmental problem, as it means cork forests (a valuable habitat) are no longer so economical, and risk being grubbed up for other more lucrative uses, like condos.
There is also a large wine grape growing region around Lodi, CA. In fact, I understand that many of the big-name Napa and Sonoma wineries get a sizable portion of their grapes from Lodi, and then crush, bottle, and cellar the wines locally. So there may be trucks with grapes going east/west in addition to north/south along the 101.
“In 2010, Verallia North America manufactured approximately 9 billion glass bottles and jars that are part of consumers’ everyday lives. From the jar of jelly on the breakfast table, to the bottle of wine at dinner, Verallia products are everywhere.”
and;
•4,395 employees
•13 manufacturing facilities
•29 furnaces
•$1.542 billion in sales
I can’t find a link to it right now, but when I lived in Modesto I remember Gallo as having their own glass plant since the 1950’s. Here is a news link about Bennu Glass in the PacNW that mentions the Gallo plant.