Crush - Alan Jacobson [105]
Vail shook her head. “Let’s back up a second. Bottling includes what, exactly?”
“Gas sparging the bottles, filling them with juice, corking them, applying the labels and capsules, and then boxing them into cases.”
“And this is done at the winery, right?” Vail asked.
“That’s what I was saying. Some larger wineries have the capacity to do this. Many don’t. And many don’t want to do it because it means committing a large amount of space to something that only gets used two weeks out of a year. And they have to maintain and upgrade the equipment every so often to increase capacity, or to accommodate new technology to increase efficiency. It’s a lot of headache and expense. Easier, and usually more cost efficient, to let someone else worry about it.”
Dixon nodded. “So the ‘mobile’ in Superior Mobile Bottling means they come to you.”
“Exactly,” Crystal said. “They have semi trucks that are outfitted with all the equipment. They come to your winery, hook up to your electrical grid, and eight hours later, you’ve got finished cases of wine. A state-of-the-art truck, like the kind Superior has, can do a hundred bottles per minute, about 2,500 to 3,000 cases a day.”
Vail picked up a strawberry from the platter. “Sounds like a nobrainer.”
“One would think.”
“But there are some who don’t get it.”
Crystal slid her chair closer to the desk and leaned her forearms on the glass surface. “Our pricing power is contingent on us hitting certain volume goals. So if you have some who don’t want to get onboard, it can cause some . . . discontent within the ranks.”
Dixon pursed her lips and nodded. “Of course. So who in the AVA didn’t want to get onboard?”
“A very small minority didn’t want to renew the contract we have with Superior. They thought we should invest in building a few custom trailers of our own, that would then move from each of our wineries and do our bottling. But that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s the initial build-out cost—five hundred grand to a million dollars apiece—and you’d still have to park them somewhere in the off-season. Not easy to find parking spots for sixty-five-foot trucks.”
“And it puts you back in the business of maintaining and owning bottling facilities.”
“Sort of. You don’t have permit issues, which is a big deal nowadays. Trying to get permission to build out new space to expand your bottling line is tough, if not impossible. So if we built trailers, we’d get around those issues. Still, there are other things that wouldn’t make sense if we were to own our own trailers. Like some of our members have restrictions on the roads that lead to their wineries, so they’d need to have smaller trucks, which, obviously, have less bottling capacity. Superior takes care of all that for us. They have trailers that can accommodate all our members’ needs.”
Vail swallowed the strawberry she’d been chewing and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “What about the issue of natural versus fake?” She was trying to be nonchalant with the question, hoping to place less emphasis on it. Because she didn’t really know what she was asking, should it involve something significant, she didn’t want Crystal to feel the weight of the question and attempt to snowball them.
Crystal leaned back. “Well, that was another thing that led to intense debate. I’m not sure that got resolved. I guess we’ll find out where we are at our next meeting.”
“Why such disagreement?”
“What do you know about corks?”
Vail and Dixon shared a glance. Vail’s look said, This is about corks?
“I don’t know a whole lot,” Vail said. “Wineries stick them in wine bottles to seal them. But my guess is there’s a lot more to it than that, isn’t there?”
Crystal smiled again—but this was not her promotional smile. It was a one-sided smirk that conveyed depth and irony. “Your guess is correct. It’s sparked quite the debate in the wine community, and our board is no exception. There are those who are fervent supporters of natural cork, to the point of being fanatics.