Moving wine around the world is actually quite a complicated business, not just because of the different labelling requirements and strict customs/import regulations, but also because of the physical conditions under which the wine travels. If you’re moving wine across the equator, or half way around the world your bottles will be subject to all sorts of stresses, the most significant being temperature.

In an ideal world we would move everything using refrigerated transport (as we do for all of our domestic pallet deliveries), but for long distance this can be a very expensive exercise. Whilst I have no doubt that all the 1er Cru Classé wines of Bordeaux are always moved around using temperature controlled transport (as customers protect their huge investment), for a humble wine such as albariño this is not quite so common.That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen as we do have customers that ship our wine across the planet at a constant temperature of  around 12°C….. a real achievement in logistics!

If you’re not quite so rich there is however, an alternative – perhaps not quite as effective, but still offering some protection against the elements. J.F. Hillebrand offer a system called a Vinliner, sort of like a big ‘oven proof’ foil bag into which you simply zip your pallets or cases. Obviously it isn’t really just foil, in reality it’s made from an aluminium coated woven polyethylene fabric, which simply adds another layer of protection against thermal shock (see photo). Of course it still needs to be backed by a good marine transit insurance.

As one final precaution, however you decide to pack your container, you always need to specify that your precious cargo is stowed below deck, and not piled high on top of the ship with full exposure to hot sunshine – baking your beloved albariño like an oven!

Back in June I mentioned on this blog that we had been measuring the Oxygen Transfer Rate (OTR) in our wines. In case you didn’t read it this is quite simply a measurement of the oxygen levels within the wine in our tanks (before bottling), during bottling (oxygen suspended in the wine when bottled), and also oxygen in the ‘head space’ (the small gap between the wine and the cork). By measuring this we can learn about the effectiveness of the closure that we use to seal our bottles.

 Now, I have to be honest by telling you that our migration from Blogger to WordPress has not gone as smoothly as we might have hoped. The main problem was that our Spanish host turned out to be a bit unhospitable….. We had a compatibility issue between our hosting and the new software, which resulted in certain functions of the new site simply refusing to do what we wanted.

During the design phase everything went swimmingly and all the pages appeared exactly as they should - unfortunately the problems did not come to light until we actually went live. Strangely, despite using a Spanish host, many of the issues were to be found on the Spanish pages (possibly more to do with the software than the hosting), and try as we might, we could not fix them.

Suffice to say that we have now shifted our hosting to the U.S.A., and as a result (with fingers crossed) we believe that all is now working as it should.

Of course, with all this going on behind the scenes, I have not been able to work on our blog, so please allow me to apologise for those of you who have developed withdrawl symptoms – once again, normal service has been resumed.