Natural Wine Shipment

At last! On Friday 28th May, our pallet of wine (Vinos Ambiz, Young White 2009, 100% Airén, Unfiltered) began its journey to the USA.

It took me two-and-a-half months to do it, counting from the day that importer Jose Pastor came to visit the vineyard and winery and taste the wines (on 11th March).

This is basically what I had to do:

• Design and print a front label and back-label (by Hola Por Que)
• Find a box manufacturer who would sell me ‘only’ 100 boxes (Cartonajes Hurtado)
• Remove labels and wash and disinfect 400 bottles
• Fill and cork and stick on labels and put in boxes
• Find a special US-homologated pallet, (thank you, Vinos Jeromín) stack it and wrap it
• Do the paperwork!

The ship is leaving the Port of Barcelona this Saturday (5th June) and arrives New York about two weeks later, so I assume that by the end of June the wine should be in the shops.

I’m looking forward to following up on the ‘progress’ of the wine down the chain of consumption and interacting with the final customers and/or retailer on blogs and forums, etc.

Here’s some final photos:

Truck backing up to winery gates

Wine moving out

Thank you, Juan, for doing all the hard work, while I swan around taking photos!

Elevator... going up!

Bye-bye wine

Our First International Shipment (Labels, Boxes, Pallet, ...)

Yesterday, Tuesday 25th May, I spent all day sticking labels onto bottles, exactly 804 labels (for the record), ie 402 front-labels and 402 back-labels.

It's our very first ever shipment abroad! Vinos Ambiz Young White, 100% Airen (not filtered, not clarified).

The following photos are a bit dark, because I was in a 'real' bodega, ie dark and cold (unlike our own place in Ambite).

After bottling and corking the bottles the other day (see a previous post) we decided to move the bottles to the bodega of our friend (and fellow organic winemaker) just down the road in the village of Morata de Tajuña - temperatures are rising in Madrid (at last!) and our place in Ambite doesn't have good insulation.

Bottles being labelled

Labelling station and detritus

The other day, I discovered by chance (luckily!) that you can't just use any old pallet to ship goods to the USA! It has to be a specially approved model that is made of plastic (as opposed to wood). No doubt the reason for this is to reduce the risk of accidentally importing insects, larvae, germs, etc that can live in wood.

Plastic pallet, homologated for entry into the USA

Below is Juan, sealing up the 6-packs and stacking them on the pallet.

Sealing up the boxes

The stack grows

Well, it's almost ready to go. Now we just have to wrap the stack up in plastic film (I forgot to buy it yesterday!) and call the transport company to come and pick it up.