Who ships wine, and when do they book?

Commodity playbook

Who ships wine

Head offices and named wineries. Gallo's Livingston site alone crushed 450,000 tons and Fresno 535,000.

Ask for the winery's transportation manager, and ask which of the three freights they need. Crush haulage is short, seasonal and often handled by specialised local operators. Bulk wine in tankers moves between facilities all year. Cased goods to distributors is the national truckload business and the one most brokers want.

Where it hauls

The Central Valley does the volume, around Modesto, Ceres, Livingston, Fresno and Manteca, and that is where the tonnage and the truckload freight are. Napa and Sonoma do the value on far smaller volumes. Lodi, the Central Coast and Washington's Columbia Valley fill in. During crush, grapes move in gondolas from vineyard to winery on very short hauls; bulk juice and wine then move in tankers, and cased goods go out in vans. The wineries to know:

How to open

Raising temperature on cased wine is the credibility move. Wine cooks in a hot trailer and freezes in a cold one, and long summer or winter lanes need protective service that a lot of carriers never mention.

Qualifying questions

• Cased goods, bulk wine, or grapes? Three different freights. Grapes move in gondolas on short hauls during crush. Bulk wine and juice move in food-grade tankers. Cased wine is palletized van freight. Establish which before anything else.
• Does it need temperature protection? Yes, more than people expect. Wine cooks above about 85 degrees and freezing pushes corks. Long summer and winter lanes want protective service or a reefer on a mild setpoint.
• What does a cased load scale? Glass is heavy. A trailer of cased wine reaches legal weight well before it fills. Get the case count and target gross rather than thinking of it as consumer goods.
• Is the tanker food-grade and certified? Bulk wine requires dedicated or properly certified food-grade tanks with documented wash history. This is not a lane to improvise equipment on.
• When does your crush start? It moves every year with the weather and it differs by variety and district. The answer tells you when the short-haul surge lands and how long you have before it.

When to call

August and September, before crush begins. The crush itself runs roughly September into November depending on variety and region. Then the case goods push into the holidays follows immediately, which is a completely different lane profile: long haul, national, and temperature-sensitive.