Portavin turns 21

Portavin Integrated Wine Services has turned 21 and, looking back over its history, it is a wine packaging company that has truly “come of age”.

The concept for Portavin Integrated Wine Services began back in the early 1980’s, when founder and chairman Mike Davies was studying winemaking at RoseworthyCollege in South Australia. He wrote his thesis on the viability of a mobile bottling facility for the Australian wine industry and, after a few years winemaking around Australia, Mike turned his thesis into reality, when his first mobile bottling facility in Australia hit the road in Margaret River WA in 1989. And so Portavin was born.

Since then, Portavin has grown to five static wine bottling facilities and two mobile lines – including one line at Cheltenham Victoria. The Portavin business now offers services to complement the bottling such as supply of packaging materials, laboratory services, dry goods supply, bulk wine storage, warehousing, distribution and export container packing.

The Cheltenham branch of Portavin, known as Portavin Melbourne is partly owned by managing director, Ian Matthews, who is a qualified and experienced winemaker. Ian has refined the technology of bottling wine into PET plastic bottles and Portavin Melbourne recently bottled its 21 millionth PET bottle of wine.

PET keeps growing

PET is an abbreviation for polyethylene terephthalate, a light weight plastic which is increasingly in demand from airlines seeking to improve their environmental credentials.

Amcor, the leaders in PET technology, approached Portavin in 2004 to trial to run of 187ml PET down the bottling line, which until then, had only handled glass. After certain modifications were made, Portavin developed a method of successfully filling PET bottles, which if not done correctly has the bottles behaving like ping pong balls.

The first commercial bottling into PET took place in 2005 – being wine destined for Qantas. The wineries were directed to Portavin by the airline, as Qantas was confident that Portavin could deliver on the project.

At the same time, other airlines were looking at ways to save money and weight across their logistics chains. Given the 187ml PET bottle weighs five times less than glass – saving almost 3kg per case - packaging in PET is a “no brainer”.

Portavin is a logical company for an airline to deal with because of its independence and strong contacts with the boutique wineries of Australia as well as the medium and large producers.

Since 2005, Portavin has successfully bottled 21 million PET bottles for wineries around Australia. The list of customers for PET is growing – both in terms of wineries and airlines using the technology.

For more detailed information on PET, click here to read Ian Matthew’s technical paper “Study of suitability of 187ml PET bottles for packaging wine in Australia.”

www.portavin.com.au/Portavin-Site/Technical

UK Wine drinkers prefer PET

PET bottles are now the preferred alternative to glass in the all important UK wine market. The following article by Carol Emmas appeared on Harper’s Wine and Spirits website www.harpers.co.uk. 20^th October 2010.

“The PET bottle has edged in front of the Bag-in-Box (BIB) and Tetrapak in popularity according to Wine Intelligence research. A consumer survey of UK monthly wine drinkers, conducted in June 2010 showed that 40% of respondents said they would be likely to buy wine in a PET bottle in the future, compared with 37% for BIB and 21% for a pouch, although the scores still lagged a long way behind glass.

The report confirms that consumers still overwhelmingly back the 75cl glass bottle for almost all wine drinking occasions, particularly in social settings. Alternative packaging has more relevance in outdoor settings, or when carrying heavier glass bottles are inconvenient.”