Shipping in flexitank

If you are going to ship wine, there are two ways of doing it. One is to bottle at source and then ship the bottles. The other is to ship the wine in bulk, and then bottle nearer to the destination market. For wines from the new world, quite a bit of UK or European bottling takes place these days, and it needn't be detrimental to quality if the wine is handled well during the critical points during the process - the transfers.

One of the things I saw today was the unloading of a 25 000 litre flexitank which had been shipped to France from Chile. This is now the standard way of shipping wine: a 25 000 litre flexitank is like a huge bag-in-box - it's a single-use skin that's placed inside a standard shipping container and is filled with wine. When it reaches the port, it's loaded onto a lorry and then at the bottling facility it is transferred to tank, ready for bottling. Pictured are (from top) the lorry unloading the flexitank; then the flexitank itself inside the container, almost empty; then the punp, with a meter for measuring the dissolved oxygen in the incoming wine; then the microbullage device that injects bubbles of nitrogen into the wine that prevents any oxygen pick-up during the transfer process.