The wine industry in South Australia’s Riverland region involves hundreds of growers, thousands of trucks, and hours of manufacturing to create a product that is transported across the world.
Key points:
- Berri Estates is the largest winery in the Southern Hemisphere
- It is celebrating 100 years of being one of the Riverland’s largest employers
- The winery crushes around 30 per cent of South Australia’s annual grape crush
But 100 years ago, when Berri Estates first entered the industry, a horse and cart was the fastest way to transport wine.
“There are very few organisations that make the distance and it’s important we stop and reflect on the wider community that makes Berri Estates,” Accolade Wines operations director Tim Molloy said.
“Growers are one and the same for us, and the contractors, suppliers, and local industry are all a success story worth celebrating.”
The winery, now owned by multi-national company Accolade Wines, is located in the country’s largest wine-grape-growing region, and is the largest winery in the Southern Hemisphere.
In 2019, its home site was transformed into a $40 million facility that houses three cask lines, two glass lines, and a 25,000 pallet warehouse, with an additional $30 million spent on equipment and packaging lines.
During the Riverland’s vintage period, typically during January and February, more than 10,000 trucks travel in and out of the winery.
“There’s no such thing as a typical day, but on any given day we could be packaging hundreds of thousands of litres of wine,” Mr Molloy said.
“Half of our production goes overseas and the other half goes domestically.”
Grape expectations
Despite being the daughter of a grape grower, Vikki Wade said she fell into a job that became her career for more than 30 years.
The group commercial winemaker said it was a much smaller site with a more intimate staff when she started.
“I had just finished my studies and came home on a holiday when I decided to take up a vintage role in the laboratory,” she said.
“All the people who worked in the winery were lab staff or cellar hands.
“We would sit down on a Friday afternoon and taste the wines with the winemakers and I think that’s where my interest really started.”
Hundreds of wines are tasted and tested at the facility every day, but Ms Wade said adapting to the changing consumer tastes was vital.
“When I started here 30 years ago we mainly made fortified wines and sweet generic wines made from gordo and riesling grapes and it was mainly cask wine,” she said.
“In the late 1990s was when there was a huge change when we started exporting to the UK and we started to make varietal wines like shiraz and cabernet.
“In recent times, the trends have changed again to look at more emerging varietals such as Mediterranean varieties and low alcohol wines.
“It’s been quite a journey to see how the consumer has changed their taste preferences and we’ve got to be continuously onto that.”
From horse and cart to automated robots
As the tastes of wine drinkers have changed over a century, so too has the shape of the winery’s workforce.
“We’ve moved from an industry, which is focused on manual labour, to the point of [looking at] forklift driving versus automatic forklifts,” Mr Molloy said.
“This now requires a lot of understanding of the programs behind them that control the forklifts and the automation and sequencing involved in that.”
Mr Molloy said the change to more automated tasks had meant Berri Estates’ approach to recruiting and training local employees had also evolved.
“We match anything that’s in any major capital city now, so a local can be trained up and developed through the business where otherwise potentially they’d have to move to a capital city,” he said.
The winery’s age and scale had not allowed it to escape the downturn hitting the wine industry, with red grape prices down as tariffs from China leave an oversupply of red wine in the country.
Mr Molloy said working with local growers and continuing to innovate would ensure Berri Estates survived.
“If nothing else, we recognise that it’s an extremely challenging time across the nation in the wine industry,” he said.
“It’s not insurmountable, we will get there. We need to focus on the markets where we’re strong and smart decisions and working with our growers to deliver what the market wants.”