Karen Wilson of Kingsland on bulk wine importing

This show was published 31 October 2008

Overview

Kingsland Wines & Spirits is the largest independent UK bottler of wines and spirits. Karen Wilson and Fiona Loveland explain how the process works and discuss the company's green initiatives.

The facility has been based in Earlham, Manchester since the 1960's.
The company has its own brands and bottles on behalf of other companies including Tesco. The wine comes to the Liverpool docks and then onto a barge along the canal to Manchester. They are working with Tesco on a green initiative to reduce carbon footprint and the canal is a major part of this. They also have a lightweighting of glass initiative. Much of the glass they use is sourced in the UK and they try to use green or autumn leaf (brown) glass wherever possible.

Fiona's job is to select the wine and ensure it meets customer specifications. It is then shipped over in tankers within a huge bag inside the container, about 24,000 litres at a time. The wine is analysed to check against the specification and then goes through a sterile filter down to the bottling lines - 5 lines including one high speed line. Most of the bottling is in screwcap. They produced the first range from Tesco which was called Unwind. Tesco then changed all their own label wines to be bottled in screwcap. As well as glass Kingsland pack wine into bag-in-box and they are working on PET bottles.

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Music

The music used for the UK Wine Show is Griffes de Jingle 1 by Marcel de la Jartèle and Silence by Etoile Noire.