Wine On Wheels? Mobile Bottling Arriving Soon At Area Wineries

You might call it wine on wheels.

Coming soon from the owners of Good Harbor Vineyards and Aurora Cellars is a business venture that will pull up to wineries’ doors and bottle their wines – a mobile wine bottling service that’s a new concept to this region and yet another step forward for the booming local winery scene.

“Mobile bottling service is the next big thing for us, that no one else here is doing,” says Sam Simpson, co-owner of Harbor Hill Fruit Farms, the Leelanau County enterprise that includes the two wineries and other business lines. He says the service encompasses “all of the equipment that you would need in your winery to bottle,” housed on a trailer that will travel to customers in the Grand Traverse area and beyond.

It’ll work like this: A winery will supply labels, bottles, closures like corks or screw caps, water and electrical hook-up, and on bottling day the mobile service will arrive, plug in, and run a hose to tanks holding wine ready for bottling. The stainless steel bottling line unit, containing several pieces of equipment and mounted on a 36-foot trailer, will be able to bottle up to 1,800 cases a day for a customer.

The venture’s total equipment cost – including trailer, truck and bottling line – is nearly $600,000, toward which Harbor Hill received a $150,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Simpson says that for a small winery that may not be able to justify the cost of updating older equipment or installing commercial-grade bottling lines that can run from $150,000 to $350,000 or more, the mobile bottling service can provide an easier-to-afford option, particularly for wineries that produce fewer than 15,000 cases annually or that want to use the service for a portion of wine production.

Karel Bush, executive director of the Michigan Grape and Wine Industry Council, says her office has received calls over the last several years from wine producers asking if such a service was available in Michigan.

She says that for a winery that has minimal bottling equipment and is growing but can’t yet afford a more sophisticated bottling line, “this service will help them get through” a transition time in which they can build revenue to eventually invest in equipment. A winery also might not have space needed for a bottling line, which may be used only a short time each year.

“I think there are a few different business models that this service is just going to make the difference for some of these other wineries to have their business grow and thrive and be sustainable,” Bush says.

Also benefiting will be college students. The mobile bottling unit will serve as a training lab for students in a new two-year certificate program being developed by the Michigan State University Institute of Agricultural Technology and offered at Northwestern Michigan College. The food processing and technology program will launch next year and address many segments of Michigan’s food-processing industry, says Brian Matchett, the MSU institute’s program coordinator at NMC.

He calls the partnership with Harbor Hill a “win-win,” providing access for students “to learn how to use a unit like that as it relates to food processing” and training new wine industry talent who could become future hires for Simpson or others. Students could be trained not only through NMC but also at Muskegon Community College and Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, which will offer the new food processing certificate and are located in areas with wineries where Harbor Hill could market its service.

The bottling line equipment is being manufactured in France and the trailer in Illinois, and Simpson hopes to have all assembled and operating before this year’s harvest. Production of all Good Harbor and Aurora wines will switch to the mobile unit this fall and plans call for providing the service to other area wineries starting in 2019.

“The first two years, we’re going to simply service this area, and go down to southern Michigan, and the Petoskey region,” Simpson says. Farther in the future, he says, the Midwest may be a market if there’s demand.