Mobile bottling line helps small wineries put cork on expenses
The machine that sticks labels on wine bottles as they rattle past on a narrow conveyor belt, is not cooperating. Just as the labels are pasted onto a bottle, they tear and jam the machine.
When that happens, Tony Beko, the bottling operator, must hit a red button to stop the line and then refeed the labeler. But that doesn't seem to be helping. The labels are a little bigger than normal, and the labeler is having a tough time unsticking the backings.
Headaches like this are why Paul Shinoda of Saintpaulia vintners in Snohomish rents a mobile bottling line instead of investing in one of his own. Like other small winery owners, Shinoda can't afford a bottling line, the hassle of fixing one he'll use only two times a year.
That's where Signature Mobile Bottlers comes in. The Portland company rents out a full bottling line, housed in a 60-foot tractor trailer, and trucks it to a winery along with a bottling operator.
The winery provides the labels, caps, bottles, corks, additional workers and, of course, the wine.
"For us, it's just a dream come true," said Jay Soloff, owner and partner of DeLille Cellars in Woodinville, which has rented the Signature bottling line since 1994. "The cheapest bottling line is $500,000, and we just can't justify that expense when we only bottle once a year."
Soloff said he paid $11,300 to bottle 4,900 cases of wine over four days.
While small wineries count as Signature's core customers, the company also contracts with some of Washington's largest wineries for smaller jobs. Woodinville-based Stimson Lane Vineyards and Estates, which owns Chateau St. Michelle and Columbia Crest wineries, has been using Signature for eight years for its premium estate-bottled wines.
"Our bottling lines are mainly set up for high-speed production, so it's just not cost-efficient to use them for a few hundred cases of wine," said Pete Bachman, Stimson vice president of operations.
Signature was founded in 1988 by Steve Scholz, who sold wine-bottling equipment in Portland. His son, David, came up with the idea for a mobile wine bottler when he was demonstrating his father's equipment to prospective customers.
The company started with one truck and expanded to five — three in California's Napa Valley, one in Oregon and one based in Walla Walla. It bottles about a million cases of wine a year.
Steve Scholz would not divulge sales figures for the 10-employee company, but said it has more than broken even. It is one of eight mobile bottlers in California and the only one in the Pacific Northwest.
"We've been expanding rapidly for the last five to six years as new wineries have come online," he said. "We're betting these small wineries will grow and expand and increase our business even more."
Kristina Shevory: 206-464-2039 or kshevory@seattletimes.com.