Australia's JMP collaboration with a Spanish company aimed at the bulk wine export market has impressed visitors to WineTech in Sydney, taking out the show's “Wow” Award for best new innovation, service or product at the show.
The companies' new Trust Flexitank is a bulk wine container developed specifically to address logistical and quality problems associated with conventional tanks for wine export.
JMP regional sales manager Matthew Moate told PKN at the show the containers could potentially revolutionise the export of wine from Australia. At present, some 54 per cent of the country's wine exports is transported in bulk.
“The industry is very concerned about oxygen transmission and taint migration in wines transported in typical flexitanks,” Moate said.
“With the ever increasing shift from packaged to bulk exports in the wine industry, we recognised a need to provide a product that would allay the warranted industry concerns relating to impacts on wine quality and the associated loss of value for consumers that can be caused by shipping in this method.
“The average container can hold about 24,000 litres of wine, which is about the same as 33,000 bottles.
“If that gets tainted or oxidised, that’s basically 33,000 bottles lost.”
He said most bulk wine containers in use today were not well suited for container transport. Many tanks do not even fit the dimensions of an average container, which meant that they were prone to folds and stress cracks which could result in loss of product through leaking.
Moate said the Trust Flexitanks were designed to fit snugly within a container, with the seams welded securely to avoid any failures which would result in loss of wine.
For further protection, the new Flexitanks are manufactured with a single layer of film, using an ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) layer to reduce oxygen transfer by up to 92 per cent over previous tanks.
He said the barrier properties had been independently tested and verified by the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI).
"So we feel this Flexitank offers three key benefits that are hard to beat – the design, the manufacturing process and the film technology,” Moate told PKN.
“It's really a case of providing winemakers with an export tank they can trust.”
Moates said the Wow award vindicated the company's decision to work with Trust on the tank.
“We are absolutely excited to be recognised by our peers in the industry, and look forward to continuing to drive wine industry packaging innovation in the future,” he told PKN.
