The Australian Wine Industry

March 28, 2019

Alternative Engineering has a long-standing partnership with the Australian Wine Industry, supplying a range of products and services to enhance capabilities to wine producers Australia wide. Alternative Engineering’s focus is on how our solutions can improve the capability of our clients.

Our solutions set out to have an impact on how improvements to bottling lines can impact the competitiveness of the company. Whether this is increasing production efficiencies, higher production outputs or fewer wastages.

The Australian wine industry is ranked 5th on the global scale behind traditional winemaking countries such as Italy, France, and Spain. Despite ranking 5th, in 2018 international demand for Australian wine grew strongly with an increase in wine exports of 10% in value and 5% in volume. Wine production is around 1.2 billion litres per year with over half being red wine. The increasing demand for Australian red wine exports is driven by strong sales in China.

‘Strong growth in exports and stable domestic demand saw total sales increase by just under 8 million cases (6 percent) compared with the previous year, while a smaller grape crush in 2018 led to a decrease in wine production of 10 million cases (7 percent).’ (Wine Australia)

40 percent of Australian wine production is consumed in Australia making it by far our largest wine market. This account for approximately 500 million litres of wine.

Alternative Engineering provides bespoke and niche services to our wine clients which allow us to enhance their productivity and production efficiencies.

One of the most important services we provide to the wine industry is custom manufactured change parts. For wine manufacturers, the engineering of reliable, accurate and high-quality change parts plays a crucial role in meeting production goals and delivering products to market on time. Change part engineering has resulted in significant increases in productivity and efficiency when using local design engineers to innovate processes and produce new machined components.

What sets Alternative Engineering apart from OEM and other engineering companies is how we design and manufacture our change parts. The process to achieve these outcomes in detailed and thorough.

A summary of our process is as follows;

• Map and measure the bottling machines with the latest technology.
  Alternative use a ROMER arm for exact measurements, this requires an onsite visit.
• Our engineers meet to discuss and design parts which will provide our clients with products capable of meeting the required outcomes.
• Drafting of parts from the agreed design. This is present, discussed and agreed upon. Lead time are them agreed on to achieve anticipated outcomes.
• Parts are manufactured and our engineer arranges a time to attend site to commission parts.
• Complete any adjustment to ensure the parts provide the capabilities they were designed for.

Through this, we have been able to increase productivity by 30% and increase efficiency by 10%.

Did you know?

The History of Wine in Australia

The wine industry in Australia can be traced all the way to the First Fleet in 1788. Governor Arthur Phillip brought over vine clippings from the Cape of Good Hope for planting in Botany Bay. By the 1890s, the popular Hunter Valley, Barossa Valley, and Yarra Valley had begun to produce wine.

A quintessential Australian Invention

Around the 1970’s Australian wineries developed wine casks, or ‘bag in a box’ wine, which made wine more accessible to a wider group of people. Angoves began to use cask wine in 1965 with Penfold’s quickly following. Now cask wine, which is affectionately referred to as ‘Goon’, is an Australian Icon.

Alternative Engineering: Expertise and service you can rely on

Alternative Engineering is a leading Melbourne based engineering and manufacturing company that specialises in high-capacity production environments with particular expertise in the Pharmaceutical and Food & Beverage sector. With an impressive and growing client list, Alternative Engineering has built a reputation for exceptional customer service, technical expertise, reliability and quality engineering outcomes.

*Data sourced from www.wineaustralia.com/market-insights/