In early April, the entire Italian wine industry decamps to Verona for the mother of all trade fairs:
VinItaly. I was one of the 140,000 people there, battling my way round the 25-acre site and its collection of vast sheds representing wine regions from Piedmont to Sicily.
With more than 4000 stands ranging from simple booths to two-storey castles, it was fairly mind-blowing.
If I close my eyes now, I can still see a shimmering wall of glass bottles, but in that sense VinItaly may be swimming against the tide of bulk wine whose shipments have more than doubled since 2005. Today, more than half of Australian and two-thirds of South African and Chilean wine arrives in the UK in a flexitank - a giant, 24,000-litre bag-in-box.
This is the industry's unglamorous backside, revealed by Gregg Wallace on BBC's Supermarket Secrets last December.
"What we're doing is moving large volumes of wine as efficiently and carefully as possible," explained Tesco's wine chief, Dan Jago, before prodding an enormous plastic bladder that had spent seven weeks at sea from Australia.
Bulk is certainly efficient given the extra weight and space taken up by bottles, and it's more environmentally friendly.
You can use lighter bottles if you are bottling here, it helps keep costs down and is good for the planet - so what's not to like?
Well, in South Africa, with unemployment running at 25%, they have lost around 1000 jobs on bottling lines so far, and the country's government has threatened to retaliate by importing Scotch whisky in bulk.
Among producers I have met, there is cynicism about the motives behind the shift to bulk. Instead of being a green initiative, they see it as all about money and something that threatens the image of wine by making it nothing more than an anonymous commodity traded solely on price.
In theory it shouldn't matter where a wine is bottled and yet there is something unsettling about those wine bladders squished into containers wobbling their way across the seas. Nor should it have any effect on the credibility and sense of provenance of the wines concerned, although curiously the world's third biggest importer of bulk wine is France. It does make you wonder.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article