Over 40 percent of all the wine produced in the world is exported to another country. Of the wine that is exported the percentage of wine that is shipped in bulk now accounts for over 40 percent of the total, and that percentage is steadily growing. In some countries that number is now as high as 60-70 percent. Container transport has now become the method of choice for shipping wine around the globe due to logistics efficiency and time savings.
Surprisingly, most of the bulk wine is shipped to Germany for bottling, before being re-exported to its destination market. Germany is a global hub with over 3 million hectoliters exported from Germany, only a third of which are German wines. Germany’s automated bottling lines are so efficient that it actually costs less for Chile to bottle its wine in Germany and then ship it back to South America than to have it bottled locally. Many U.S. wines are also bottled in Germany and then shipped back to the U.S. market.
Source: Meininger’s, April 2017