Constellation is winding back the clock into a bygone era to reduce the environmental impact of selling Australian wine in the ultra-sensitive UK market. In a move that duplicates the age-old practice of bottling imported wine in English ports, the company is to expand the bottling of its Australian wines at its European bottling and warehousing hub near Bristol. This move significantly reduces the carbon footprint of bottled Australian wines sold in Europe. Naturally, given its distance from European markets, Australian wine is at an environmentally based disadvantage with many of its competitors in the UK, so it’s highly likely that more of our lower-priced wines might be shipped and bottled this way in future. As a consequence, forty people from the packaging, packaging maintenance, winery, laboratory and quality group functions at the company’s Reynella facility near Adelaide have taken voluntary redundancies with exit assistance.
