Of all the stands at this year’s London Wine Fair, one of the most eye-catching was also one of the smallest. Instead of using a standard shell scheme booth, or commissioning a designer to create a showcase tasting area, Wines of Argentina promoted its wines in a dark blue, 20-foot shipping container that had been converted into a wine bar.
The timing was appropriate, coming just a week after the 60th birthday of these now-ubiquitous metal boxes that have radically changed the lives of people across the planet.
A new era
The history of the shipping container officially began on 26 April 1956, when a trucking company boss called Malcolm McLean watched 58 aluminium containers swing their way onto a converted oil tanker in Newark, New Jersey. The idea of shipping a diverse set of goods in a large metal box wasn’t McLean’s idea – the US army had pioneered the concept as a means of transporting military materials during the Second World War. But until McLean adopted it – investing more than $500m (in 2016 dollars) in converting two former military T2 oil tankers, installing cranes and designing and manufacturing the containers – the shipping container had no role in merchant shipping.
Six decades ago, responsibility for loading and unloading goods that were shipped within, to, or from the US was the preserve of highly unionised and sometimes criminal longshoremen of the kind immortalised by the 1954 Marlon Brando movie, On the Waterfront. Handling each package individually was a slow and expensive process, costing $5.86 per US ton every time a consignment was transferred between transport and warehouses. ‘Containerisation’ not only reduced this to $0.16, but slashed the number of times it needed to happen. It became possible to shift nearly 40 consignments onto a boat in the time previously taken for just one.
In other words, it was shipping containers that effectively made globalisation possible. The impact on the wine industry over the following decades was dramatic, enabling the New World export wine boom that began in the 1980s. Margaret River Merlot could be shipped from Australia to the UK for little more than it cost to ship Médoc Bordeaux or wine from La Mancha in Spain.
The development by international shipping companies like JF Hillebrand offering Less than Container Loads cargo (LCL) — consolidated shipments — enabled importers to ship batches of wine from several small Burgundy estates, for example, at a similar cost to dealing with a single big negociant. Perversely, the big metal boxes helped the tiniest producers to get a toehold in overseas markets.
The ‘reefer’, or refrigerated container, made it possible to ship premium wine across the equator and throughout the year without fear of spoilage, while the recent arrival of the flexitank has allowed large companies like Accolade to run a bottling plant thousands of kilometres from the winery, almost as though it were in an adjoining building.
New uses
The containers are manufactured so cheaply in China that many have paid for themselves in a single trip. Today, while there are an estimated 17m containers performing their appointed task across the globe, millions more have come to the end of their commercial lives. New 20-foot containers can be bought on ebay for as little as $2,000.00, while second-hand ones are offered for half that price. A range of specialist companies stand ready to convert these containers into almost anything from a permanent or semi-permanent housing unit to an office or a pop-up bar or shop.
Among the designers who have exploited the potential of containers is Juancarlos Fernandez of Signum Architecture, who transformed three ‘repurposed’ examples into the offices of the Odette Estate winery in California in 2013. In an interview with the Napa Valley Register, the architect said that he’d wanted to use shipping containers for a while, partly because of their lower cost and partly because of the ecological aspect of recycling a product that is sometimes unwanted once it has made its ocean voyage.
On the other side of the Pacific, the Australian wine company Brown Brothers went even further, commissioning two local firms to create an eye-catching visitor centre for its Tasmanian Devil’s Corner brand. It not only includes timber-clad tasting rooms, shops and catering outlets that are based on containers, but also a lookout tower that seems bound to help this become one of the most iconic vinous destinations on the island.
Both the Devil’s Corner and Odette’s containers are permanent fixtures. Other wine companies have exploited their portability to create pop-up bars and tasting rooms. In California, Fetzer used a specialist company called CubeDepot to create a bar from a second-hand container at the Shoreline Amphitheatre venue in San Francisco Bay. Like Odette, the Concha y Toro subsidiary includes a desire to reduce its environmental footprint as a reason for choosing the container.
Profit in a box
Andrew Maidment, head of Wines of Argentina in Europe and Asia, and the man behind the blue container at the London Wine Fair, explains how he developed the concept. In 2013, after commissioning Kantar Worldpanel to define the ideal marketing target for Argentine wine in the UK, he decided to focus on what he calls “youngish” (25-40), trendy male and female consumers with good levels of disposable income, and to do so using various forms of ‘experiential’ activities. “What we wanted was to take an ‘immersive’ Argentine experience to places where we would gain mass visibility amongst our audience,” he says. “This meant big outdoor activities such as summer music festivals as well as high footfall ‘pop- up’ locations.”
Maidment carefully considered a wide range of options, from Citroen vans to vintage London buses, but ruled them all out either because “they had been done a million times” or weren’t quite fit for purpose.
They were too big, too small or too hard to adapt. A shipping container, on the other hand, answered many of his requirements. It was effectively an empty box that could easily and affordably be turned into something completely bespoke by a specialist company. It was big enough to accommodate a large bar, with significant storage and wall space for the design elements he wanted and – an important factor in a country with an unpredictable climate like the UK – it offered covered and/or inside space whenever it rained.
Another important advantage Maidment identified was reliability. “The problem with a nice old vehicle is that they can be very expensive to keep running – there’s very little to go wrong with a container.”
Having made his decision, Maidment bought a 20-foot container for £3,000.00 ($4,250.00). He then spent £22,000.00 on converting it into a structure that offered nearly 30 square metres of covered space, including a four-and-a-half metre bar, with wine fridges with space for 100 bottles, plus a lighting and sound system and seating for 20 people, “And a purpose-designed, colourful portable wine bar that captures some of the ‘Argentine spirit’ we’re hoping to sell!”
Justification for spending $36,000.00 of Argentina’s wine promotion money on a metal box came quickly. As Maidment explains, “At a traditional fair or festival the cost to build a stand or bar is somewhere around $450.00 per square metre (and you can pay a lot more if the design is interesting). So a 30-metre build would cost $13,500.00 – money you throw away each time.”
Not having to commission a new structure every time Argentina wanted to promote its wine represented a saving of up to $15,000.00 per event, “So you could say the bar had ‘paid for itself’ after the first three events.” This is only part of the process, however. In order to be able to attend as many appropriate events as possible, Maidment also wanted his bar to pay for itself through profit-making activities.
Depending on the location and the nature of the event, he either solicits free stock from wineries that want to be promoted, or buys it from importers at ‘cost’ price. “The aim is a win-win for everyone,” he says. “Cheap promotion for the wineries that’s interesting for importers and good for Argentina in general.”
Maidment has found that his eye-catching bar not only attracts more customers, but that its design and the larger working space make it easier to accommodate and serve them more quickly – so the container is proving more profitable than his participations at previous exhibitions. At the TV chef Jamie Oliver’s Big Feastival in 2015, for example, the bar took £19,600.00, compared to the £17,600.00 that went through the till in 2014.
“You have to be pretty strict with where you go,” Maidment cautions. After taking the bar to three events in 2015, he drew up a few rules covering the criteria for the ones he wanted to attend in the following year. “We have found we need highly visible locations where people want to drink alcohol – dare I say it – in significant volume, and guaranteed high footfall, even if the weather is bad. This means that cheap-ticket events don’t work for us. We need long trading hours, and specifically the drinking hours between 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm.” A crucial aspect for Maidment is also “limited competition and/or wine exclusivity”.
By the end of 2016 the bar will have been taken to a Malbec World Day pop-up in London’s Camden Market; a pop-up in Central Manchester in combination with a retailer and an Argentine steak restaurant chain; along with three music festivals (including Jamie Oliver’s Big Feastival). It also provided Argentina with what Maidment calls “a cheap and visible way of having a presence” at the London Wine Fair.
Now he says he is looking for a semi-permanent London location where the bar can operate as a going concern when it’s not being used in a festival setting. “What I want is to limit the downtime and to help the bar to run as a real business. If anyone has any ideas let me know.”
