By SHELLY STRAUTZ-SPRINGBORN

Michigan Correspondent

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Harbor Hill Fruit Farms, Inc. on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula has taken its wine bottling service on the road – the farm recently launched a 37-foot enclosed trailer that is set up as a state-of-the-art mobile bottling unit capable of producing about 3,200 bottles per hour.

“We have taken all of the equipment that you need in a $5 (million) to $10 million production facility and we set it up in a trailer that we can haul anywhere around the Midwest,” said Harbor Hill owner Sam Simpson. “The winery has to supply the wine and the packaging goods, but we put the whole thing together for them on-site.”

The unit is capable of producing 1,800 cases of wine in an eight-hour day, with either cork- or screw-cap closures, as well as custom labeling, date and batch encoding, and grape-crushing services.

“We fill the bottles using world-class equipment. When we leave they have a finished product that is ready to go on the shelves. It’s an all-inclusive service,” Simpson said. “The whole idea behind this is that we are trying to help smaller wineries scale, but we also wanted to be able to serve larger wineries.”

When designing the unit, he said they took into consideration varying resources.

“Most of the larger wineries have three-phase power. We made the extra investment to make sure we could run off single-phase electric, which is solely aimed at being able to service everyone from a 1,000-case winery up to a 100,000-case winery,” he explained.

Wine bottling is not new to Harbor Hill, but the mobile concept is. “We own two production facilities. We were the fourth winery in the Leelanau Peninsula. It was started by my dad in 1980,” Simpson said.

“We’ve been running equipment like this for 40 years – it just sits on a trailer now. This new mobile bottling service has been live for about eight weeks.”

Simpson said the concept is quite common on the West Coast, but not in the Midwest. As Harbor Hill considered its options for more capacity for its own bottling needs, the Simpson family saw an opportunity to expand services to other growers in this region.

“We saw that it was a good opportunity to provide the service to other wineries as the market continues to expand,” he said.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, wine exports in the United States totaled almost $1.5 billion in 2018, with Michigan exporting less than $600,000 of that. Simpson said with an initial investment of about $600,000 to put together the mobile bottling unit, he expects to see a financial return in about three years.

In addition, the investment freed up capacity at Harbor Hill, with the farm liquidating two of its four bottling lines. “Because of the size and the speed of this equipment, we’re only using 10 percent of the capacity, so we have this great opportunity to be able to service to others in the Midwest,” he said.

“If we can run per line about 300,000 cases in a season, which is what the line is (specified) for, that’s about one-third of the Michigan industry. When you start looking at Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, it may be 5 to 8 percent.

“A lot of bottling for most wineries is only done in one part of the season or it’s something that they’re doing very infrequently,” Simpson said. “For wineries to spend so much money on something that is being used for such short periods of time doesn’t make a lot of financial sense, but there hasn’t been another option until now.”

Prior to launch, Harbor Hill worked on the mobile bottling unit for about two years, with construction starting a year ago. Simpson hopes to grow the business enough to expand operations and add another mobile unit in the future.

“If the service takes off, we would like to add another trailer. We see this as a great opportunity to create value for growing the Midwest wine region. We see it as a huge time and money saver, and a great service.”