That’s How Many Swimming Pools of Wine?!

While I was researching my emerging wine region, I came across a Decanter article about a wine spill that happened last week in California [1]. What caught my eye was the fact that there was initial concern that the vat had spilled 97,112 gallons (367,000 liters) of wine. This prompted two initial questions: 1) Conceptually, how much liquid are we talking about? and 2) They can fit that much liquid in a single vat?!

To answer the first question, I broke it down step by step:

• Assuming all the wine was destined for your standard sized bottle, that’s 489,333 bottles or 40,778 cases. 
• Assuming 56 cases in a pallet, a 20 foot shipping container can hold 10 pallets and a 40 foot shipping container can hold 20 pallets. However, the Wine and Spirits Shippers Association claims that the average 20 foot container only holds 504 cases and the average 40 foot shipping container holds 1064 (both configured at 56 cases/pallet) [2].

So that puts the initial spill estimate at 81 20 foot containers or 39 40 foot containers worth of wine. That seems like a lot, until you realize that the liquid itself would take up approximately 15% of the liquid volume of an Olympic size swimming pool [3].

Now that I had conceptualized how much liquid had escaped, I wanted to learn more about vats and how much wine they held. A quick search led me to the fact that as a layperson I could order a 8000 liter wine tank [4] or a custom made 60,000 liter barrel [5] online. At the larger size, the estimate for the escaped liquid would be approximately 6 vats. These large vats can be wooden or, more commonly, steel or concrete. The vats are used to store wine temporarily or can also be used to age wine in the right conditions. While this is what I could find online for vats, I would imagine that an industrial grade vineyard might have vats that were even larger than the 60,000 liter barrel, so it didn’t seem like too much of a jump to say that this was a spill from a single vat.

And what happened with the spilled wine? You’ll be glad to know that the actual amount of wine that escaped the property in the spill was 45,000 gallons (170,000 liters) or approximately 226,667 bottles/18,889 cases/38 20 foot containers. The winery is working with authorities to determine the potential impact to the Russian River and surrounding waterways. Because of recent rain, the impact on the river has been somewhat diluted, but California Fish and Wildlife is still monitoring it [6]. In the past, wine spills into rivers have reduced the oxygen concentration and hurt or killed fish, but to date that doesn’t seem to have happened in this case yet.

[1] https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/california-wine-spill-russian-river-431117/
[2] http://www.wssa.com/membership/faqs
[3] https://www.livestrong.com/article/350103-measurements-for-an-olympic-size-swimming-pool/
[4] https://winesvinesanalytics.com/features/article/51235/How-Big-Is-Your-Barrel
[5] http://www.thevintnervault.com/category/612/Oak-Vats.html
[6] https://www.winespectator.com/articles/spill-at-rodney-strong-winery-sends-thousands-of-gallons-of-cabernet-into-river