Whoops! $1 million worth of wine spilled
More than 5,000 bottles of Australian wine won't be in glasses after a forklift accident Thursday.
July 22nd, 2011
08:00 AM ET

Whoops! $1 million worth of wine spilled

A malfunctioning forklift dropped 462 cases of wine in Australia on Thursday, a spill with a price tag of more than $1 million.

The 5,544 bottles of 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz, with a price tag of $185 a bottle,  fell almost 20 feet to ground of a wharf in Port Adelaide as the forklift was loading it for shipment abroad, according to media reports.

"We just couldn't believe it," winemaker Sparky Marquis said in a report on Adelaide Now. "As you can imagine, this wine is our pride and joy. To see it accidentally destroyed, and not consumed, has left us all a bit numb.

"The container manager said that when his team came and told him what had happened, he was looking around for cameras to see if it was a 'gotcha' hoax. He realised it was serious when nobody was laughing," Adelaide Now quotes Marquis as saying.

Marquis told ABC.net that only one carton among the 462 was undamaged. His staff was searching through the others to see if any other bottles may have escaped.

"All of the bottles are in the cool store and we're just having to go through every single bottle, check it first of all to see if it has any cap seal damage to it, in which case it just gets immediately discarded," ABC.net quotes him as saying.

The lost wine represents a third of his company's output for a year.

Brett McCarthur of Kerry Logistics, the company which operated the forklift, told Adelaide Now his company moves tens of thousands of heavy containers each year.

"We move hundreds of pallets a day filled with sand and even stuff that it wouldn't matter if you dropped it from 50 feet in the air, but the only premium container had to be the one," McCarthur was quoted as saying.

Marquis said he was working with insurers to get compensated for his loss.

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Filed under: Agriculture • Australia • Food
soundoff (216 Responses)
  1. Bjorgens

    Great news that less people had a chance to get poisened by alcohol. This is actually achievement but not so for the insurer I guess.

    July 23, 2011 at 2:44 am | Report abuse |
    • Peter Live!

      Sounds like a true alcoholic to me. Perhaps AA might teach you something....like "don't take the inventory of others,"....I will indulge in doing so for just a moment to comment.....MORON.

      July 23, 2011 at 10:00 am | Report abuse |
    • Doogle

      12 years old?

      July 23, 2011 at 11:10 am | Report abuse |
  2. MatiValhalla

    @Bjorgens
    ...as opposed to being "poisoned by" Coca-Cola?

    July 23, 2011 at 9:11 am | Report abuse |
  3. Heather

    The remaining bottles will most likely fetch close to what the entire pallet was worth.

    July 23, 2011 at 1:38 pm | Report abuse |
  4. paul

    Excuse me. I farted...
    FIRST!!!

    July 24, 2011 at 1:22 am | Report abuse |
  5. Tom

    I keep all my high end bottles stacked high in the back of a warehouse, too. It's always more fun if you're not sure that it's going to be safe to get it down... beats the heck out of keeping them in safe place, too.

    July 25, 2011 at 11:25 am | Report abuse |
  6. Big D

    That is an awful lot of cases to have on one pallet. Something doesn't compute.

    July 25, 2011 at 12:35 pm | Report abuse |
  7. helloeyes

    Noooooo... how awful for the winemakers! I just spent a beautiful two weeks in the wine country in South Australia and got to know the winemakers there; truly beautiful people who love doing what they do. Tasted some amazing wines too.

    July 28, 2011 at 7:40 pm | Report abuse |
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