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Cameron pushes to finish storage facility

$14 MILLION NAPA PROJECT CAN HOLD 2.5 MILLION GALLONS; OWNERS HOPE TO OPEN IN AUGUST

NAPA – Butch Cameron, whose fleet of tanker trucks has been moving a lot of the wine produced in the North Coast for the past three decades, now is racing to open a $14 million-plus bulk-wine facility in south Napa for his largest clients in time for this year’s harvest.

Construction continues at 305 Technology Way even as the owner of the nearly four-acre site, San Rafael-based REIT startup Vintage Wine Trust, is liquidating. The firm is seeking a buyer for its anticipated $8.2 million investment in the project.

Mr. Cameron’s bulk-wine business, called Cameron Wine Storage, is racing to complete the facility by Aug. 15, about the time when wineries are needing to move wine from previous vintages to make room for the coming crush. “We’ve seen some of our larger wine customers need extra storage for wine from the previous crush,” he said. “There is excess storage needed near where wineries do their bottling.”

The Cameron Wine Storage facility is set to have 30,000 square feet of insulated, climate-controlled space for wine tanks. Santa Rosa Stainless Steel is fabricating 73 tanks with capacities of 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 gallons each for the venture.

Because this facility is tailored toward large-scale vintners, most of the tanks will be of the two larger sizes, according to project manager Bob Green. Total tank capacity will be 2.5 million gallons. Cameron Wine Storage is courting a half-dozen large vintners to house wine there.

Mr. Cameron is eyeing a couple of sites near the trucking company headquarters by the Sonoma County airport, north of Santa Rosa, to build a similar bulk-wine facility also with room for wine casegoods.

Overseeing the Napa storage facility will be Ron Schrieve, former vice president of winemaking for Foster’s Wine Estates Americas. He started at Beringer in the mid-1990s, working with the Napa Ridge brand, and then progressed to be winemaker for the Beringer Founders’ Estate brand in 2000.

Services to be offered while clients’ wines are at Cameron Wine Storage are set to include micro-oxygenation and insertion of oak staves, which mimic the characteristics of barrels.

The bulk storage facility, designed by O’Malley Wilson Westphal of Santa Rosa, also will have a 10,000-square-foot attached building with a branch office for Butch Cameron Trucking plus bays for washing and sanitizing two trucks at a time.

The trucking company has such wash facilities at its headquarters near Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport as well as in the Central Valley and elsewhere.

Butch Cameron Trucking serves 2,500 wineries on the West Coast, according to Mr. Cameron. The company has 150 trailers of varying sizes for hauling bulk wine, grape and fruit juices, high-proof alcohol, barrels, cases of wine and even egg whites. Trucks run throughout the North Coast as well as to the Central Valley, Oregon, Texas and Chicago.

Cameron Wine Storage has signed a lease for the Napa facility with Vintage Wine Trust through December 2017, with options to extend the term 15 years.

Though the startup REIT in late May opted to liquidate its holdings and distribute assets to investors, Cameron Wine Storage project is funded, allowing general contractor McDevitt & McDevitt of Petaluma to take the job through to completion, according to trust co-founder Joe Ciatti.

In March 2005, Vintage Wine Trust launched what was to be a wine-industry focused real estate investment trust. The firm, started by wine and grape broker Mr. Ciatti and former wine trade journal publisher Richard Shell, amassed a $170 million portfolio of purchase-leaseback arrangements for two wineries and 13 vineyards with more than 6,000 acres.

Three of the prominent properties have been sold, and there’s an interested replacement investor for the Cameron Wine Storage facility, according to Mr. Ciatti. He declined to identify which properties had been sold until proceeds are distributed to investors next month. He expects the rest of the 15 properties will be sold and proceeds handed out at the end of the year. The group has marketed the properties first to leaseholders, then to original owners and then to all takers.

One of the trust’s two winery properties was involved in overbidding before its sale, according to Mr. Ciatti. The trust owned a winery in Hopland, leased to Weibel Inc., and one in Edna Valley.

Cameron Wine Storage is part of a trend among some wine companies in recent years not to tie up as much capital into assets such as additional tank and barrel storage, while a wave of vineyards were coming into full production, according to bulk-wine broker Steve Fredricks of Turrentine Brokerage in Novato.

“They are letting someone else put in the infrastructure, and we’re seeing that with sale-leasebacks for vineyards and leasing of tank capacity,” he said.

It remains to be seen whether the drive toward more outsourced storage will continue as the number of nonbearing vineyard acres dwindles, according to Mr. Fredricks.

Another outsourced new storage facility in the same Napa Valley Gateway Business Park is Safe Harbor Wine Storage, a venture by Alan and Steve Sullivan, owners of oak stave insert makers Stavin in Sausalito, and winemakers Scott McCleod of Rubicon Estate and Corey Beck of Rosso & Bianco.

The nearly 50,000-square-foot facility at 303 West Gateway Road has a capacity of 4 million gallons of wine in 175 stainless steel tanks by The Belli Corp. of Healdsburg. The tanks range in size from 6,400 to 32,000 gallons each, with larger tanks available for blending. Of that, 3.2 million gallons have been filled since the facility opened in August 2007, according to Alan Sullivan.

Services Safe Harbor offers include use of Stavin’s or another brand of stave inserts; macro-oxygenation, which is controlled exposure of fermenting wine to the gas to foster yeast activity; and micro-oxygenation.

For more information, call Cameron Wine Storage at 707-543-7123 and Safe Harbor Wine Storage at 707-252-9690.

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