Wine direct shipper leases large new Napa warehouse for expansion
Pack n’ Ship Direct plans to move its Napa Valley operations into all of a 226,000-square-foot warehouse under construction in south Napa this fall, as the Windsor-based company expands its operations nationwide amid greater wine industry emphasis on selling wine directly to consumers.
The shipper’s operating company, Vynapse, LLC, part of Adams Wine Group, signed a long-term lease for the 1325 Airport Blvd. first building at New York Life Real Estate Investors’ Greenwood Business Park project. Pack n’ Ship plans to relocate from a 64,000-square-foot, 40-employee warehouse in south Napa in October, based on the schedule at this point from project general contractor Devcon Construction, according to Truman Reynolds, general manager of the shipping company.
“Sometimes, we feel like a creeping amoeba,” he said. “We just continue to run out of space.”
With the new location, Pack n’ Ship Direct will have roughly 325,000 square feet of warehouses in California - Windsor and Napa for the North Coast and Paso Robles and Buelton for the Central Coast - plus 170,000- and 40,000-square-foot partner facilities in New York and Florida, respectively.
Pack n’ Ship Direct started a decade ago and for nine years used other companies to provide temperature-controlled intermodal and forward-staging facilities to get wine closer to customers throughout the country and keep the wine from getting too hot or cold en route. About a year ago, Pack n’ Ship and certain service providers joined into an equity partnership with JL Acumen, based in New Windsor, N.Y.
A somewhat near-term goal is to expand shipping options in the Midwest. Having a facility in Texas, the nation’s second-largest wine-direct-shipping destination after California, would be ideal, but complexities of Texas alcoholic-beverage law and the every-other-year legislature sessions may call for expansion of the Oklahoma warehouse to serve the Lone Star State, Reynolds said.
The new Napa building has 7,000 square feet of office space and a wine-storage configuration, such as upgraded insulation and cooling systems.
A second warehouse at Greenwood Business Park, located on 19.4 acres at the corner of Airport Boulevard and Devlin Road is expected to be under construction later this summer, according to the DTZ real estate team marketing the project. The additional single-story building will have 79,000-square-feet of space. The development will have nearly 305,000 square feet at completion.
The development is part of about 2 million square feet of wine-dominated industrial construction underway or poised to be so in Napa Valley this year.
Brooks Pedder, Tony Binswanger and Trevor Buck of DTZ represented New York Life in the lease deal, and Pedder and Scott Bertrand of DTZ represented Vynapse.
