St. James Winery buys Mueller Co. fermenting tanks

Springfield-based Mueller fabricated the 25,000-gallon stainless steel tanks earlier this year in conjunction with a 5,000-square-foot cellar expansion under way at the winery. Once complete, the cellar space will span nearly 15,000 square feet, said Jack Bonar, the winery’s national marketing director.

“These are some of the largest tanks that St. James Winery and Paul Mueller are aware of in the Midwestern region,” he said, declining to comment on the costs of the tanks or the winery expansion.

At the least, the tanks are thought to be the largest for wine fermenting in Missouri, said Paul Hume, national sales manager for Mueller Processing Systems and Equipment Co.

Each tank stands almost 30 feet tall and is 13 1/2 feet in diameter, which can make transportation tricky, Hume said. Late last month, tractor-trailers in Mueller’s fleet hauled the tanks to the winery via Interstate 44 with a required police escort, Hume added.

At the winery, the tanks were hoisted from the trailers with a crane and installed on a concrete pad, Bonar said. A new structure that will house the tanks is under construction.

With the new tanks, St. James will have a total of 68 tanks capable of producing 600,000 gallons of wine, Bonar said. Prior to the addition of the new tanks, he added, the winery’s largest tanks held 14,000 gallons.

St. James – one of the largest wine producers in the Midwest – will soon have the capacity to bottle 200,000 cases annually. The winery bottled 160,000 cases last year and is expected to bottle about 180,000 this year, Bonar said.

“High demand … has made it necessary to increase our capacity while maintaining the integrity of our products,” St. James Winery General Manager Rodney Lough said in a news release.

St. James sells wine in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. The wines will soon be available in Indiana, and another three states will be added to the distribution list in the next three to six months, Bonar said.

Hume said St. James has been a longtime Mueller customer, and that the winery’s future growth could translate into as many as 20 additional fermenting tanks, each of which takes about 12 weeks to manufacture.

“They’re growing at a very rapid rate, and this is just the start of the new expansion,” he said.

Hume said the winery has become a “real Mueller showplace.” The steel manufacturer also has made some smaller fermenting tanks for a boutique winery in Ste. Genevieve near St. Louis.