Leading building and civil engineering contractor, Farrans Construction, has completed a £10m technically complex warehouse in Hertfordshire for client, The Wine Society.

Warehouse 5 will provide 25% of The Wine Society’s total storage, increasing total capacity across the site to 18 million bottles. Using the latest in temperature moderating technology, this unique project has involved careful planning to accommodate requirements for a strictly controlled operational environment.

The new warehouse is 70m long and 23m high, with over 6,000m² of floor space, equivalent to the size of a football pitch. It has been specially designed using the latest in temperature moderating technology and includes facilities for solar panels as well as electric charging stations. The space is already being put to work with wines from the 2019 Bordeaux En Primeur campaign amongst the first bottles to settle into their new home.

The building of Warehouse 5 will also enable the organisation to further streamline its goods in and picking procedures to enhance its service to members.

Constructing this building to seamlessly link into the existing live Warehouses 2 and 4 required effective materials distribution. Farrans has utilised its in-house expertise of laser scan point cloud technology to verify elements of the warehouse using the BIM models.

Cathal Montague, Regional Director for Farrans Construction, said:

“The warehousing and logistics sector is very buoyant in the UK and we are pleased to add the Wine Society to our extensive portfolio of completed projects in this sector. As we see more requirement for spaces like this, we know that the skills and innovative technology that we are using in our projects can be redeployed to support the developments of data centres, retail collection centres and ecommerce warehousing. We work with our clients to respond to their end needs, identifying construction solutions which will enable them to continue to operate while we are on site, reducing the need for downtime.

“Our work in this sector continues as we are also on site in Keynsham Recycling Centre, delivering a state-of-the-art two storey recycling centre for Bath & North East Somerset Council.”

Karen Coates, The Wine Society’s Chief Operating Officer, managed the project. Working closely with the team at Farrans Construction, the build was completed on time and on budget. She comments:

“With our unique ownership structure, all profits generated at The Wine Society are reinvested into the business. This means that as well as using our profits to keep our wine quality and service to members high, we also now have a new, temperature-controlled facility which will improve our operations and increase our overall storage space. So effectively, this warehouse was built by our members for our members. By growing our storage capacity by almost 5 million bottles, we can continue to meet our members’ demand for quality wines now and into the future.”