Now THAT’S! A Winery

I was moving through the various satellite imagery of wineries and vineyards at Appellation America today and came across these images of what is surely the largest winery facility in America, if not the world.

Talk about a "Tank Farm". Gallo’s production facility in Modesto, California is more like a "Tank County". I’d love to tour this facility. By all the accounts I’ve ever received, this is but the tip of the iceberg.

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WOW

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Now, THAT’S a Tank Farm!!

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Just how big are these tanks??

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6 Responses

  1. James Brummett - December 14, 2006

    Having lived in Modesto my whole life, I do know at one time it was the largest in the world. Not sure if that’s still true today.
    Just Northeast of the winery is the airport, and being a pilot it’s always fun taking off and feeling like your wheels are skimming the tops of those tanks.
    One thing to note is that this site also includes the Gallo Glass plant where all of the bottling is made. Very cool to see!
    If you look at this site using something like Google Earth, zoom out a bit and you’ll see the Administration building near the river and may be able to make out one of the many peacocks that roam the grounds.

  2. Frank Stevens - December 14, 2006

    Gallo’s Modesto plant IS spread out over a large territory, but their Livingston plant IS the largest winery in the world. The capacity there is over 155,000,000 gallons. Now THAT’S a lot of wine!!

  3. Jack - December 14, 2006

    Shouldn’t the title be, “Now THAT’S a Family Winery!”?

  4. Nancy - December 15, 2006

    Hi, Tom! Terrific photos! This is a great example of a “small family winery.” Well, the family’s small… (sorry–old joke from my Mondavi days).
    I was lucky enough to have a tour of Gallo yeah many years ago, when I was at Mondavi, because Mondavi’s then PR guy (Harvey Posert, who now speaks for Franzia) was a friend of Gallo’s PR guy. What an experience. I’m sure we didn’t see the whole thing, but as it was, we needed a van to get around the property!
    We were told that their largest tank was 1 million gallons, but that it was no longer in use. Saw the bottle production too.
    Extremely impressive and unforgettable! I admire them tremendously. Nancy

  5. Tim - December 19, 2006

    I’ve toured this facility and likened the experience to visiting the Death Star.

  6. joel - February 19, 2014

    I was a Sr Systems analyst for Gallo years ago when it was truly small. All the offices were in one small building, and my office was about 30 feet from Ernest. At that time United Vitners was the largest winery. When Boons Farm hit, we expanded FAST. We were hiring people and basically telling them to find a desk and define their job functions.

    It was really fun in those days. We developed everything. The lab was using GS’s, mas specs, flame photometers, and other dry lab stuff. We developed all the software to interface the lab. We even wrote our own real time OS for an IBM s/7. I remember going to Radio Shack and buying chips to develop a tank level system. It worked. We wrote a wine tracking system, and I do believe our system ideas on interfacing the lab, cellar operations, shipping, warehousing, glass plant , Mic Cal Aluminum plant and wine tracking into a unified system.. Ah! but that was years ago..

    The tanks are around 600K to 800K. The 1 million gallon tank was in operation when I was there. We developed a crush system to interface the growers, crush operations, and winemakers. Gave immediate feedback if they were going to meet expectations. This allowed them to crush into other programs.

    I’ll have to say it was exciting during the early days. Later the winery just became to big for my personal taste, and I moved on..

    Hope this gives you some background.


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