Greencroft Two

Greencroft Two is the new home for Greencroft Bottling, at our main site in County Durham.

Greencroft Two is the UK’s newest and most sustainable wine bottling facility, powered by renewable wind and solar power.

Our new £21million building is more than 22,000 square metres (around 240,000 square feet, equivalent to about four football pitches) and, when all our lines are installed, will more than double the potential capacity at Greencroft Bottling to up to 400million litres per year, which is equivalent to around a quarter (28%) of all wine sold in the UK.

The first of Greencroft Two’s new lines is a new €3million counter-pressure line which is up and running while we gradually bring our existing lines over from Greencroft One without disruption to production. When complete, Greencroft Two could accommodate up to 10 bottling lines and seven ancillary lines for bag-in-box, cans, pouches, key kegs or any new types of sustainable packaging. We will then gradually bring the remaining existing 

So why are we building a new bottling facility? 

In recent years the Lanchester Group – which includes Greencroft Bottling and Lanchester Wines – has grown rapidly and requires more space for both the bottling facility and subsequent warehousing. Utilising additional space on the Greencroft Estate, we have developed a purpose-built bottling facility which is the most modern and environmentally sustainable wine bottling facility in the UK, housing new filling lines to double present capacity and accommodate new forms of packaging as the market moves ever closer to carbon-neutral formats.

We documented the building which you can view in stages via our drone footage

The video above is from May 2022 and shows the development in progress. To the left, you’ll see our truck park while in the background is Lanchester Wines and our current site. The development is close to our wind turbines which will generate power for Greencroft Two, as will the solar panels you can see on the roof. 

Powered by Renewable Energy

The Solar Panels in the roof will have 3 MegaWatts of solar which will create around 2.8m kiloWatt hours of electricity per year – the chemical reactions which occur within solar panels are more efficient at cooler temperatures so County Durham’s bright and sunny, yet rather chilly, weather is perfect for our solar panels.

The existing wind turbines will also provide backup power and we will, at a later date, be installing batteries to store the power we generate – the challenge with renewable energy is that it’s not always used when it’s produced.

We estimate that (new solar and existing on-site wind turbines combined), the business could generate up to 8 million KiloWatt hours per year of clean, renewable energy.

  • Our facility will be powered by our on-site wind turbines which feed directly into our on-site substations, with excess sold back to the National Grid – usually, wind turbines feed into the grid and businesses ‘buy back’ power.
  • 3 MegaWatts of solar which will create around 2.8m kiloWatt-hours of electricity per year
  • Together, these are sufficient to power our facility. This will be the first facility of this size not beholden to the National Grid
December 2022