60% of the equipment we lease is IT related, but you may be surprised at some of the assets in the other 40%, like wine barrels!
Wine barrels are always an interesting topic. People generally want to know why you would even want to lease a wine barrel? Well, in short, wine barrels are a lot more than just a container - they are the hand crafted receptacle that imparts oak flavour into the wine, and their ability to do this has a limited life span.
Wine barrels are particularly important for making certain types of wine that have complex oak flavours and the only way to achieve these flavours is through the use of different types of barrels that come from different forests, regions and countries. The barrels also have different types of woodgrains and can be toasted in special ways to produce specific flavours. It’s a lot more complex than we can explain, but essentially our winery clients and their winemakers are very selective about where their barrels come from and how they are used.
Imagine the large volumes of wine being produced every year in Australasia and then think about how many wine barrels you need to make all of that wine. As a gross generalisation, each barrel holds about 225 litres of wine, so with the volumes being produced by some of the large producers, that means a lot of wine barrels are needed. Costing around $1,000 a barrel, that can be a substantial capital outlay for any business.
That’s where we come in. We finance wine barrels from all over the world - French oak, Hungarian oak, American oak, Euros, USD etc. We make it easy and simple for our clients every single season. Then after 4 or 5 years when the wineries are finished with them we get them back and sell them into the secondary markets.
The next question we get, is where do those barrels go? The answer is lots of different places and it’s not DIY stores to be cut in half and sold as planters. There is a strong market for used oak throughout Australasian wineries, and the rapidly expanding whiskey and craft beer industries, all of which use loads of wine barrels. We’ve also got lots of craft wooden product producers ringing up looking for barrels.
So, when you next think about equipment leasing, it’s not all about laptops and desktops. That tasty glass of chardonnay or pinot noir may have come from a Quadrent wine barrel.
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