There was a TV programme in the UK last year about a bottling plant in Bristol. It's now a contract packer which packs many of the top 20 wine brands in the UK and seems to have capacity for 40 million cases a year.
This gives me hope that it's easier to ship wine now. Last time I tried to ship wine to my parents as a gift I literally couldn't find a courier who would accept it.
To a degree, I don't blame them... most people suck at packing, but there are products that are made for shipping wine bottles and they don't accept those from consumers either (although wineries use the same couriers and containers to ship wine to me). Hopefully this has changed.
At least within the US, individual to individual wine shipping is basically impossible without breaking some laws and/or regulations. Typically, you need to be a licensed retailer or producer (winery), and the rules vary depending on the state the recipient is in. Certainly people do it (often claiming it's "olive oil" or similar), but it's still not easy to do it legitimately as an individual. Even as a retailer or producer (which might be what you were trying to do) it varies a lot by state, and some states are very restrictive.
Most wine is stores, or transported in this way at some point in its life. Most blends are blends from multiple vineyards, and are transported in big metal tanker trucks with plastic lining. Some are transported in big 500 gallon plastic totes. In my limited knowledge, only pretty high end wines are made by only ever touching oak barrels and glass bottles.
The plastic should not impart any taste directly, but it would expose the wine to oxygen. This is a factor that bulk producers take into account when formulating their wines.
They speak of the environmental benefits at the start, then finish with an advert for their service to move wine by air — two whole cargo planes most recently.
Well, designing a blog in alignment with DHL's corporate design that's pleasant to ones eyes is certainly not the easiest task but boy, what happened with this header bar (in dark mode)?
