History of Oregon Wine Services and Storage
In late 2001, John Niemeyer, a local real-estate investor purchased the Pillsbury building in McMinnville, Oregon with the idea of opening a wine storage facility. For the first nine months the majority of the 110,000 square foot facility sat vacant while renovations to the cooling system, insulated rooms and offices proceeded.
In August of 2002, Jeff Meader began marketing Oregon Wine Services and Storage (OWS) to the Oregon wine industry. By December of 2002, Jeff had taken over as General Manager and later Jeff became a co-owner of OWS.
From its inception, OWS focused on climate controlled storage, fulfillment services, consolidations to northern California and local wine transportation. In 2003, OWS formed a partnership with Laurent Montalieu to create a custom crush facility called NW Wine Company.
In 2005, Tim Moore joined OWS as Director of Operations. Tim brought with him a wealth of knowledge pertaining to wine storage and distribution from his past employment with Vintage Wines, LLC in Chicago. Additionally, Tim's computer skills and organizational acumen have allowed OWS to grow and adapt to the changes of Oregon's continually evolving wine industry.
Over the past eight years, OWS has utilized its abundance of insulated climate controlled space to store and ship wine for the Oregon wine industry. With an eye to the future, OWS has recently added of 61,000 square feet of on site temperature controlled storage area, which was completed in July of 2008, bringing the total facility to over 170,000 square feet.
Our direct-to-consumer shipping services have grown from a small percentage of our business to our primary revenue sector. In the process we have become the envy of the direct shipping industry in Oregon. We are now expanding these services to include compliance consulting, both and the federal and state levels.
OWS continues to expand our services to the Oregon Wine industry, recently launching a new trucking arm that expands our local and Northern California services to now include local and long haul, partial load and full load trucking to all destinations within the continental United States.