When Railex Wine Services opened a Wallula warehouse big enough to fit 11 football fields inside it three years ago, the company didn’t expect Ste. Michelle Wine Estates to dominate the majority of its space.

“It’s great to have an existing customer just prompt you to expand your business and open it up to more and more potential customers and some of the things we think we can provide. It’s really pretty cool,” said Jim Kleist, senior vice president of Railex Wine Services.

It’s no wonder Railex needed room to grow, as Ste. Michelle is the state’s winery giant. Of the top 10 wineries in the state, Ste. Michelle owns eight of them and produces more than 7.5 million cases of wine each year.

Railex, which is about 25 miles east of the Tri-Cities just off Highway 12 in Walla Walla County, broke ground on its 260,000-square-foot expansion a little over a month ago.

The $10 million addition on the 45-acre site will be attached to the existing 500,000-square-foot temperature- and humidity-controlled bonded wine storage and distribution space.

The tenant-driven expansion will add 10 more truck doors for a total of 30 for the entire facility, along with five railcar loading/unloading doors.

The project also includes 50,000 square feet of refrigerated special projects space to accommodate specific requests such as re-labeling, re-casing, direct-to-consumer fulfillment, club store packaging and export preparation.

With the extra space, Railex will be able to offer storage, distribution, freight brokerage and consolidated shipment programs for all Pacific Northwest wineries to the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast markets via truck, rail or intermodal carriers, Kleist said.

Big gets bigger

It’s hard to wrap your head around how big the facility currently is until Kleist breaks it down into a football analogy.

He estimated 11 football fields, including end zones, could fit under its long roof. The expansion means the addition of another five or so fields, he said.

It also means the hiring of four to six more employees. At its peak, Railex employs 40 people.

“The Port of Walla Walla is pleased with another new large investment coming to the port’s Dodd Industrial Park. The port over the last several months has worked closely with Railex Wine Services to ensure that the required infrastructure is in place to accommodate the Phase 2 expansion,” said Mike Fredrickson, president of the Port of Walla Walla.

Railex opened in February 2013. Most its shipments go out by truck, about 80 percent, with about 20 percent by rail, Kleist said.

“The goal was to open it up for all the industry but our main partner, they’re pretty strong and pretty large,” Kleist said of Ste. Michelle. “The first year we just had to learn how to handle their business. I purposefully did not focus on putting other people in there until we could do it well but then space got tight.”

Kleist has been watching the growth of the wine industry, especially since last year’s opening of the WSU Wine Science Center, a new teaching and research facility on WSU’s Richland campus that features research laboratories and classrooms, a research and teaching winery, a two-acre vineyard, and greenhouses to train technical personnel to support the state’s expanding wine industry.

The opening of the WSU center gives the area a “stamp of approval” as a world-class wine area, Kleist said. “You now have everything,” he said. “There’s a lot of possibilities with the growth in the Washington wine industry.”

Railex Wine Services was founded in 2012 as a wine storage, distribution and logistics platform that provides wineries and distributors across the United States with the latest technology to manage their storage and shipping needs.

The expansion is scheduled to be completed and opened in spring 2017.

Hansen-Rice of Nampa, Idaho, is the contractor for the project.