(Wines&Vines) - The growing needs of the Northwest wine industry have prompted two suppliers to join forces to serve local demand.

Santa Rosa, Calif.-based closure and glass provider M.A. Silva USA announced a deal to acquire the bottle and wine packaging business (but not the wine tank operations) of Vintners Global Resource LLC, based in Kent, on Oct. 10. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Both companies were looking to expand their capacity. M.A. Silva was seeking an efficient way to broaden its services in the Northwest, the company’s president Neil Foster said, while Vintners Global Resource principal Andy Brassington was seeking a partner to boost the capacity of his own business as the region’s wine industry continues to expand.

“We found that shipping from Sonoma County to the Pacific Northwest was definitely cost prohibitive, and we were unable to be competitively priced in a lot of situations. And therefore we sought warehousing and looked to be a distributor up in the Pacific Northwest,” Foster told Wines & Vines, noting that he’s also been seeking a location in Southern California for similar reasons.

Meanwhile, Brassington was scouting expansion opportunities for his own seven-year-old company and gave M.A. Silva a call.

“We had grown it to the level where it needed the next level of infrastructure and support, and I determined that the best way to do that would be to partner up,” Brassington said.

Partnership logistics

Kent is located just south of Sea-Tac International Airport, between Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., the Pacific Northwest’s busiest ports for incoming cargo.

 “We saw the opportunity with Vintners Global Resource to be able to have a location in Kent, ship directly from our suppliers in China and distribute more efficiently and cost effectively in the Pacific Northwest,” Foster said.

Distributing glass from China has been a highly successful venture for M.A. Silva, which launched in 2000 with a cork division. Its glass business has experienced steady growth, and being close to a key gateway for the product as well as in a key wine-producing region was ideal. The deal will boost M.A. Silva’s warehouse capacity to a maximum of 160,000 square feet in California and Washington state, and boost revenues by about