A plastic bottle of "Outdoor Wino"
A plastic bottle of "Outdoor Wino" wine is dropped to demonstrate the bottle's robustness in New York June 20, 2011. Wine producers from New Zealand, the United States and even France are switching from glass to plastic wine bottles, saying they are lighter, good for the environment and not bad for the wine. Picture taken June 20, 2011. REUTERS

It's not an easy job to get wine into a bottle. Yet as one Australian vintner was told in a difficult phone call, that hard work can quickly be undone by a malfunction.

In a report on Thursday, AdelaideNow.com told the tale of more than $1 million in wine from South Australia's Mclaren Vale being spilled due to a malfunction involving over four hundred cases of wine and a spill of more than 6 meters.

We just couldn't believe it, Sparky Markquis, who runs the Mollydooker Wines company. As you can imagine, this wine is our pride and joy. To see it accidentally destroyed, and not consumed, has left us all a bit numb.

The wine was being readied for shipment to the United States. The spill involved about one third of his annual production.

Marquis was said to be working with insurance agencies to recover the losses, the report said. He said the insurer is inspecting.

He said there was a lot of damage to more than 70 percent of the cartons and that the rest were being checked by hand.

The story did not specify the day the incident took place.