WineWorks’ Marlborough site in New Zealand can bottle around 45,000 bottles of wine an hour. When the contract bottler ran out of space and put up an additional building beyond its existing site boundary, with a waterway between the two, the awkward part was not the building. It was moving pallets across the gap without denting that hourly rate. The answer, described in a customer story published by Nedap in 2026, was an electric tug towing trailers, with passive UHF RFID opening the doors and gates in front of it.
The conveyor that did not get built
WineWorks is a New Zealand contract wine bottling, packaging and warehousing business, with its Marlborough operation at Riverlands near Blenheim and further sites in Hawke’s Bay and Auckland. Growth meant more space was needed, and the new building ended up on the far side of a waterway from the existing one.
WineWorks looked at an automated conveyor to shuttle pallets between the two buildings and concluded it was complex and costly. The team chose an electric tug towing trailers instead, which solved the transport problem and created an access control one: authorised trailers and other vehicles had to get through the site’s doors and gates securely, without queuing at each one, and on conditions WineWorks could define itself.
uPASS Target readers, heavy duty tags on the vehicles
WineWorks consulted its security partner, Advanced Security, which recommended long-range UHF RFID from Nedap, a Dutch manufacturer of vehicle and personnel identification readers. The installed combination is Nedap uPASS Target readers with Nedap UHF Heavy Duty tags fitted to the vehicles and trailers, supplied through ISCS, Nedap’s longstanding distributor in the region.
Passive UHF RFID means the tags carry no battery: they draw power from the reader’s field and reflect a signal back, which is why a tag bolted to a trailer can sit outdoors for years without maintenance. Nedap specifies the Heavy Duty tag as passive UHF at approximately 900 MHz, EPC Gen 2 compatible, waterproof, shockproof, chemical resistant and built to perform on metal, with a quoted range of up to 18 m (60 ft) when read by a uPASS Target. The reader is quoted at up to 15 m (50 ft) in combination with Nedap’s UHF Windshield Tag. Nedap notes that achievable range depends on reader type, installation and environment, and it has not published the ranges achieved at Marlborough.
The rest of the uPASS Target sheet explains why the reader suits a working industrial yard: Power over Ethernet on a single cable, OSDP v2 including secure channel, EPC Gen2 V2 tags for tag authentication, and a read field that can be reshaped by adding a uPASS Antenna beside or beneath the reader for intricate gate layouts, wide approach angles or entry and exit on one lane.
Bolted onto the access control system that was already there
Nothing was ripped out. The uPASS Target readers were integrated with the site’s existing access control and alarm system, which runs on ICT Protege GX, a unified access control and intrusion platform, and already operated the automated gate and doors. The readers are also tied into traffic lights indicating when vehicles are operating in the area, so pedestrians and drivers get a signal rather than a surprise.
“Adding the Nedap uPASS system to our existing access control ensures fast, efficient movement of material handling equipment across our facility, while maintaining security and compliance. It’s allowed us to set up a solution that’s smooth, quiet, economical, and emissions-free, rather than using trucks for short haul movement.”
Anthony Barnes, Project Manager, WineWorks
Tags on the equipment, not cards in the cab
The detail worth stealing here is the credential model: the identifier lives on the machine, not on the person driving it. Tags fixed to the equipment reduce the risk of identifiers being lost, left behind or shared between vehicles, and when a machine is replaced the tag transfers to its replacement. For anyone who has run a yard on windscreen cards or handheld fobs that removes a whole category of nuisance, and it means permissions describe equipment rather than staff.
The deployment covers the electric tug trailers, forklifts across the site, and the infrastructure team’s electric scooter. The operational result Nedap reports is unglamorous and exactly the point: when a tagged vehicle approaches a door or gate it opens without delay, and the driver never has to stop or climb out.
For more on the terminology used here, see the RFID News glossary, and for related deployments our access control and UHF coverage.
Read more at https://www.nedapidentification.com/customer-stories/keeping-production-flowing-at-wineworks/
