The move will take 50 lorries off the road every week and cut carbon emissions by 80%, Tesco said.
Plans are already underway by Tesco to use similar waterborne freight routes across Britain.
Tesco distribution director Laurie McIlwee said: “Other businesses have merely discussed switching over to transporting their cargo by waterway one day but we’re actually doing it.”
Earlier this year, Sainsbury’s said it had successfully trialled transporting goods by barge on the River Thames in London.
Tesco’s new cargo service will involve three journeys a week, delivering an estimated 600,000 litres of wine on each journey along the 40-mile stretch of the canal.
The containers of wine from Australia, California, Chile and Argentina are then transported to a bottling site half a mile away, where they are packed for Tesco supermarkets across the country.
Until now Tesco’s New World wine shipments have arrived in the UK at various southern ports by ship before being driven to the Manchester bottling depot.
