2009 Wine Bottle Shock

Poor design or clinging to traditions unnecessarily has always struck me as being mentally lazy, and daily life always presents products which stick out glaringly for their antiquated presentation and functionality. Wine bottles are one such product which I find to be shockingly overly engineered for their use and ripe for updating. The glass bottles are just too thick and heavy which increases not only the costs of production, but the costs of shipping, and then the cost of the wine to the consumer.

While most other beverage industries have made a progression toward dropping the weight for the cost savings to be realized, the weight of wine bottles has actually increased in the last decade. One has to believe that there is a perceived correlation between the heft of the package and the quality of the wine.  While beer bottles have trimmed 30% and cola bottles 20%, and have become stronger simultaneously, the wine industry has resisted the trend, driven by the high-end wine makers. The problem is that what the high-end producers desire sets the standard for the industry and it’s difficult to get others to do anything differently, lest they be perceived as inferior products. There is a good chance that the heavy bottle mentality can be traced back to the early days of wine making – in particular, the early, volatile days of champagne when the process was less well known or managed and the carbonation levels being produced warranted strong bottles. But we have come a long way since then and should be updating according to technology and superior designs over time.

A good example of the follow-the-leader mentality can be witnessed as you take any California wine country tours; take a look at the base of bottles at any of the popular wineries in Sonoma Valley or Napa Valley. A lot of the wine bottles will contain the indentation at the base which serves two functions: it allows for sediment separation, and enables one hand pouring from the base with your thumb stuck up the bottom for grip and balance. But the settlement aspect was intended for champagne or wines that will be aging for years. And the single handed pour (mostly for champagne) from the bottom of a bottle is more pretentious than anything else. If a wine is meant to be enjoyed in the near-term years after bottling, then it serves no purpose to overly produce the bottle with unwarranted features. And if weight can be dramatically reduced to numerous good ends from savings, I think the wine drinking public will come to appreciate the move to the new weight of wine. Americans have always been resilient and adaptive, and embraced change. The push to decouple overly weighty wine bottles won’t come from France, but I believe that California wine country could easily make this move and the public will quickly follow, wondering what took the industry so long.