Opening up the bottle

Wines & Vines, Sept, 2002 by Larry Walker

Not very long ago, bottles were not something to which a wine marketer gave much thought. There were a few standard shapes--the Bordeaux bottle, the Burgundy bottle, the hock bottle--and colors. The production people might have some concern about a tight seal with a cork, but on the retail shelf, most bottles looked pretty much alike. Not only that, but on the technical side, differences were small, at least differences that the consumer would notice. Now, of course, the wine bottle is part of the package.

We are also in the process of a dramatic change in the technical side--the growing popularity of screwcap closures, which require a departure from the standard bottle.

Randall Grahm, of Bonny Doon, recently announced that he was converting to screwcaps for 80,000 cases of his Ca' del Solo Big House Red and Big House White wines. Naturally, he is concerned about consumer reaction to the screwcaps, but his biggest initial problem was finding a bottle that would take the screwcaps.

"There are actually very few bottles that one can currently purchase 'off the shelf' that will take them," he said. Grahm added that Bonny Doon is planning to create a custom bottle for future releases. Grahm says that unless he is "totally screwed" by the Big House bottlings, he would do the entire Ca' del Solo and eventually the Bonny Doon line in screwcaps. His commitment to the closure is demonstrated by an extensive retooling of the winery bottling line. New machinery from Italy is being installed at a cost in excess of $100,000 for future bottlings.

Grahm is using the Stelvin cap, made by Pechiney, a French company. The Stelvin is generally considered state-of-the-art in screwcap technology.

Vincent Ravanas, of Pechiney in the U.S., said he is talking to several more wineries in California who are doing trials with screwcaps. "We don't have to convince the winemakers. They know it's the best closure," he said. "All the conversation is really about marketing.

Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, is urging wine producers in Europe to bottle their wine in screwcaps, following the success of a number of Australian wines in the chain.

The store calls the screwcap botlings their "Unwind" wines.

"We're working on numbers now," wine category manager Anne-Marie Bostock told decanter.com. She added that the Unwind range, with a strong New World bias, had generated a lot of interest in the Old World, but there was still some resistance. However; she said that an announcement would be made in the near future about which Old World producers were going to use screwcaps.

Tesco is the biggest retailer in the UK. In a 10-week period in early summer, the chain sold 1.5 million bottles of screwcap wines. An instore survey showed 60% of respondents thought screwcaps were a good idea for wine, and 65% would buy a wine sealed with a screwcap. Clearly, it would be a good idea for a bottle supply company to have bottles available that can be used with screwcap closures.

Erica Harrop at Saverglass, Inc., said she believed we are just at the beginning of the screwcap revolution. (Saverglass supplied the bottles for Randall Grahm's Big House wines.) "We had a line of bottles for the Australian market, a Riesling, Burgundy and Bordeaux bottle. The bottle must be designed specifically for screwcaps, you can't just modify the existing bottle. The shape of the neck is the key."

California Glass is prepared to source bottles with the appropriate screwcap finish, according to Marc Silvani, a principle in the firm. Silvani said that existing bottle molds can be adapted with different neck rings to enable finish changes. Other molds will have to be redesigned to accommodate the differences in headspace created by the disparity between cork length/fill point and screwcap closure/fill point.

Bert Loughmiller, president and CEO of APM Bottling, Inc., said, "We are anticipating that the use of aluminum screwcap closures will soon become a significant factor in premium wine packaging. Many wine producers have long recognized the technical benefits these closures provide. It is only of late that the missionary work of pioneering users has cleared away many of the marketing doubts which have retarded use of these closures. APM already offers a wide variety of imported specialty wine bottles. Now we have arranged for many of these offerings to be available with a screwcap finish."

Loughmiller added that APM can also provide a full range of decorated aluminum screwcap closures through its partnership with Globalcap, a leading supplier of Stelvin-style closures.

David Schwandt, director of sales and marketing at Demptos Glass, said his company already has a Bordeaux and a Burgundy mold in antique and flint in production in France. "We are also in the process of designing! developing a 75 Omi Bordeaux/Claret mold that we will produce in North America," he said.

With few exceptions, all the bottle companies that responded to a recent Wines & Vines survey expected an increase in premium wine bottled in screwcaps and were ready or would soon be ready to supply the bottles.