Personalizing Your Wine Package
Summer is approaching, and if you haven’t already, it’s probably time to start thinking about what to do with all that wine you made last harvest season (well, besides drink it).
The wine at this point is probably sound, drinkable and ready to start accumulating some serious bottle age. You certainly could stop messing with it at this stage — or you could put in a few extra hours of work and truly make your bottle of wine a special personal creation, one that has a visual package that’s as pleasing as the wine inside. Read on to learn about some of the “bottle-dressing” options available to the home winemaker and find out why — due to convention or creativity — you might want to choose one over the other.
Bottles
For many winemakers, the final “look” of the bottle of wine starts with the bottle. The bottle serves as the aesthetic “grounding point” for any wine and is usually the first thing to be
noticed (however unconsciously) when it is given as a gift, shown at a wine competition, or proudly brought to table. Serving as protective container and attractive dispenser, a wine bottle is an important part of the perceived identity of the wine.
There are many glassware choices available to the home winemaker. Wine bottles seem to come in an almost endless array of shapes, sizes, and colors, and the sheer variety on the market is probably enough to make even the veteran home winemaker’s mind swim. There are three main considerations to be taken into account when choosing glassware for your wine:
The color, the shape, and the funcitionality of the design.
Traditional wine bottles belong to one of three color families: brown, green, or clear. It is thought that these three glass colors developed as the most dominant due to at first practicality and then, as time went on, to tradition. Some villages that produce wine in France have always
bottled their product in green bottles and continue to do so, while some wine producers from Alsace have always chosen brown. Tradition might not matter to some of us, but for those of us who care, here are some bottle color conventions that still hold true in today’s marketplace and might influence your choices: Red “Bordeaux” varietals or blends (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc) or the dominant red “Burgundian” varietal (Pinot Noir) are almost always bottled in dark green glass. Chardonnays and other dry white wines are sometimes bottled in lighter green “leaf green” bottles, whereas white dessert wines and some dry Sauvignon Blancs
are often bottled in clear glass. Brown glass is not typically used for many of the wines we see on the shelves today, though Alsatian varietals (Riesling, Gewurtzraminer) are often bottled using dark or light brown glass.
If you don’t care to adhere to traditions, then by all means, bottle your wine in whichever color you prefer! Some manufacturers have some attractive blue bottles that have been making their presence felt in the marketplace. One word of scientific caution when it comes to choosing a bottle color: Clear glass may look nice and show off the delicate hue of your finest Chenin Blanc, but UV rays from the sun can easily penetrate clear glass and damage the contents inside, creating what is known as a “sunstruck” defect that can smell unpleasantly of sulfur, onions, or rotten eggs. This reaction can be prevented by keeping your wine out of the sun as well as by bottling in colored glass, whose pigments will prevent most of the sun’s rays from causing any damage.
Not surprisingly, many centuries of winemaking tradition dictate which bottle shapes should be used for which varietal. The cylindrical wine bottle with pronounced shoulders is called a Bordeaux bottle, and usually contains varietals that historically come from that region in France: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc to name the most famous ones. The bottle with the gradually sloping shoulders is called a Burgundy bottle, and contains, you guessed it, wine types traditionally made in Burgundy, i.e. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Alsatian varietals usually are bottled in tall, skinny bottles with narrowly sloping shoulders. Sparkling wines need to be put into bottles specifically reserved for this purpose because the carbon dioxide gas requires the bottle to be thick and built to withstand some pressure. Champagne bottles, as well as any of those mentioned above, can be easily purchased from a glass
company or through most home winemaking stores. Or save your used bottles over the year, clean, and re-use!
Of course, home winemakers are under no obligation whatsoever to follow convention. It’s cost-effective to use whatever bottles come the easiest and most cheaply to hand, as long as they are clean, free of defects, and fit the needs of the wine.
Closures
If you’ve got a bottle, you’ve obviously got to come up with a way to close it up. The natural counterpart to a wine bottle is, of course, a cork. Wine corks are essentially cylindrical plugs taken from the pliable bark of the cork oak tree, the bulk of which are grown in Portugal. Even though they may seem impractical at times, corks are actually very well suited to the
healthy long-term aging of wine. Corks are very elastic and once forced inside a bottle, form a tight (but not airtight) seal that keeps the wine from beingexposed to damaging levels of oxygen as well as discouraging opportunistic spoilage microorganisms. The corks also let in minute levels of oxygen, thought to actually help the aging process.
Again, in the realm of closures, there are some decisions to be made. Aside from natural corks, there are artificial corks, plastic corks and crown caps to be considered. Artificial corks are made of a silicon-type plastic, are cheap, colorful, and help save the fragile cork oak population
from further decimation. They are widely used in the commercial wine industry and seem to do just as good of a job as real corks. An extra bonus in using artificial corks comes into play if you use an ah-so (two-pronged wine opener) to crack in to your bottles. Artificial corks are harder to damage than real corks and can often be re-used once washed and sanitized.
Plastic corks and screw caps are almost exclusively used in sparkling wine making, though it is possible to bottle still wine in sparkling wine bottles and put a crown cap or plastic cork on, though the seal they form is completely air-tight. Crown caps are exactly the same as the metal caps one finds on bottles of beer — and plastic corks are those that are often found on bottles of cheap sparkling wine. Both are affordable, easy to use, and don’t require anything but brute force or a beer-bottle opener to crack into….but again, what you may make up for in convenience you lose in aesthetics. The only downside to not using real corks when you close your bottles of wine is that, well, for many people part of the wine-enjoying experience includes the traditional trappings. If you want to stick to tradition, it’s best to use real corks.
Capsules
If you’ve got a tightly corked bottle of wine, putting a capsule on over the neck of the bottle really isn’t necessary. Back in the days of questionable sanitation, dank cellars overrun with vermin and corks that often leaked, lead or tin capsules fitted over the top of the bottle provided an extra barrier of protection against marauding microbes, fungus, and molds. These days capsules are stuck on the bottlenecks because, like so much that has to do with wine, people expect it. If you want to continue the traditional look, that’s great! Winemaking supply stores and catalogs carry all sorts of capsules that come in many colors, materials, and lengths. Some are made of plastic, some of metal, and some of a combination of varying percentages of
both. They come in bagged stacks of 50 or so and are ready for you to slap on your bottle and seal with a little pressure or a little heat provided with the help of a hot towel or heating pad.
Again, tradition comes into play here and what you want your final package to look like will dictate the choice, if any, of capsule. The best wines in the world are always capsuled with a sleeve that carries a high percentage of metal, usually tin. Lead used to be the material of choice for capsules but since now we know the dangers of lead exposure, it is no longer used. Tin and other non-poisonous alloys make the best capsules on the market today and provide that oh-so-luxurious feel of breaking into a great bottle of wine. Plastic capsules, of course, are a lot cheaper — but so is their feel. If you have the need to capsule your wine and don’t want to spend a fortune but don’t want to have your wine come out looking like it should be on the liquor store clearance rack, it’s advisable to use a capsule that contains a middle-of-the-road metal to plastic ratio. Pick them in a color that suits your fancy, apply to your corked bottles, and you’re ready to go!
Labels
Besides the initial impression given by the shape of the bottle, many would argue that the most important component of any wine packaging scheme is the label. Not only can the label contain important information such as the winery name, varietal, vintage date, and geographical origin, it also can house what is seen in the wine industry as perhaps the most
crucial bit: the winery logo. Luckily, in today’s technology-rich world of computers and the internet, it is extraordinarily easy for home winemakers to make their own labels. It’s easy to download grape and wine-related graphics off of the Internet, insert a few words here and there with somegraphics/text integrating software, and print out adhesive labels that will
easily adhere to a finished wine bottle. Colors can be added by hand and color printers to make the job even easier.
If doing it yourself doesn’t satisfy your urge for a really slick-looking label, there are companies that will take your text and your home winery’s name or logo (if you have one) and integrate them into a professionally printed labels made to your specifications. If you don’t want to
deal with a paper label but still want to go for some look of authenticity, take a lesson from port-producers in Portugal. In the days when port was shipped across the ocean in the creaky, leaky boats of yore, Portuguese sailors found that paper labels would often be eaten away by the damp sea air. Instead of battling with Mother Nature, the port-producers would paint the crucial information on to the bottle with white indelible paint, a tradition still to be seen in evidence today if you walk down any supermarket wine aisle and check out the port selection.
Besides employing only the traditional trappings of bottles, corks, capsules, and labels, there are other ways to make each bottle of wine uniquely yours. One way that many home winemakers make their fine wines stand out is by employing humor, fun, and irreverence when it comes to dressing up the finished package. Some use crazily colored bottles, some none at all! Some of the best homemade wine I’ve ever had came from a homebrewer friend of mine
who “bottled” his wine in mason jars! No corks, capsules, or fancy bottles required. He made his own labels using his computer and even went so far as to make up his own bogus government warning label. Putting the finishing touches on your bottles of wine can be a fun way to get even more enjoyment out of showing off your finest. From traditional and customary to creative and wacky, “dressing up” your wine is just one more of the many rewarding steps involved in home winemaking.
