Post #4: Bottle Selection
Any business owner knows the number of decisions you make seem endless. When we started this business, we knew there would be many decisions we would need to make – what varietal should we choose? How much wine should we make? Little did we know how many decisions would need to be made on things like glass bottles and caps.
When I posted a story about the many hours we spent one night choosing bottles for our new Pinot Gris and Syrah, we received some feedback that many people had no idea this was so detailed. You know what? Us either.
Choosing Bottles
There are a lot of options to choose from out there. Here’s just a few of the questions we found ourselves asking:
What color do we want?
What shape should it be?
How much does the weight matter?
Will our label fit on it?
Color
There’s a few things we took into account with color selection. While a clear bottle allows you to see the wine, a dark bottle will provide UV protection. After much consideration we choose green for all of our bottles. But did you know there are many different shades of green? In the end we chose Antique Green, which is a darker shade of green.
Shape
Bottles come in many different shapes, and some will be familiar shapes you have seen before. We decided to bottle our wine in traditional bottle shapes.
Our Riesling is bottled in a Hock bottle which is most often associated with Riesling and Gewurztraminer. Our red blend Crossroads is bottled in a Bordeaux bottle which is common for wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc. Our Pinot Gris and Syrah are bottled in a Burgundy bottle which is popular for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
The Pinot Gris is the bottle we debated the most, you can find Pinot Gris bottled in a variety of different bottles, so this choice came down to our personal preference.
Weight
At one point we were debating two very similar bottles and the main difference was weight. Would people think that the wine in a heavier bottle was a better product? We weren’t entirely sure, but we did know that a heavier bottle would mean additional shipping costs and higher glass costs.
Labels
One of the most important considerations for us was to ensure our label would fit on the bottle, as we didn’t want to change the size of the label. Each bottle gives the height available for label placement before the bottle starts to curve up towards the neck, so this helped us narrow down our options.
Takeaways
We really had no idea how many decisions we would have to make when we began following our dream of starting a wine label. When you buy a bottle of wine, you might not know that each wine owner has taken so much time in choosing the bottle, the weight, the colour of the glass. Who knew that one bottle had so many decisions behind it?