BUMP - see post 88. Most wine collectors I know hate large heavy bottles. In addition to racking problems, extra shipping costs and hernias, there’s the waste of natural resources and excess garbage. My son got me a new electronic kitchen scale and I weighed the four empty bottles I had lying around. All empty, dry, with capsules and corks removed. Here are my results. Weigh your bottles, post your results here, and maybe the Hall of Shame will convince some of the wineries to change their bottle choices.
2007 Ridge - 1 lb. 4.1 oz.
05 Brancaia - 1 lb. 2.7 oz.
07 Aubert - 1 lb. 14.6 oz.
08 Carlisle - 1 lb. 7.4 oz.
Jay, I applaude you for staying with this topic for the past few years. We’ll run up against the same oppostion, however, that same argument as to why this topic doesn’t matter. I do realize and appreciate the changes many have made over the years, such as Pax Mahle, Wes Hagen, Wells Guthrie (I drank a 2005 recently and that bottle was pretty damn heavy but the 2007s and on are gloriously light!). Didn’t Kosta Browne finally switch to lighter glass, as well?
Anyway, it’s great to talk footprint and impact, such as capsules, glass weight, label, etc. Keep it up, Mr Hack, as individual choices and decisions added together make for a meaningful impact.
I would participate, but I don’t have a scale that would work. What sort of household scale measures down to ounces? The only ones I can think of are owned by chemists and drug dealers.
“What sort of household scale measures down to ounces?”
A postal scale? We have a cheap kitchen scale to make meat and cheese plates for our wine bar and it goes to half ounces…
Worst offender we have ever sold was a Rosso Conero called Travé that came in a bottle that looked like an artillery shell, was over 2 feet high (with a four inch punt) and weighed more empty than two FULL bottles of cheap Pinot Grigio.
No postal scale, no meat scale. All I have is the thing that I step on each morning to make sure I’m not drinking too much wine, and that doesn’t register a wine bottle unless it’s in me.
So post the weight of a light bottle. I would be happy if everyone used Bordeaux bottles. If they can cut the size and packaging of CD jewel boxes in half, they can get rid of heavy bottles as well.
I don’t know what it is, but wasteful packaging has always annoyed me. Look at cereal boxes. If they were cubes instead of tall thin boxes, the amount of cardboard saved would be astronomical.
We pretty much use one bottle for everything we do. I don’t know what it weighs but it is neither the lightest nor the heaviest bottle (closer to the former for sure) and I think it is a good balance between being a very high quality vessel and over the top ornate. As an aside I can say that years ago when we worked with a bottling line that you physically had to put the bottles on and take them off the filler spouts and corker by hand we learned a lesson in quality/heavier bottles. We were sold some “high strength/low weight” glass. Did not want it but we were kind of pushed into it. Bottles were literally exploding in peoples’ hands every so often when they were corked/came off the corker. It was crazy. And dangerous. While this was, no doubt, just cheap glass it certainly pushed us to a different category of bottles. BTW, we ceased the use of capsules this vintage and no one seems to mind.
Linked below are a couple of scales you might consider. I’ve had a similar Soehnle scale for several years and I’m very happy with it. Note that these scales weigh in 1 gram (< 0.05 oz) increments, which is more precise than most inexpensive kitchen scales (it will also display results in pounds/ounces, if you prefer quaint). My Soehnle seems pretty accurate. When first I got it I compared it to a serious, recently calibrated, lab scale and they agreed (within expected rounding errors given the lower precision of the kitchen scale). I can’t vouch for these scales in the same way, but they are well-reviewed at Amazon (and probably use the same strain-gauge technology as the Soehnle) and if I were in the market today I’d give one of them a shot.
I only bought Pax for one year because the packaging was so over the top - massive oversize bottles, wax capsules,… I still have a few, and the bottles still piss me off because I have to store them away from all the more well-behaved bottles.
I recall Pax saying that the packaging was selected to differentiate the wine on the shelf, but I never saw any early-days Pax on a shelf anywhere…
My first foray into convincing wineries to use lighter bottles was a thread on e-Bob in which I pushed for a boycott of Pax. I spoke to Joe Donlan about it and refused to buy their wine until they changed their eco-unfriendly approach. A year later, they abandoned the aircraft carrier bottles. Cause and effect? Who knows. But behold the power of the BB. I think if we all actively coplain about large wasteful bottles at every turn, tell the producers we hate what they are doing, and vocally refuse to buy overweight bottles at wine stores, we can have an effect.
This is something I am also passionate about. A few years ago Seghesio switched their Sonoma Cty. Zin (the blue cap) to these huge thick bottles that weighed over 2 lbs. and I think 9 oz greater than the previous years bottle. I personally did not buy a lot of this wine (preferring the single vineyard wines at the time) but this is their largest bottling that is shipped and moved all over the US and would be sure to have a larger impact than 300 case bottlings. At the time, I contacted them about this and they were very polite and the story goes: 1) Weight was/is not as much of a concern to them as other factors, 2) They switched to a local bottle supplier (the source of the large heavy bottles) from an overseas outfit (which involved container shipping the empty bottles), 3) I was told that they felt it was important to use a local (I am not sure how local it actually is) supply of bottles because of the decreased travel impacts of the imported bottles.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting to hear this trade off.
I wish this thread would have come up a few hours earlier as it was just after our weekly recycling was taken away- with it was the heaviest bottle I’ve lifted, the Tikal Patriota from Argentina. Had to be at least two pounds, it was heavier than almost any sparkling bottle. Even numerous Cellartracker notes comment on it.
And I’ll add my +1 to preferring bottles lacking a capsule!
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I had the 08 but I’m sure it was the same bottle