Bottle Heft- Do you care?

WINE TALK
21

A friend opened a bottle of Kinsella Cabernet Sauvignon last week. The bottle is one of the more unique and certainly among the heaviest I’ve ever picked up. Didn’t sway me one way or the other as to the quality of the wine.

However, if I’m at a charity event and there is a blind wine pull that I get to select the bottle and have a chance to pick them up. I always go with the heavier bottle.

22

I assume that some use the thicker bottles to help reduce temperature variation?

23

Personally I hate heavy bottles. As others have noted the marketing works for some people.

24

Great call!

I’m also at the point where I will start boycotting wine that won’t rack easily - they know who they are. [swearing.gif]

25

Another one here.

26

I care and I while I merely dislike heavy bottles, I hate oversized bottles that don’t fit in my racks. There are a lot of bottles that look classy and expensive but that are still fairly light. For examples among current wines, I think EMH’s silkscreened bottles look great. For bottles with labels, I like Calluna’s. I find that the look of the label gives me more of an impression of quality than does the shape or heft of the glass.

27

I’d say the normal person sees a thicker heavier bottle as a sign of quality. I cannot tell you how many times waiters and/or somms have commented about how a bottle of Carter cab must be really good based on the weight of the bottle while knowing literally nothing else about the wine. For me - lighter works for storage purposes though.

28

I’m in agreement with the collective wisdom here. Lighter glass, standard size please. I don’t care about the color.

But - who is the market? If it’s mostly a mailing list, go cheaper!

29

As a long time collector, as are many above, we see it as a cheap gimmick. If you’re actually storing and aging these things, it gets old real fast. Collectors might be forgiving for a few labels that they feel they must have, but that means you’re competing for a small finite portion of those collectors’ cellars. We’ve had these discussions before. It’s clear some collectors stop buying from certain producers solely because they’ve run out of capacity for those over-sized bottles.

As someone who does a lot of bottling, those larger bottles are brutal on the crews. I suggested to one winemaker he charge a $20/case premium for the over-sized bottles a couple of his clients insist on using to compensate the crew for the extra work. “Yeah, I should.” He’s at that point. It’s gotten old. It’s harder to recruit workers for heavy bottle days. Those are about 10 lbs. heavier. If you go the full 17.5 lbs heavier, you should pay at least double that. (In the same way, a couple of the local mobile bottlers have upgraded to faster lines. The winemakers responded by paying a much higher wage, so the labor cost per case is closer to what i had been.)

30

+55 on light standard size bdx and burg bottles. Not having stuff fit into racks and wreck your back every time you move is a nightmare. I really dgaf if stuff’s in fancy glass, I’m after the juice. Spend less on glass and more on label design if you really must drop coin on packaging. I am super picky about labels for some reason but I couldn’t care less if it was packaged in the dumpiest glass imaginable.

31

Not a fan of heavy or odd shaped bottles. Like so many others, I care what is in the bottle and not really about the bottle. The bottle needs to serve its purpose obviously.

32

I hate big/hefty/unwieldy bottles so much. I say let the wine speak for itself… and please don’t make me shoehorn bottles into my cellar with a hydraulic press.

33

I like this point- so often worker protection is overlooked in the big scheme of things. I hated it when I would get off the tractor after spraying fungicide all night and the owner would ask if it was safe for his dog to walk out there!

34

I like this angle too- makes sense the extra weight is added thermal mass.

35

Plus, heavier bottles throw better.

36

That is an interesting thought, though I’ve never ever ever heard it used as a justification for larger bottles. And I’m not sure how true that truly is . . .

37

This is the reason I quit buying Pax years ago, as the heavy bottles to me were stupid. Pax made great wine, he didn’t need heavy glass to validate what was under the glass. However, I get the intent behind it, as while the 1% geek crowd around these parts doesn’t care, the 99% who don’t post here do have an emotional connection and perception to the weight of the glass being equated with prestige/quality.

As for me, I have none of these heavy bottle=better stuff producers in my own cellar. Mostly in part because I don’t play in that space. In my view, it makes sense to house Champagne in these heavier bottles but for California still wine…for me, nah.

38

You can get the 540g glass in colors outside of Champagne Green.

If you are partial to lighter glass, go with lighter glass. [cheers.gif]

39

heavy glass = silliness…
give me everything in base bdx bottles… or base burg bottles…tho i really prefer base bdx.

40

Heat capacity of glass is about 20% of water. A bordeaux bottle weighs about 3lbs, the wine inside about 1.6lbs. So if you’re adding, e.g., 30% more in glass, you’ve increased the effective thermal mass by about 8%.

But frankly I doubt that any producer has ever considered this aspect when choosing a bottle.