Tag Archives: wine packaging

Five nights drinking wine from something besides a bottle

man drinking from box wine
“Dinner? Who drinks boxed wine at dinner?”

The results were uneven, and helps explain why the glass bottle still dominates packaging

We’ve discussed alternative packaging on the blog for years, so what better way to see where wine is with something other than glass bottles than to drink wine packaged in something else?

That’s what the Wine Curmudgeon did last week – five nights drinking wine at dinner from a variety of “premium” 3-liter boxes (so no Franzia) and 250-ml cans. Why dinner? Because that remains the occasion where most wine is consumed.

Sadly, the results were uneven, and reminded me why the glass bottle – despite all its flaws – still dominates wine packaging.

My thoughts after five nights with something other than glass bottles:

• Convenience. Boxes and cans don’t do well at dinner. How do you keep track of how much wine you’ve had when it comes from a box? In addition, wrestling the spout into its holder remains a challenge, as does pouring the wine into a glass. And where do you put the box when you’re eating dinner? It needs to sit on a counter, to make pouring easier, so you have to get up every time you want another glass. And finding space in a normal-sized refrigerator for chilling the box? Good luck. Cans aren’t as awkward, but opening another can after the first is empty – and disposing of the empties – remains an inconvenience.

• Quality. Uneven, which was really depressing. Most of the canned wine tasted like it should, though some had a noxious, sour aroma when first opened (which I’m told isn’t unusual). The box quality, sadly, was all over the place. One rose was undrinkable, tannic and bitter. One red blend was OK, but nothing more. In this, boxed wine consistency hasn’t improved much over the years – decent one year, not so decent the next.

• Price. Again, uneven. The point of 3-liter boxes is price, and most figure out to $6 to $8 a bottle. Hence, the theory is we’ll put up with crappier wine since it costs less. But, as my experience with the rose proved, that’s not always the case. Just the opposite is true with cans – prices are higher because we’re paying for the convenience. For dinner, though, that means a $10 bottle of wine costs $15. And what’s the point of that?

Can an eight-pack of tiny bottles save the wine business from itself?

wine packaging
Imagine an eight-pack — and watch the young people buy with joy.

Will younger consumers appreciate eight bottles of single-serve wine?

Imagine this: a 20-something, arriving for a dinner party, puts an eight-pack of wine on the table, each a single serve bottle.

Are we on the way to solving wine’s generation gap?

Maybe, says analyst Jon Moramarco, speaking at an industry webinar earlier this month. Moramarco is one of the most respected analysts in the wine business, the editor of the Gomberg Fredrikson Report, which tracks wine sales, and managing partner of the market research firm bw166.

His suggestion: The eight-pack of 125 ml bottles, which would include red, white, rose, and sweet blends. The wines would be lower in alcohol and the pack would cost around $15. In addition, he said, the product should be marketed toward younger women, with packaging designed to reach that demographic.

Pretty spiffy, yes?

The concept, of course, is not new, as the picture at the top of the post shows. Wineries have been selling multi-packs in smaller bottles for years. What’s different about Moramarco’s proposal is the size – 125 ml is smaller than the traditional 187 ml multi-pack bottle — and the contents, four different wines instead of just the one.

Which makes his idea about as revolutionary as these things get these days.

So what’s wrong with it (since I am the WC, and must point that out)?

• How do we guarantee wine quality? Typically, single-serve bottles are made to hit price points and not to taste like wine (as anyone who has ever suffered through an airline bottle knows).

• Manufacturing. A 125 ml bottle is not a standard size, which raises all sorts of supply chain and bottling questions. Plus, I can just hear the moaning from winery executives: “We can’t put different wines in the same pack – we’ve never done that before!”

• Retailers. As noted here many times, most wine is sold in 750 ml bottles; hence, most stores aren’t set up to sell something that isn’t in a 750 ml bottle. Any retailer willing to take this project on would have to be willing to rearrange shelving and adjust displays – not an easy task.

Still, don’t let it be said that the WC is standing in the way of progress. This is the first idea that I’ve heard in years that doesn’t make me worry about the future of the wine business. So let me do my part: how about calling it, “I’ll bring the wine”?

The ZIPZ failure and why it matters to wine drinkers

fetzer zipzNo, single-serve plastic glasses of wine did not “disrupt” wine

Remember ZIPZ? It was the next big thing in wine, an oversized plastic glass with one serving that was endorsed by the masters of the universe at Shark Tank about a decade ago.

Don’t remember it? Not to worry. Almost no one else does, either.

Mashed recounts ZIPZ’s sad, not unsurprising history, and it’s well worth reading for those of us who wonder – and lament – that wine has had such difficulty adapting to the 21st century. The ZIPZ glass, for all of its many failings, was a unique way to package wine – call it “disruptive,” if you must.

Yet it never had a chance, and that it didn’t speaks to how the wine business resists change, even when change is exactly what is needed.

Why not a chance?

• First, the wine was lousy. That it would be difficult to find quality wine to put in a plastic, single-serve glass apparently surprised ZIPZ’s creator, who probably had never seen anything quite like the bulk wine market.

• Second, the three-tier system. You just can’t make ZIPZ wine and sell it to Costco, which seemed to be the plan. Rather, it has to go through a wholesaler, and why would a wholesaler want to waste its time on something as funky as lousy single-serve wine in a plastic glass? And where the margins would be so tiny?

•Third, retailers. Most wine in the U.S. is sold in 750 ml bottles, which means store shelves are set up to stock 750 ml bottles. So where do you stack cases of single-serve plastic glasses? This nugget somehow escaped the moneyed geniuses at Shark Tank; call it a lesson in the supply chain they would eventually have to learn.

The irony of all this? That canned wine does all the things that ZIPZ was supposed to do, and does it more efficiently. And that canned wine, for all of its many failings, is the next big thing in wine. Wonder why none of the geniuses saw that?

Winebits 729: Wine bottles, Eyrie Vineyards, robots

Label lawsuits
Yes, lighter is better.

This week’s wine news: Bogle will use lighter glass bottles, plus a tour of the legendary Eyrie Vineyards and robots among the grapes

• Lighter bottles: Bogle, the one-time champion of quality supermarket wine, will reduce its bottle weight by 10 percent, starting next year. Bogle’s bottles were always a bit heavy, given the price of the wine, so it’s good news that it’s cutting down on their weight. Wine Business reports that the change will take place in phases, with the first lighter bottles coming to its being featured in Bogle’s chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, Essential Red, pinot noir, and merlot. Now, if the company would only stop sweetening the sauvignon blanc. …

• Touring Eyrie: Oregon’s Eyrie Vineyards is one of the great treasures of American wine, and Austin Beeman shows us why in this video, “Walking the Original Vines.” Eyrie’s Jason Lett takes Beeman on a tour of where his father David planted the winery’s first vines and helped change the way we made wine in this country. If you get frustrated and overwhelmed with the way wine is going these days, do what I do — drink a bottle of Eyrie wine. It reminds me what wine can be.

• Winery robots: Because, of course, who doesn’t like robots? Traxx will come in two types — to till vineyards and to spray them. It’s unique because it’s what called high-clearance, that it is taller than the vines. It will undergo field trials in France next year. No word on whether or when it will be available in the U.S.

Winebits 570: Box wine, wine drinkers, restaurant trends

box wine

This week’s wine news: Why isn’t box wine more popular? Plus, identifying U.S. wine drinkers and restaurant wine trends for 2019

• No boxes, please: Box wine, despite its increasing popularity, remains a minor part of the wine business. It accounts for just four percent of wine sold worldwide by volume; box sales have declined in Australia, one of the few places where it’s popular; and younger wine drinkers prefer bottles to boxes. One expert thinks he knows why: The technology was developed for battery acid, and producers treated the wine they put in boxes much the same way, using it for lower quality products.

• Parsing the wine drinker: A study has divided U.S. wine drinkers into six groups in one of those exercises that only marketing types can understand. The study uses terms like social newbies and premium brand suburbans to divide us by age and demographics. As near as I can tell, the idea is that younger wine drinkers are more adventurous and older wine drinkers buy the same brands of chardonnay and white zinfandel over and over. Which, of course, isn’t all that new; perhaps it means something the marketing gurus in the audience?

• Restaurant wine trends: Of which there aren’t any in 2019, if this forecast from a restaurant consultancy is accurate. It lists 13 trends for next year, including higher prices, new spins on Asian food, and “motherless meat.” But it doesn’t say one thing about restaurant wine, which makes perfect sense given what we’ve seen of restaurant wine over the past couple of years. So don’t expect the conundrum that is restaurant wine — higher prices, mediocre quality — to be solved anytime soon.

New and easier to use motor oil containers, but same old wine bottles

wine bottles
Something’s wrong here — not a cork or punt in sight.

Even the conservative and old-fashioned motor oil business realizes packaging matters. So why doesn’t the wine business?

Does this quote sound familiar?

“We are far more conservative in the marketing of our products. We are almost apologetic. While other industries focus on creating products that are distinctly different and stand out from the crowd, we do the exact opposite.”

No, it’s not the wine business, which considers screwcaps the spawn of the devil and still thinks chateau wine labels are a big deal. It’s the motor oil business, as described by a long-time senior official at Valvoline.

So when Valvoline comes out with a truly innovative product – a five-quart, easy-open, easy pour, ergonomic motor oil bottle, what does that say about the wine business and its outdated and ridiculously stubborn reliance on the 750-ml bottle and its cork closure?

Not much. Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

The genesis for this post came after talking to a friend about wine packaging. He described a trade show seminar where a packaging consultant told the audience that the dizzying array of wine bottles – their shapes, sizes, and closures – were expensive, inefficient, and hurt sales and profits. He couldn’t help them until they decided to get serious about wine packaging.

And then I saw a TV ad for the new Valvoline bottle, and I literally shook my head in despair. Valvoline wanted a new container that would make changing oil easier and less messy, but that fit on store shelves the way the current container does. In other words, it saw a problem and wanted to fix it to sell more product.

By contrast, how many times has anyone in the wine business said opening a wine bottle should be easier? Hardly ever. And how many times has anyone said the wine business should spend money to solve that problem? Even less than hardly ever.

The solution to this exists, by the way. There is a wine equivalent of the new Valvoline bottle – plastic, or PET, bottles. They have a smaller carbon footprint and weigh up to eight times less than glass, are almost unbreakable, use screwcaps, and fit on a shelf like a glass bottle. There was a push to use PET for wine about a decade ago, and you’ll see PET beer bottles, but the wine initiative never got anywhere. Is anyone surprised?

More about wine packaging:
• It’s not the quality of the wine — it’s the sound of the cork popping
• Will canned wine solve all of the wine business’ problems?
• Four wine myths that confuse consumers

The future of wine packaging

wine packagingCan the idea that canned wine is the next big thing in wine packaging

People who are supposed to know these things insist that wine packaging is about to undergo a revolution – specifically, that canned wine is the next big thing and will sooner rather than later compete with bottles as the package of choice.

In this, they are wrong. Wine packaging has remained the same for centuries – a bottle with a cork – and there is absolutely no reason to believe that canned wine’s future is any different than screwcaps or boxes. It will occupy a niche, and lots of people will like it. But most of us won’t even notice it. The wine business in the U.S. has spent almost 100 years teaching us that we have to buy wine in a 750 ml bottle with a cork, and you don’t undo that overnight.

Or, as one of the more clear-sighted analysts wrote: “In most countries, that packaging (whether it’s a $5 or $5,000 wine) is going to be a glass bottle, even though any number of containers can be used.”

So why the enthusiasm for canned wine? First, because it has grown exponentially over the past couple of years, up 125 percent in the year through the middle of 2016. Second, it’s something that should appeal to the two generations of wine drinkers younger than the Baby Boomers, who grew up on canned soft drinks and juice boxes and who aren’t supposed to be as fussy about bottles as the rest of us. Third, because the people who do trend analysis wouldn’t have anything to write about if they didn’t find a trend, and it isn’t easy to find trends in an industry as old-fashioned as wine.

In fact, here’s what the prognosticators don’t tell you about canned wine:

• “After years of packaging innovations, the traditional 750 ml wine bottle is more important to the domestic wine industry than ever.” The number of 750ml bottles sold increased 41 percent from 2010 to 2014, which is the same period that overall wine sales in the U.S., as measured by bottles sold, was up just 11 percent. This is premiumization’s work; who is going to pay $25 for a bottle of wine in can or box? Meanwhile, sales have fallen dramatically for the very cheapest wines, which lend themselves best to cans.

• That 125 percent growth was from a very tiny base. All told, canned wine accounted for $6.4 million in a $55 billion business, or about one-tenth of one percent.

• Retailers don’t like canned wine. Store shelves are designed to sell 750 ml bottles, and canned wine doesn’t fit on the shelves. That’s what happened to boxed wine, which was supposed to be the next big thing a decade ago. Retailers could never figure out how to display it, and so they shoved it to the back of the store.

• Canned wine hasn’t solved the value/price problem. Much of it is more expensive than bottled wine, since we’re paying for convenience. But the quality of the wine usually isn’t worth the added cost. Much of the canned wine I’ve tasted was junk that would cost $4 or $5 for a 25-ounce bottle, not $5 for a 12-ounce can. Compare this to boxed wine, which has improved in quality and does offer value – and still remains a small part of the market, about three percent.

In the end, know that screw caps, which offer as much convenience as a can without any added cost to the consumer, have been around for decades. And they still account for just 20 percent of the market. How are cans going to do better than that?

Image courtesy of Whitney Anderson, using a Creative Commons license