Designer Bottles for That Special Vintage Are Coming Back Into Vogue

When you buy a Mercedes-Benz, the window sticker doesn’t have a line telling you that you’re paying $4,000 for the styling. The price for the design is assumed to be part of the base price of the car.

When you buy a bottle of a special wine, one thing you’re paying for in the base price is the packaging, which includes the design of the label, the color of the bottle and the capsule.

However, bottles in recent years have all been about the same. Some have a little indentation at the bottom (called the punt), others have a flat bottom. Otherwise there’s been nothing special.

Now Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars has decided to use an embossed bottle for its two top Cabernet Sauvignons.

On Aug. 1, when the winery releases its 1985 Stag’s Leap Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, you will see embedded in the glass an emblem of a stag surrounded by a laurel wreath. It will be on the shoulder of the bottle, just below the bend.

Owner Warren Winiarski said the costly project “is our way of showing our commitment to quality. We need to maintain a distinctiveness for our package, and we felt this was one way to do it.�

Sign of Quality

Stag’s Leap isn’t the first California winery to use an embossed bottle, but it is a way to spruce up an already glossy image with a marketing touch that isn’t widely used. But after the Stag’s Leap project is on the shelf, others are sure to follow, especially when it’s a top-quality product that commands a top price.

Call them designer bottles.

Embossing the glass requires a special mold, into which molten glass is blown. One classic example of this is seen on bottles of the rare Salon Champagne, one of the finest Champagnes made in the world and one that is released only in vintage years.

Now on the market is the 1979 Salon, a handsome wine that has been aging on its own yeast since ’79. The wine, all Chardonnay from the tiny Le Mesnil vineyard, is a marvel of complexity and sprightly, lean delicacy.

At $100 a bottle it’s not inexpensive, but in addition to the superb Champagne you get absolutely classic packaging--clear label, proprietary-shaped bottle and embossed “Salon� seal in the neck. Sort of like the Mercedes-Benz emblem on the hood.

Similarly, the new Stag’s Leap package design is striking. It will be used only on Winiarski’s top Cabernets, one from the Stag’s Leap Vineyard (designated SLV) and one from the small-production “Cask 23� wine.

Not only will there be an embossed stag in the glass, but the label has been slightly redesigned to place the name of the winery squarely in the middle, and with its cut-corner label, the package now looks quite classic indeed. Alcoa Packaging of Emeryville has handled the Stag’s Leap project, supplying the bottles.

Hanzell Winery in Sonoma County, the tiny (3,000 cases) winery specializing in Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, has used its crest embedded in the glass for many years, though it discontinued using it for about four years earlier this decade when wine maker Bob Sessions found out he was out of them.

“We originally had to buy eight years worth of bottles, and we thought we had an eternal playground of bottles, but then we ran out,� said Sessions.

At the time, the supplier of the bottle was Owens-Illinois, and Sessions said it was a busy time for all glass companies and “(Owens-Illinois) wouldn’t talk to us for less than 100,000 cases. Well, in our case, that would have been about 50 years worth of bottles.

“So I spent a couple of years looking around for companies that would do molds in glass. I went to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Italy and then one day I got a flyer from Demptos Glass (of France). They said they would do 2,500 cases.� Price of the mold was about $15,000, and Demptos “duplicated our bottle shape and color.� Hanzell now uses a unique brown/green color called Antique for its Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The winery resumed the embossed bottle in 1982.

Sprucing Up Image

The embossed bottle also was an idea that Scott Harvey had as a way to improve the image of Amador County wines, and he proposed the idea to the Amador Vintners, a marketing group.

“My first thought was a special shaped bottle, but they wanted $60,000 for a special mold,� said Harvey, who is wine maker at Santino Wines in Amador.

Then he contacted Alcoa and found that for $17,000 he could get a mold for regular flat-bottom bottles in the traditional claret shape.

The design of the bottle includes the word “Amador� in raised type on the neck. The designer for the project was Rod Ruthel of Ruthel Graphics in nearby Jackson.

Amador Vintners had to agree to buy 200,000 bottles to get the cost down, but since there were a dozen wineries seeking to use the bottle, that was no problem, said Harvey. In fact, the cost for the embossed bottles through Alcoa was actually lower than plain bottles from some other bottle suppliers.

The irony is that Harvey has a need for an Amador impression in a taller hock (German Riesling-shaped) bottle, and because no one else uses that shape in Amador, “by going for the claret shape, I was cutting our own throat. So we had to pay for another mold for our own wines.�

Wines that appear in the Amador bottle all go through a taste test done by a peer group panel. Harvey said such wines “must meet a quality standard to be in the Amador bottle.� First wines released in the Amador bottle were 1986 White Zinfandels.

Embossed glass bottles are not uncommon in France, where a number of properties use them. Notably, they are used on bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines. The embossed crossed keys are the symbol of St. Peter and use of the symbol reportedly had to be approved by the Vatican. (Chateauneuf-du-Pape literally means “new home of the Pope,� and it was the area in which the Avignon Popes lived in the 14th Century.)

Bottles of unique design and shape (some with embossing, some without) exist throughout the world. Many are done in Champagne for special cuvees. Bouchaine in Napa designed and used a special bottle shape for its Pinot Noir, but discontinued its use recently. And in Italy, a special bottle shape is used by producers in Piedmont, the so-called Albeisa bottle, which carries the marque deposee of the region.

Form of Protection

Darrell Corti of Corti Bros. in Sacramento, one of the most knowledgeable men in the world on wine lore, said the original intent of special bottles, especially those with embossing, was to prevent fraud.

He pointed out that from the 16th Century through 1953, it was common for French producers to ship wine to England in cask and have it bottled there. The fact that the producer was not in control of the wine at bottling made the whole experience dangerous, so many producers would supply unique bottles, and only enough bottles to accommodate the amount of wine shipped.

That would prevent “stretching� of the wine.

This led to the use by some houses of special bottles.

“Chateau Lafite had the tradition before 1900 of sending ‘sealed’ bottles along with the casks,� said Corti. (A sealed bottle is one with a seal in the glass.) He said the 1945 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild bottle has embossed in it the date, which he said was the last such use of an embossed bottle from Bordeaux. Other chateaux in France still use embossing in the glass with a house crest, but Corti said use of the vintage date in the glass has disappeared.

Moreover, many wealthy wine collectors in England often would buy special lots of wine in cask and have sealed bottles made for them. In the Corti Bros. Museum, he has a sealed bottle inscribed ASCR.

“That stands for All Saints Common Room and it was a special bottling of a special wine bought by Oxford for the student’s common room, which is a dining room. The bottle itself belonged to wine bottled by Oxford College for its own use.

“Very often, these bottles were re-used. Once it was empty, it was rinsed out and saved until the next wine came in. But then some people actually put dates on them, to prevent them from being used again.�

He said the rich often used sealed bottles designed with a family crest. “That was intended to impress the guests that you were wealthy enough to have your own bottle. And if you were really wealthy, you had your own bottle with vintage dates on the glass, meaning you used each bottle only once.�

A recent such commercial bottle was one by the Portuguese producer Dow, containing its 1977 vintage Port.

One way to do a sealed bottle is with a mold and a simple embossing, but Corti said another way is called the “blob mold,� and it is done by adding a blob of molten glass onto the not-yet-cooled bottle. And while the blob is still soft, a crest is pressed into it, leaving behind an impression.

He said use of the blob mold is considered more expensive these days and is rarely done, but older bottles with blob molds are rare and the target of bottle collectors.

“When people toss out old bottles that have been emptied, sometimes they’re discarding something almost as valuable as the wine was.�

Wine of the Week : 1987 Bonny Doon Muscat Canelli Vin de Glacier ($15/375 milliliters) -- This is expensive wine. It is worth trying. Wine maker Randall Grahm harvested grapes for it and then had them placed in a freezer. When crushed, the ice crystals separated from the juice and the only thing left was this elixir that is very sweet and amazingly rich. Kind of like a German Trockenbeerenauslese, this wine carries the unmistakeable aroma of spice from the grapes and excellent balance from high acidity. The winery also made other wines with the Vin de Glacier designation including a Grenache (amazingly fine pomegranate aroma) and Gewurztramimer (very good, but not as good as the Muscat or Grenache).