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Having fun with wine packaging

Snob Hill Winery scores with a synthetic cork and its Le Snoot piggy graphics on labels. Don Sebastiani puts a screw cap in its wine name.

Pw 12123 Bskn Merlot

Many different packaging approaches are emerging for popular-priced, highly drinkable wines. Last year, two of the more engaging were from Snob Hill Winery and from Three Loose Screws, a unit of Don Sebastiani & Sons.

Snob Hill definitely takes a marketing approach. Parent company Access Beverage is located in Irvine, CA, far from Sonoma, where winemaker Bob Broman crafts the wines and bottles them at Taft Street Winery. While Broman handles grape buying, blending, and packaging, all the packaging decisions are made in Irvine, under the direction of Diane Svehlak and her marketing team.

β€œBasically, the whole branding and launch of Le Snoot was done in-house,” says Svehlak, president of Access Beverage. β€œWe did all the label graphics, from concept to finished art. The actual illustrations were done by a famous illustrator, so we bought the rights to them, along with the name β€˜Le Snoot’ and β€˜Snob Hill Winery.’ And never would I divulge the illustrator’s name.” Even the wine names are playful, like 2002 Le Snoot Cheeky Chardonnay.

The synthetic cork

What also sets the Snob Hill approach apart from others is the use of a black synthetic cork from Neocork.

β€œBefore we began our national launch earlier this year, we discovered that our distributors preferred the use of a synthetic cork closure,” Svehlak tells Packaging World. β€œThey prefer it because of numerous requests they get from mass retailers and also from on-premise accounts. It’s proven to be a very acceptable closure because it prevents cork from drying out. And with conventional cork, you have to sacrifice a certain percentage of bottles to cork taint. So it was really our distributorsβ€”and the marketplaceβ€”that drove us to use the synthetic cork.”

The 43-mm-long Neocork, says sales representative Craig Finetti, is made of low-density polyethylene that’s coextruded with a foam core and an outside layer in a critical thickness. β€œIt has to be more pliable and more resilient for the wide array of corker jaws in the wineries,” he says. β€œIt has a very smooth finish to give it a very good seal, whether on hand corkers or automatic equipment.”

The Neocork, Finetti says, is not recommended for wines that expect long-term, in-bottle aging. β€œWe recommend that our closures be used for wines that will be consumed within two to five years after bottling,” he says. β€œToday, we sort of joke that most wines are β€˜truck-aged’-aged only as long as it takes to get them to market. But it’s true in many cases. Most new-world white wines are meant to be drunk very young.”

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