fine wine It’s okey, fruit-forward, and even chewy. But recent vintage wines have a logistical nightmare bouquet due to the brutal convergence of natural and man-made crises. And a metal capsule that wraps around the top of the bottle.
Winemaking is a delicate agricultural ballet embedded in a delicate logistical ballet, and both ballets are off the script at the same time. “It’s the perfect storm,” says UK-based wine importer Daniel Lambert. “Most people don’t think about the raw materials involved in making wine. Obviously, you got the grapes—everybody gets a bit of it. We forget that there is.” All these prices are rising rapidly, leading to higher wine prices.
For example, a bottle of rosé might look like a simple vessel for transferring fermented grape juice into a glass. But presentation is important. People want to see a nice pink color through clear glass. For red wine, the color of the bottle is less of an issue. It looks fine in a dark green container. But making clear glass could cost him twice as much, Lambert says. This is because it requires more refinement, requires more energy, and requires more funding. Due to high energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is now very expensive for European manufacturers.
Which bottles a winemaker can choose also depends on legal regulations and physical parameters. Sparkling wines like champagne require thicker and therefore more expensive glasses to hold the liquid under pressure. Also, some geographic regions mandate the use of certain types of bottles for certain types of wine, so producers cannot simply switch to cheaper alternatives.
In winemaking, timing is everything. Unlike beer makers who can brew year-round, vineyards complete one harvest a year, so operators have to plan bottle shipments ahead of time.I’m running out of glass and now I need to make a plan way ahead. said Jon Ruel, CEO of Trefethen Family Vineyards in Napa, California. “Something like a glass, before he was 6-8 months, now he’s 12-18 months. We haven’t picked the grapes yet. We don’t know how much wine we have.” No, but you have to decide how much you need.”
The market for corks that go into those bottles is also a mess. The cork tree is a type of oak native to the Mediterranean, harvested by carefully peeling off the very thick bark without cutting the bark. This process is repeated every nine years as the bark grows. In Portugal, which accounts for his third of the world’s cork forest area, the bark is processed into wine stoppers and shipped abroad. A company like Cork Supply USA then prints the winery’s branding and coats the surface.
That company’s vice president of products, Greg Herson, says there’s no shortage of cork right now, but climate change makes supply less predictable. It makes it impossible to strip the bark without damaging some tissue or killing the plant. Hirson says.
