Garage WInemaker Blog

How to Lower Your Carbon Footprint While Drinking Wine

by The Garage Winemaker Team on 12/24/11

As we wind up the year, we start thinking about our goals for 2012. One goal that stays on top of mind is how we can reduce energy usage and trim our carbon footprint. It may not surprise you that about 70% of the energy used and CO2 created in winemaking comes from the production and shipping of the glass bottle, and about 10% from the cardboard packaging. What's more, the EPA estimates that only 20% of wine bottles are recycled.

Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse

Here are a few easy things we can all do to lessen energy consumption and reduce our carbon footprint. First, when you are buying wine, choose a bottle that is lighter in weight. Many wineries use heavy-weight bottles, in the hope that it sends a message to the consumer that the wine is higher quality than a lighter weight bottle. The truth is that the heavier bottle costs the winery more to buy, store, and ship. That extra cost gets passed on to you. Hopefully, as people become more aware of the higher energy cost of heavier glass, it will become a disincentive to buy that wine.

Of course we all have favorite wines, and will buy them regardless of the the bottle weight. But if your favorites are in a heavy-weight bottle, email the winery and ask them why they aren't using lighter weight glass. It's a win-win. Lower cost for the winery and better for the environment.

Recycling wine bottles offers a huge opportunity to reduce energy consumption, as only 20% are recycled today. It would seem to be a no-brainer to move this to 50% or more, and that would make a huge difference. Please help encourage others to recycle.

For many home vintners, the ultimate recycling of wine bottles is to reuse them in your next bottling. We've been reusing wine bottles for the past 3 years for our home wine, usually about 50 cases worth per year. We soak the bottle for a day or two in water mixed with a some potassium metabisulfite, scrape the label off with a putty knife, remove any stubborn label adhesive with a scrub sponge, clean the inside with a bottle brush spun with a cordless drill, rinse and put upside-down to drain dry.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

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Why You Should Steer Clear of Clever Wine Labels

by The Garage Winemaker Team on 06/13/11

With wine consumption increasing and more of the younger generations buying wine, the label is more important than ever. Matt Latkiewicz is the first guy I've seen who has charted the seven major label groupings, from the French to the Clever, to the A-Hole. He then tasted the wines within those groupings to see if there was any correlation. The winners, from his totally unscientific yet believable analysis, seem to be French and some of the graphic arts style labels, with the Clever and the A-Hole (of course) being the losers.

It's another reminder to pay attention to your label design. The label is the first thing a person sees, and creates an expectation and bias as to the quality of the wine.

Click here to check out his humourous article with sample pictures of all the categories, sub-categories, and the label map. It's a great read!

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Weakening Dollar is Bad News and Good?

by The Garage Winemaker Team on 05/06/11

As the Fed has continued to inject more money into the economy, and kept interest rates basically at zero (for the banks anyway!), the dollar has continued to weaken across major currencies. For the winemaker, this means higher costs for the items we buy from abroad. As the dollar/euro rate has gone from about $1.20 to $1.45 in the past year, higher prices are showing up in the supply chain for stainless steel bins from Germany, crushers from Italy, corks from Portugal, etc. At least our grapes come from here!

Many companies have tried to absorb higher gas and goods costs in the hope that customer demand will increase, but margins are getting too tight. Prices are going up, which raises the fear of igniting inflation. Bernanke recently said in his press conference that the Fed will do whatever is necessary to fight inflation, but raising interest rates and contracting the money supply could choke off whatever moderate growth we have going for us.

So where's the good news is all this? A cheaper dollar will increase demand for US goods, probably not for winemakers, but it should help the overall economy. That in turn will help the wine economy.

By the way, this week Garage Winemaker got the news that our cork prices will be going up starting July 1. We operate on tight margins, so we have little choice but to also raise our prices. If you can plan now for this year's bottling needs, take advantage of our current pricing and buy your corks now. And enjoy a bottle of your favorite wine tonight. It will make you feel better.

Cheers!

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Do Naked Women on Wine Labels Appeal to Buyers?

by The Garage Winemaker Team on 12/08/10

Did I get your attention with that title? Guess what? It gets your attention when you see it on the bottle too. What's more, scantily clad or naked women on the label appeal to both men and women. Paula Sugarman, a wine label designer, learned alot when she was given the grand tour of the wine section of Haggen's Market in Bellingham WA. She learned that labels with that look of old fashioned simplicity also strike a chord with buyers, and French-looking labels with curlicues are the most often purchased type of label for dinner parties.

There are so many new wines on the shelf, the first impression about the taste of what's inside the bottle is the label. Simple thought, but how often we forget. For many Garage Winemakers the passion goes into making the wine, and the label design becomes just something that needs to be done, usually at the last minute, before bottling. If you pay attention to your label, your wine instantly gets better. The first impression that others have of your wine will improve.

If you have the money, hire a graphics artist who has designed labels. A less costly route is you may know of someone who is creative and does graphic design as part of their job. If not, there is probably an art school near you with lots of starving students who are full of great ideas. Once you find your designer and agree on a price (or barter some of your wine), they can create a digital design that can be printed on self-adhesive labels with a color laser printer (yours or Kinkos). Don't use inkjet because the label will smudge at the slightest sign of moisture. Next, enjoy your wine!

To read more of Paula Sugarman's article on labels, here's the link.

http://winelabelsthatwork.com/?p=1249

If you would like to have Paula design a wine label for you, please go to her site at www.sugarmandesigngroup.com

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A Fantastic Wine Cellar Application

by The Garage Winemaker Team on 11/28/10

Looking for a great program to track your wine cellar? We highly recommend Cellar Tracker, at www.cellartracker.com. It offers inventory management, tasting notes of over 120k users, integration of professional reviews, pricing, and now FB and Twitter integration. There are over 21 million bottles currently being tracked. My fav is the drinkability report that tells me which bottles I need to drink, as they are coming to the end of their aging window. The one report that I never look at is the consumption history!

CellarTracker! was built by Eric LeVine (send email), a wine geek and fanatic with more than twelve years of former software development experience at Microsoft. He's created a fabulous offering, and is free for the basic features. A volunteer payment is recommended and enables some extra features, such as current market pricing for your wine cellar. The payment also helps defray operating costs of the site.

There's an interesting link on the page now showing what all the members drank last Thanksgiving. Of the nearly 7,000 total bottles consumed by CellarTracker members, the top 5 were Turley, Ridge, Beringer, Abeja, and Robert Biale.

Take a look. Once you start using it, you'll love it!

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