The Boutique Wine Lover's Wine Reviews and Wine Related Stories

There is a bit of a trap with using the same bottle packaging systems that work wonderfully with cork sealed wines for packaging wines sealed with screw caps.

The problem lies in the very thin aluminium seal that the screw caps provide. It only takes a very small blow to the top of a bottle and the a screw cap can be pierced (it is cut by the relatively sharp edge of the bottle - and dropping one carton onto another from a height of only 5 cm can produce this result). This will result in a lost bottle and leakage of the contents over the remaining bottles. It only takes one.

From our records it appears that most of the damaged shipments come from Australia Post deliveries so I suspect that the cartons are still being handled as if they are cork sealed bottles. I'm not sure why. That's just the way it is. Nothing wrong here, it will just take a little time for this to filter into the transport industry in general: screw caped wines are slightly more susceptible to damage than cork sealed wines.

What we have found is that a thin piece of E flute Single Walled corrugated or even a piece of E Flute single face board (a sheet of cardboard) over the top of the shipper (the carton) will significantly reduce this kind of loss from occurring. It provides just that extra bit of padding, and so protection, for the tops of the bottles. These sheets cost only a few cents each. Just something to keep in mind for the future.

Let's have this as an open discussion. Wineries, what are your experiences with wine bottle delivery? What kind of system do you suggest? Customers, what is your view? The wine industry is big in Australia, should the delivery company more adapt to it?

When ... it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn - Harriet Beecher Stowe