Just found this silly little article on the BBC website. Well it is a warm Friday afternoon.

Something to amuse you when you are in the pub tonight!

How do you hold a glass?

How do you hold a glass?

‘Glass hold’ reveals personality Drinking types. Which type are you?

The way you hold your glass can reveal much more than you might realise, a psychologist has warned. Dr Glenn Wilson, a consultant psychologist, observed the body language of 500 drinkers and divided them into eight personality types. These were the flirt, the gossip, fun lover, wallflower, the ice-queen, the playboy, Jack-the-lad and browbeater. Dr Wilson, who carried out the work for the Walkabout bar chain, said glass hold “reflected the person you are”.

The types of drinker are:

THE FLIRT This is usually a woman, who holds her glass with dainty, splayed fingers and uses it in a provocative way. She may position it over her cleavage so as to draw attention to her attributes or peer over the rim to make eye contact when taking a sip – and she may “tease” the rim of the glass with her finger, perhaps dipping it into the drink and sucking it dry.

THE GOSSIP Again, usually a woman who clusters together with her friends. She may be talking about other people, and can be critical. She holds a wine glass by the bowl and uses it to gesticulate and make points in conversation. She is inclined to lean over her drink, in towards others so as to speak confidentially. This person already has a close-knit social group with little inclination to extend it, therefore advances from outsiders are not usually welcome.

THE FUN-LOVER This type of drinker could be a man or a woman. They tend to be sociable and convivial and “like a laugh”. They take short swigs from bottled drinks so they don’t miss out on chipping in with the conversation. The bottle is held loosely at its shoulder for ease. This type of person is always happy to extend their social circle. The best way to approach them therefore is to leap directly into light, good-humoured conversation and make them laugh.

THE WALLFLOWER Usually a shy, submissive person who holds the glass protectively, not letting go, as though afraid somebody will take it away. Palms are kept hidden and the glass is used as a social crutch – the drink is never quite finished, with a mouthful left in case of emergency. The drink is small – maybe half a pint of lager for a man.  It may be drunk through a straw, which is fidgeted with, and used to stir the drink between sips. The style and pace of drinking is an echo of those around them – very little is initiated. This individual needs to be approached in a gentle, sensitive way, with perhaps a few understated compliments to build self-confidence, but may eventually warm to overtures.

THE ICE-QUEEN This is a mainly female type whose natural style is cold and defensive. She drinks from a wine glass, or a short glass, which is held firmly in a barrier position across the body so as to deter intimate approaches. It is usually a waste of time approaching this woman; she may be ready with a castrating put-down.

THE PLAYBOY This man is active and self-confident; a “Don Juan”-type seducer. He uses his, usually long, glass or bottle as a phallic prop, playing with it suggestively. He is inclined to be possessive, and can be tactile with his female companions.

THE JACK-THE-LAD This “peacock” is conscious of his image and will drink a bottled beer, or cider. He is inclined to be confident and arrogant, and can be territorial in his gestures, spreading himself over as much space as possible, for example, pushing the glass well away from himself and leaning back in his chair. If he is drinking with friends, he would be unlikely to welcome approaches from outside the group, unless sycophantic and ego-enhancing.

THE BROWBEATER Again usually male, he prefers large glasses, or bottles, which he uses as symbolic weapons, firmly grasped, and gesticulating in a threatening, “in the face” kind of way. Something of a know-it-all, he can come across as slightly hostile, even if only through verbal argument, or jokes targeted at others. He should be approached with great care, or not at all.

Dr. Wilson said: “The simple act of holding a drink displays a lot more about us than we realise – or might want to divulge. “When you’re in a crowded bar, often all you have to go on is body language. “To a large extent, it’s an unconscious thing and just reflects the person you are and the type of social relationships you have.” But he warned: “The next time you’re in a bar, it might be worth thinking about what you’re saying to the people around you, just by the way you’re holding your glass.”

Pretty sure I don’t do any of those things, but I will be checking myslf later.

Posted by: winelabels | Sunday, 5 April 2009

Red Nose Day Wine Labels

Just had a good look at the Damien Hirst wine labels for Red Nose Day.  OK so I’m a bit behind.

Hirst is the well known enfant terrible of the British art world, famous for pickled shark and half a cow. He designed an exclusive label for two new wines to help raise money for Comic Relief.  It’s great that he’s letting his name be used to raise money for a good cause, there has been huge publicity because of it and sales certainly benefited.

The label design itself though is hardly inspirational, or even noteworthy. It is a red circle on an off-white background. If a wine label designer had put that forward, he’d have been laughed out the room. It would have been more interesting using one of this year’s red noses.

Hirsts red nose label

Hirst's red nose label

As a promotional label, it doesn’t grab you enough, there is no message, no impact, no memory hook. It certainly wouldn’t pass muster on one of our personalised wine labels!

Posted by: winelabels | Wednesday, 25 February 2009

Plastic wine bottles – the future?

I can hear you shrieking in horror at the very suggestion.  Surely that’s just for the most basic plonk you cry. Well no, its proper wine this time. And it may well spread as part of the wine industry’s drive to become more environmentally friendly.

Artisan Wine Company of British Columbia have launched 2 new wines in their painted turtle range using the latest PET bottles. The semilion/chardonnay and the cabernet/shiraz are in two different shaped bottles.

Plastic wine bottles - the way ahead?

Plastic wine bottles - the way ahead?

These full sized screw cap bottles weigh only a tenth of normal bottles, and reduce packaging requirements by about 85%. It also enables a pallet to be loaded with 20% more bottles. All of which adds up to a reduction in carbon footprint of a third.

The clever bit is a new interior coating of silicon oxide, called SIG Plasmax. This creates a long life barrier that stops the wine and the plastic interacting. So no plastic taint on the wine and no rotting of the bottle. And as it doesn’t degrade, the wine can be matured in the bottle in the cellar for an extended period, rather than just bottle and drink.

These new bottles are fully recyclable in the normal way with other PET products.

You may well still be thinking it will never happen, that plastic will never be taken seriously. Just remember that 10 years ago that’s what people were saying about screwcaps! I think that this will become the standard for everyday wines within 10 years.

Posted by: winelabels | Sunday, 8 February 2009

Bin Laden wine label a real blast.

You gotta love the Aussie sense of humour. They have just put picture of moslem fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden on a wine label!

Obviously if we had tried it here, there would have been a pc outburst and someone would have been forced to give a public apology.

Anyway a Tasmanian winery, called Morilla, has come up with this publicity stunt, apparently inspired by political graffiti from the streets of Hobart!

The black and white image is of Bin Laden and a couple of cronies, next to a graffiti message reading “all you need is love”. A piece of satire that apparently gone over the head of some American commentators.

As a label its not pretty, and I can’t see urban and gritty being a great way to sell much wine. But I’m sure the PR will help shift a few cases. And if they export to the US, I’m sure people will buy it just to smash the bottles.

The full story is here if you want more info The Mercury

Here are the 2 images of the label that they show.

Osama hitting the bottle

Osama hitting the bottle

Aussie Bin Laden

Aussie Bin Laden

Posted by: winelabels | Saturday, 24 January 2009

UK Tops Wine Imports Tables

The UK has topped the world wine imports tables according to the industry body Vinexpo, the French based international wine and spirits exhibition.

In their latest report imports topped 1.6bn bottles in 2007, overtaking the Germans, previously import leader by volume. The US still stands as the top wine importer by value. Both of which are major wine producers.
Wine from Australia proved to be most popular among British drinkers, ahead of imports from France and then the US.

British adults are likely to get through nearly 38 bottles a year on average, well short of the world’s most prolific wine drinkers – the French – who knock back 78 bottles each. Overall the UK still ranks only 13th in terms of world wine consumption.

Despite the increasing quantities of wine flowing into the UK, the economic downturn has had an effect.

Sales dropped by more than 3.5% in the first nine months of 2008, largely due to falling sales in pubs. And annual growth in the wine market is expected to halve to 6% by 2012, which is still a healthy figure.

Predictions are that consumption will rise slightly.
White wine will increase in popularity from an estimated 764 million bottles last year to 823 million by 2012 and rose sales are expected to rise by almost 50% to 220 million. We got through 720 million bottles of red in 2008 but this is expected to fall to 687 million by 2012.

World wine consumption is expected to rise as a whole to 33 billion bottles over the next three years.

Whisky sales down

Meanwhile our national spirit, Scotch, is continuing to lose out in the popularity stakes to the UK’s favourite spirit – vodka, the tipple of women and the young.

Vinexpo said sales of whisky dropped 11% between 2003 and 2007 and will continue falling.

In 2007, Britons bought 96 million bottles of vodka and that is predicted to rise by 20% in the next three years.

Posted by: winelabels | Saturday, 17 January 2009

harvest in France

The latest reports from France, reported by Décision Boissons, is that the 2008 French grape harvest in will be less than 43 million hectolitres.  If accurate, this would be the lowest harvest yield since since 1991.

The breakdown is likely to be: 21.4 million hectolitres of AOC wines:
12.2 million hectolitres of vins de pays; 2.3 million hectolitres of table wines; and 6.9 million hectolitres of wines for cognac and Armagnac production.

Its not just us that had a bad summer in 2008!

Posted by: winelabels | Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Civil partnership labels

Civil partnerships are a big thing nowadays, and far be it from us to ignore a large potential market!

So we would like to announce that  Civil partnership labels have now been added as a new category on Personalised Wine Labels.

We realised that our wedding label range is not entirely suitable for same sex ceremonies, so we have added a specific label set.

personalised champagne label for civil partnerships

personalised champagne label for civil partnerships

We now offer personalised labels for both wine and champagne for male + male and female + female couples, plus a few non gender specific.

Personalised wine labels for civil partnerships

Personalised wine labels for civil partnerships

Posted by: winelabels | Sunday, 4 January 2009

New year sale

Thought we’d celebrate nearing the first anniversary of personalised wine labels by having a new year sale. So for the next 10 days only there is 20% off Merlot with a personalised label from the website.

Personalised Champagne Congratulations Label

Personalised Champagne Congratulations Label

Posted by: winelabels | Friday, 19 September 2008

Personalised Wine Labels love corks

Just seen this on the BBC website, about the environmental benefits of cork. I’ve written on aspects of this before, see screwcaps are worse for the environment.

Urging vintners to put a cork in it

By Paul Henley
BBC News, Portugal

“It’s not just a tree we are trying to protect here. It is a whole environment,” says Antonio Ferreira, who has been a land owner and cork farmer in the Coruche district of Portugal for many years.

Stripping bark from Portugal's cork trees

Stripping the bark needs an expert touch

“The forest you see around you now has been like this for hundreds of years. It is meant to be this way”.

Antonio points to the cork oaks whose roots hold the soil together in Portugal’s increasingly extreme climate, where deluges can be followed by many weeks entirely without rain.

Not only is there none of the creeping desertification here which marks much of the southern Iberian peninsula these days, there is an abundance of life.

Between the oaks, wildflowers flourish, sustaining bees and honey production.

Some of the animal, bird and insect life is unique to the cork forest.

Mushrooms are harvested that sprout from the root fibres. Livestock like sheep and pigs feast on acorns in the autumn and in turn help fertilise the soil.

It being harvest day, these woods are buzzing with people and tractors.

It is exactly nine years since the trees were stripped of the bark that is the main source of income for landowners.

And the cork has grown back, several centimetres thick and ready for collecting.

What we are looking at here is the ultimate sustainable resource
Conceicao Silva
Forest engineer

Farmers do not risk letting anyone loose on these trees with a sharpened axe. The men putting carefully placed cuts in the bark, and peeling back people-sized chunks of outer tree trunk, have been doing this job for years.

“It’s like cutting cloth for dress-making”, says Mr Ferreira.

Conceicao Silva, who works as a forest engineer for the organisation overseeing environmental standards in the industry, adds: “Bring the axe down too hard on the branch and permanent damage could be done, which will rule out generations of future harvesting.

“If it’s properly managed, what we are looking at here is the ultimate sustainable resource.”

‘Sense of ceremony’

It will be more than a year before bits of these curved slabs of bark appear in wine bottles around the world.

They will have to be slowly dried out in the sun, boiled, graded, shaped and cut.

The best – single unadulterated chunks of natural cork – will be safeguarding the finest red wines as they mature for decades.

The shabbier parts will be chopped up into little pieces and re-shaped into an amalgam that might seal a bottle of beer or tile-cover a bathroom floor.

But cork only grows around the Mediterranean. Wine producers in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand long ago started to rebel against tradition by using plastic bottle-stoppers and metal screw-caps.

Many European wine-growers followed suit and, suddenly, cork no longer has the monopoly in what remains its vital market.

Two hours away from the harvest, in the streets of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, wine-drinkers are mostly unaware of the implications of their choice of bottle-stopper.

Fine wine at auction

Producers say fine wines need cork to allow small amounts of oxygen in

A clear majority of those I talk to come down on the side of cork.

“Opening wine just isn’t the same without that twist and popping sound”, a student visiting from California tells me.

“I guess it’s the sense of ceremony I like.”

But, asked which they think is the most environmentally-friendly option, many assume it is best to avoid the natural product.

“We shouldn’t be cutting down the trees, I suppose,” says a couple from Austria.

Vanessa Linforth, who manages the Soil Association’s forestry programme for the Mediterranean, tells me this is the kind of misconception she spends a large part of her working life trying to correct.

“People may have heard misguided campaigns before,” she says.

“There was one about eight years ago, claiming cork harvesting was destroying a vital habitat. In fact, it’s preserving it.

“Recently, I think we’ve been getting through to people more. Jose Mourinho was the face of a campaign recently encouraging drinkers to ‘put a cork in it’”.

‘Corked’ taste

Some non-European wine producers, though, say they have had enough of fighting so-called wine-making tradition – that it has been bad enough convincing importers that high quality wine does not have to come from the ancient vineyards of southern Europe.

They prefer the screw-cap, which they do not have to import and which eliminates “wine taint” – the “corked” taste that comes from a chemical present in inadequately treated cork bark.

In recent years, Portugal has thrown increasing time and resources at combating cork taint.

Bark from Portugal's cork trees

The drinks trade accounts for 90% of cork demand

Pedro Borba, who showed me round a processing plant near the harvesting grounds, and who is personally responsible for rating the quality of the cork, says the amount of wine lost to corking can be reduced to zero with the right precautions.

But his main argument for the preservation of the cork is practical.

“A twist-off top may be adequate for a wine that is going to be drunk within weeks, even months, of leaving the vineyard,” he says.

“But for a vintage wine, tiny amounts of oxygen need to enter the bottle to allow proper ageing. And only cork can do that”.

Nearly 90% of the cork producers’ market is still the drinks industry. And the UK is the biggest single importer of wine in the world.

Consumers, it seems, bear a heavier responsibility than they might have thought for the future of the cork industry and, very possibly, for the future of a unique Mediterranean environment.

*********************************************************************************

I personally think pulling the cork is part of the fun, but there is a case for young white wines to use screwcap. The only corporate wine we offer with screwcap is our Vin de Pays Sauvignon Blanc. Our gift wines include small bottles with screwcaps. Other wise we use good quality cork. Natural, biodegradeable, and helps wildlife, what more could you ask for ?

Posted by: winelabels | Tuesday, 22 July 2008

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