Uncorking the facts on the bottle weight debate

At 1.2kg, the bottle on the table was heavy enough for it to be hard to tell how much wine was in it. But as chief winemaker Ana María Cumsille explained, the biggest market for Viña Carmen Gold, the Chilean producer’s top cuvée, was China, and consumers there “associate weight with quality”. A few weeks later I related this story to a manager at Ardagh glass in Barnsley as I toured their bottle factory. He joked: “We could get three out of one of those!” – and indeed the bottles coming off the production line in front of us weighed just 400g or less.