Touch of class added to wine bottle screwcap

The original screw cap launched in 2001.

New Zealand's largest winery is out to add a touch of class to the utilitarian screwcap.

Stephan Jelicich of Esvin Wine Resources assisted Stoneleigh, one of New Zealand's biggest production wine brands and most widely exported ones, to come up with the new smooth-sided, pricey-to-produce, new Stelvin Lux cap.

The Lux screwcap is a deluxe take on the biggest innovation in the wine world in the last few hundred years - screwcaps - but it comes at a price. Every Lux cap costs 30 to 40 per cent more than a standard screwcap.

It was an easy sell to Allied Domecq, a company whose brand managers were looking for something to posh up their highly successful Stoneleigh range.

Stephanie Hanson, group brand manager for Stoneleigh, said that the company's customers in both Britain and the United States liked the wine but were not impressed with the screwcap seals.

"Stoneleigh is incredibly important for us because of its global success in both countries but the feedback from them was that they thought the packaging didn't represent the same perceived quality as the wine," said Ms Hanson.

"The new Stelvin Lux gave us the opportunity to give these wines the contemporary look that we were after."

And so far Allied Domecq New Zealand (which owns all of the Montana and Corbans wine brands) is the only winery in the world to use the new Stelvin Lux, which is produced by the French company, Pechiney, and imported to New Zealand by Jelicich.

They were not destined to become mainstream due to the cost of each screwcap and the fact that a new capping machine was required. Most wineries had just installed new machines.

Stelvin Lux was not, however, the last word on good-looking wine closures, he said.

In August, he opened this country's first screwcap manufacturing factory in Mt Wellington, Auckland, and has what he describes as even better-looking screwcaps to be launched in 2006.