The Helix.

My previous post, Four-Buck Chuck, made mention of an "innovative closure."  Meet the Helix.  The brainchild of Amorim (one of the planet's biggest cork producers) and O-I (a rather large bottle manufacturer), the Helix closure combines a grooved cork with a correspondingly threaded bottleneck.  Bronco Wine Company was an early adopter of the Helix cork stopper for several of their value-priced wines.
With the Helix there is no need to look around for a corkscrew, there is also no need to feel like one is slumming it by buying a screw cap closed wine.  Additionally, in some small way, the Helix manages to preserve the romance of opening a bottle of wine and the pleasant pop that a real cork delivers when it is coaxed out of a bottle.
I for one found the Helix to be a little hard to twist in and out (despite multiple printed exhortations suggesting otherwise), but I did find it rather interesting.  And innovative.

Buying bottles.

Whilst I have been rather busy with the usual late-spring vineyard operations (suckering, stuffing shoots, hedging, shoot thinning and more suckering), Vinomaker has been busying himself with getting things organised for a couple of upcoming bottling events to be held here in Vinoland.  At the very top of Vinomaker's bottling-to-do list was the acquiring of new glass: in other words, bottles.  So today, we took a quick trip out of Napa (to a warehouse in Benicia, which was chock-a-block with pallets and pallets of the things) to purchase the Bordeaux style bottles needed for bottling the St. Helena Sot's Cabernet Sauvignon next week.
It rained a little on the drive back to Vinoland, not ideal weather for transporting a butt load (technical term) of bottle-filled cardboard boxes. Tut-tut, Mother Nature!