Amid all the talk about declining value of overseas sales and the diminishing domestic wine market comes an interesting diversion courtesy a team of young designers from London’s Central St Martins College of Art and Design. Their challenge was to develop the sort of wine bottle concept we’d be using 150 years from now. The four best entries were revealed at Vinexpo in Bordeaux. They comprise a Self Cooling Animated Bottle complete with a built-in mini TV screen and temperature control device, a transparent egg-shaped ball that snaps in half to form a goblet, a Gem Drop of concentrated wine that dissolves in water for instant wine that is supposed to travel well, plus a lightweight, stainless steel bottle that is split into three separate sealed modules to avoid wine wastage. Hardys Wines, which was involved in this event, has already claimed it will ‘set a new precedent in wine packaging’ as a result of these concepts, and suggests that ‘some of these designs could well be in production in as little as a decade’s time’. I couldn’t help but notice the absence of any cork from these concepts.
