Jill Park: The Godfather of wine

Coppola’s grandfather Agostino Coppola used to make wine in the basement of his New York apartment using concrete vats he’s constructed himself – or so the legend goes. Fast forward to the seventies and the Francis and his wife Eleanor started to dabble at their home in Californian wine central Napa Valley.

The director’s wine company Francis Ford Coppola Presents has since been producing and selling a range of wines from their own vineyard. But it was the couple’s Encyclopaedia range of wine that hit the Packaging News headlines this week as Coppola filed paper to sue bottle manufacturer Vincor USA.

According to reports, Coppola has claimed that Vincor ruined 55,000 cases of his Encyclopaedia wine from his vineyard by supplying faulty bottles and screw caps. Papers files with a Californian court claim bottles had bent necks, chipped glass and uneven bases, while many of the screw caps were badly made or bent after shipping.

The news put me in mind of reports I’d heard on the grapevine (pardon the pun) that supermarkets were experiencing high numbers of breakages of wine and beer bottles – in part due to companies lightweighting too much. We at PN towers experienced this first hand a couple of years ago when a lightweighted bottle entered in our awards broke before it even got to us. Needless to say it didn’t win.

It raises the issue that packaging should be fit for purpose as opposed to reducing material to wafer thin proportions – a point the packaging industry has been championing for some time. So much so that the new version of the Courtauld Commitment is expected to take this into account – Wrap head of retail Richard Swannell revealed in May the body was looking at measurements such as recycled content and carbon footprinting for a more balanced measure.

Had the packaging of Coppola’s wine been fit for purpose, replacements would not have been required. Hopefully Courtauld Two will follow the same philosophy. I’ll drink to that.

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