We tried an interesting wine yesterday - the Belle Glos Pinot Noir "Las Alturas" from Monterey County, California. It's not necessarily what you'd expect from a bottle of pinot noir, in fact you could be disappointed or surprised, because it's uncharacteristic - richer, more mellow, less acidic - but a nice wine nonetheless.
And it comes in a beautiful bottle, which I guess is the "belle" part of the name ("glos" itself being a word that's not in any French dictionary I have). Yes, that's a wax coating on the neck and top of the bottle, reminiscent of those wax blobs that until lately were the traditional finish of fine armagnac and calvados. Pretty, isn't it?
But pretty as it is, it's a problem. That little tab at the top? It is supposed to be a pull tab that would magically open a ring around the neck, permitting you to remove the wax cap and get at the cork. Sadly, the tab fails miserably - on this bottle, it just broke off, leaving me with ten minutes or more of struggle with a foil knife (and a larger knife) to open the thing; wax all over the place, and fortunate that I didn't slice my thumb.
So, real world to Belle Glos marketers: zip tabs just don't work. They don't work (usually) on champagne foil; they don't work on those USPS mailing boxes; I can't think of any application where they do work reliably.
So please spare us the wax, Belle Glos. At the price you ask for this bottle, you may suppose your customer probably has his/her own full time wine steward to handle such menial details; yet even then, getting into it should NOT be an exercise in frustration, not even in just one bottle out of several.
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