American Glass

 

Have you ever wondered where wine bottles are made? We bottle all Clearwater Canyon Cellars wines in American made glass as part of our commitment to buying local and keeping our money where our life is. Surprisingly, the vast majority of US wineries are bottling in glass made outside the US, mainly China.

I have always been aware that we pay more for American glass (almost two times as expensive as Chinese glass) but I had no idea until recently that Clearwater Canyon is such an outlier due to our choosing to buy American glass. According to several glass brokers that I dealt with over the last year….

– Approximately 90% of the wine bottled in the US is in Chinese glass.

– Some importers of Chinese bottles will actually deliver the bottles to your door step free of shipping charges. (We paid huge shipping charges to get our glass here from the west coast).They must be able to do this due to the volume of Chinese glass being sold here.

Since our first vintage (2004) we have been buying glass from the two main domestic wine bottle producers on the west coast, Saint Gobain (Seattle, WA) and Gallo Glass Company (Modesto, CA). Both companies are transparent in terms of their processing and commitment to our environment, something I have not experienced thus far with the glass producers abroad that I have been introduced to.

I care about clean processing and corporate transparency because the people I love most are drinking our wine. The wines we will be releasing this September at our Fall Release were bottled in Gallo Glass. See below to learn more about the Gallo Glass Company.