What is a shiner bottle?

Most wineries want you to believe they sell every drop of wine they make under their own label. But take a walk through any winery’s cellar and you’re bound to stumble upon cases of unlabeled bottles. These mysterious bottles are called shiners for the simple reason that the lack of a front and back label makes them particularly shiny. The wine inside? Finished, and depending on the vintage and varietal, ready to rock. So why would a winery bottle a wine and not label it? 

The wine industry is, excuse the pun, fluid. Wineries must balance unpredictable harvests and variable winemaking outcomes with shifting market demands and strategic decisions about their brands. Inevitably, a wine simply won’t have a spot in a winery’s lineup.

Maybe the winery wanted to preserve the exclusivity of a certain program by decreasing inventory. Maybe the wine no longer fit their brand strategy. Maybe a new owner or winemaker wants a fresh start and is selling off the previous regime’s inventory. Maybe a big harvest led to excess. Maybe demand dropped. Maybe a deal fell through with a distributor. Maybe the winery needs cash fast. Likely, it’s some combination, but whatever the reason, it boils down to the fact that the winery has wine that it doesn’t want to—or cannot—sell under its own label.

Rather than pour the wine down the drain, the winery bottles it without a label, hoping to find a buyer who will give it a home. That’s where we come in. For us, shiners are a fabulous opportunity. They save us the cost of bottling, which means we can pass those additional savings along to you. 

Shiners can come with a branded or an unbranded cork. A branded cork allows you to see exactly where the wine came from, providing extra assurance of its origins. An unbranded cork doesn’t mean the wine is of lesser pedigree, in fact it’s often the case that it comes from a prestigious winery that prefers to remain anonymous to, in their eyes, preserve their reputation. Either way, we’re happy to snatch up these shiny bottles, slap our label on them, and offer them to you at amazing prices.