Cetie and Wine(s)

While the Cetie may have been founded at the start of the 1960s to solve the problems caused by the bottling of beer with a crown cap at increasingly high rates, the bottling of wine has since become one of its main fields of activity.

The world of wine can be characterised by the number and the diversity of its operators and situations that make the pooling of their best practices all the more useful. Moreover, closure can of course form a part of the wine production process, either directly, for secondary fermentation and the “traditional” disgorging of sparkling wines, or by contributing to the ageing process of wines to be laid down. Here’s a quick look at the Cetie publications about the bottling of wine:

EC 3.01 Best practices for the use of synthetic closures (2008) 
DT 25 Recommendations on the design of corkscrews (2002) 
GME 30.34 PET BVS PCO 22H30 finishes (2014)

All these documents can be downloaded free of charge after opening a user account.
Many other more general Cetie documents may also be of interest for wine bottling operations. You can find these documents on the website.

Note that the specifications of the main finishes for glass bottles used for wine that was initially written as Cetie reference works (in the GME series) have been published as European standards and, consequently, withdrawn from the Cetie publications. In particular, the Cetie information sheet “Single flat finish for cork closures and caps” (formerly GME 50.01) is now available from the online AFNOR store as the standard EN 12726, and the BVS finish for aluminium screw-on caps (formerly GME 30.13) is available as the standard EN 16293. The Cetie is active in the working groups of the standardisation committees, where it provides the “after-sales service” for these standards. We are currently launching a revision of the standard EN 12726 to clarify certain aspects of the characterisation of the internal profile for inspections and to include an option for a mouth diameter of 17.5 mm, which is common in certain countries.

On-going work at the Cetie includes the revision of Guide n° 3 (already mentioned above) in order to bring the technical information up to date and to make the guide easier to use by improving the presentation. The scope of the document is also being extended to include quality sparkling wines by traditional methods, using the same NF H35-029 finish. Significant progress has already been made, and the work should be available in
2017.
With regard to screw-on finishes, in addition to the French versions of Guides n°6 (still wines) and n°9 (pressurised wines), which will appear in the weeks to come, it is also worth noting that Guide n°11 “Defects on metal screw-on caps - identification and correction” is yet published. Guide n°2 “Metal screw-on closures for flat food and pharmaceutical liquids on BVP finishes” is also being revised. This type of closure is used for certain stabilised wine products.
Also note that the specifications of shells for aluminium caps before application for the three cases - still wines with re-stamping, pressurised wines with re-stamping and flat liquids without re-stamping - are also in the final preparatory stages (respectively EC 4.01, EC 4.02 and EC 4.03).

Finally, a number of our members have asked us to start working on bottling with added-head closures. If this subject is of interest to you, then please let us know whether you would welcome Cetie technical references for this application. Remember that the Cetie is a non-profit organisation serving the bottling industries. The membership fees paid by the companies in this sector or their professional federations are Cetie’s only source of income. The technical reference documents are written by our members’ experts who form working groups where they can exchange, share and reach a consensus. The people who use our documents could also potentially form a network on a broader scale that could send us feedback and questions and enable us to verify the relevance of our documents for the industry as a whole The Cetie listens closely to the world of wine bottling in an effort to produce documents that are always useful and relevant.

By N. Harris Cetie General Secretary Published in Liquides & Conditionnement N°386 (January 2017)