Brandy, Cognac & XO Glass Bottles

Weight, relief and the XO signal

Three cues do most of the work in this category, and they are all physical. The first is mass: a deep, thick base that gives the bottle an unmistakable heft when lifted. The second is relief — sunburst fans, fluting, medallions and crests worked into the mould rather than printed on. The third is optical: faceted or stepped surfaces that catch light the way cut crystal does.

All three are mould-level decisions, which is why brandy briefs have to be specific earlier than briefs in other categories. Relief cannot be added after tooling. Base weight cannot be adjusted without changing the mould and re-validating the annealing profile. A brand that starts with "we will decide the details at artwork stage" ends up with a plain bottle and a print budget trying to do a mould’s job.

The counterweight is cost. Heavy glass is more glass, slower to form and slower to anneal, and it hits container weight limits before it hits volume limits. It is worth being honest at the brief stage about which tier you are actually selling into, because the heaviest option is not automatically the most commercial one.

The shapes in this range

Brandy moulds divide by how much of the presentation budget sits in the glass itself.

Gift coffrets change the glass brief

A large share of brandy volume ships in a rigid box, and that changes which bottle is right. The box has to be tooled around the final bottle envelope — including the closure and any decoration that adds thickness — so the bottle has to be locked before the coffret is designed, not alongside it.

Shape efficiency matters more than it looks. A flat or rectangular bottle needs a shallower box, which means less board per unit, more units per master carton and more cartons per pallet position. On a container-scale programme that compounds into a real number. A dramatic decanter silhouette can be the right brand decision and still be the expensive one — worth seeing both costed before choosing.

Decoration on a relief bottle

Relief and printing compete for the same surface. A heavily moulded bottle has less flat area for a label, and printing across a relief transition rarely registers cleanly. The usual resolution is a small front label or a neck medallion plus screen printing confined to a flat panel, with the moulded relief carrying the rest.

Metallic effects — gold or bronze screen printing, coated caps, hot-stamped detail — are common at this tier and are worth trialling on the actual mould early. Metallic inks sit differently on a faceted surface than on a cylinder, and the sample is the only reliable proof.

From brief to container

Send the tier you are selling into (VS, VSOP, XO), the destination market, whether a coffret is part of the programme, and an annual volume estimate. We come back with a technical drawing confirming capacity, neck finish and critical dimensions, plus samples before anything is committed to production.

Because relief and base weight vary so much across this range, minimum quantities and lead times are quoted per mould rather than published. Inspection documentation ships with the lot: annealing per ASTM C148, internal pressure per ISO 7458, thermal shock per ISO 7459.