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Above, your average Bordeaux bottle.

Gonzalo Jaen’s concept design for the Gonzalez Byas wine family offers up an innovative, fresh take on tradition.

Wine bottles are such familiar forms, color isn't something most wine drinkers consider. But, we ask ourselves, why are bottles typically dark or light green? The answer, much like a bottle's shape, is one that mostly boils down to tradition. Science and winemaking protocol plays a role too: colored and tinted glass prevents oxidation and increases a wine's storage life by limiting its exposure to damaging sunlight, but that says little about the specifics of green, or in some other cases, amber.

Why not a blue bottle? Or a similarly protective, but colorful hue? Especially as wines (usually whites) with shorter anticipated life spans are starting to appear more frequently in clear bottles, it seems like packaging and branding designers are overlooking a goldmine opportunity in the juice department. Designer Gonzalo Jaen of the Miami-based firm Digital Fish recently created a concept design for the megalithic Gonzalez Byass wine family worth raising a glass to. Featuring powder-coated bottles with differently-shaded bottom halves, Jaen's designs are fresh and statement-making, without skipping a beat on protective functionality. Hopefully we'll see more of these as old traditions give way to newer ones. 

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