“Preserving tradition”: Amcor launches EasyPeel capsule design to simplify opening wine bottles

30 Jan 2019 --- A new capsule design by Amcor is making wine bottles easier to open while preserving time-honored traditions. The EasyPeel wine-opening system uses a one-piece aluminum capsule engineered to open wine bottles along a clean line. Unlike other technologies that rely on pull tabs, EasyPeel allows consumers and professionals to use traditional bottle openers. The improved design prevents tearing, over-cutting or removing the entire capsule – all of which can detract from the carefully crafted aesthetics wine brands work to develop, the company notes.

Amcor decided to use aluminum instead of tin because it is considerably more stable and has a lower price than tin, the material also touts strong sustainability credentials.

“EasyPeel capsules are made out of aluminum, they are mono-material and recyclable. It depends on the location, but in most European countries, thanks to modern recycling methods, aluminum bottle tops are easier to recover for recycling when they are collected with the glass,” Lucie Neubauerova, Trade and Communication Manager at Amcor, tells PackagingInsights. 

“This means that the aluminum capsule should be kept on the empty bottle and dropped in the local bottle bank. Aluminum is a material with impressive sustainability credentials. It can be recycled infinitely and about 75 percent of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today,” she adds.

With this design, users place the knife from an opener at a point indicated on the capsule and peel back to create a clean and consistent opening. The system requires no design or manufacturing changes during the bottling process.

The R&D team faced some challenges in designing the capsule so that a perfect opening was ensured each time. The aluminum used on the capsule is made out of a different thickness on different parts of the capsule, Neubauerova explains.

“This, together with the pre-cut top disk, is engineered with very high precision to ensure consistent ease of opening and a clean opening so that a precisely defined amount of capsule is removed every time. Thanks to our extensive expertise in manufacturing aluminum and tin capsules – we’ve been manufacturing wine capsules in our St-Seurin plant located in the Bordeaux area for over 160 years – our R&D team was able to find a solution,” she says.

The application is suitable to be adapted to other markets, although it has initially been designed for wine and for preserving the traditional wine opening gesture with a wine bottle opener.