Around the Wine

What do you give someone who already has good wine?

The hard part of buying for a wine drinker is that the obvious gift is a bottle, and they have better bottles than you do. Everything in this collection sidesteps that: none of it is wine, and all of it is about wine.

Three kinds of thing, for three different situations – and one notebook for the person who writes down what was opened.

How do you turn a bottle into a gift?

Put it in a wooden box that stays. Each one takes a standard 75 cl bottle. The front panel slides up out of grooves in the sides, so the bottle lifts out and the box closes again; the three stained boxes and the Nichoir carry a jute rope handle; the light boxes travel in the hand or in a bag. Every box comes with a flat oval glass holder that sits over the neck of the bottle and carries two glasses by their stems, so bottle and glasses arrive at the table as one piece.

The point is what happens afterwards: a gift bag is thrown away when the cork comes out, and these are not. They end up holding kitchen utensils or brushes, or take the next bottle and are given on.

One of them has somewhere else to go. The Nichoir has a round hole cut through its front panel inside a wreath of vine leaves, a small wooden perch below it and three birds engraved on a branch at the foot. Empty the bottle, hang the box in a tree by its rope or screw it to the trunk through the back, and it spends the rest of its life as a nesting box. It is the one wine box in our range with a second life designed in.

Which wine gift goes on the wall?

A wine map. Ours show France or Italy divided the way a wine label divides them – by wine region, with the vineyards raised on the wood as separate pieces in their own tones. Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, the Rhône; Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily.

They come in two formats. The framed panels arrive assembled and hang from the fixing built into the back; the wooden country sits on a printed chart that names each region again with its grape varieties. The wooden maps have no chart at all: the country and its region badges – an ice bucket for Champagne, a barrel for Burgundy, a jug for Tuscany, each engraved with the region and its grapes – are mounted straight on the wall, so the wall becomes the paper.

Panel for a room that is already busy with framed things. Wooden for a plain wall that can be given to one object.

Which map tells a wine lover something new?

The Italian one. All twenty Italian regions produce wine, from Alto Adige at the Austrian border to Sicily – a fact most drinkers know abstractly and have never seen laid out. France divides into a handful of famous names; Italy does not, and laid out in wood the difference is the point. It is the gift for someone whose cellar you cannot improve on.

Where do wine maps and boxes belong in a house?

A dining room, a kitchen, a cellar door, a restaurant. These work where wine is opened rather than in a living room, and they reward being looked at closely rather than from across a room.

That is also the practical argument for giving one: it will be seen every time the person does the thing they enjoy.

Is there something for the tasting notes?

One notebook, the Vineyard: a pale birch cover with a whole scene engraved across it – a glass on a barrel, vine rows over a hill, a village with a spire – and 100 lined sheets inside, each headed with a date line, for what was opened and with whom. The cover is permanent and the block is replaceable, which is the right build for a record kept over years.

What is not in this collection?

No wine, no glasses, no gadgets. Everything in it is cut and engraved wood, so it is what wood does well: maps that hold detail, boxes that outlast the bottle, a cover that is still there when the pages are full.

For events, restaurant use or client gifting we supply in quantity, with custom engraving on business orders – details on our wholesale page.