Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The ever-rising tide of wine nonsense shows no signs of receding. Allow me to vent.

First up: the growing number of bodybuilder bottles that egotistical producers use to persuade us that the wine inside is oh-so-serious and deserves that $50-plus price tag.

I have many of these pretentious, thick-sided, deep-punted 750-milliliter bottles sitting on my kitchen floor. Carrying them down to the cellar and back up when it's time to open, hoist, pour and taste makes going to the gym seem almost superfluous. Some are twice as heavy as an ordinary bottle -- so much so that you think there's still wine in them when they're empty.

In the land of the Hummer and super-sized Coke, who can be surprised by the monster bottle of high-end wine? Yet this isn't just a California fashion. Many offenders are from Argentina (such as Nicolas Catena Zapata, $105, weight 4.22 pounds), Spain (Alto Moncayo Aquilon, $150), Chile (Montes Folly Syrah, $60) and Italy (Argiano Solengo, $80).

These big-bottom bottles cost more to produce and, with skyrocketing oil prices, the extra pounds add significantly to shipping costs.

Worse, this overblown packaging has a big carbon footprint, creating a negative environmental impact on our overheated planet. Vintners who like to tout their ``green'' efforts on the back label should start by first putting their bottles on the scale.

Not Needed

Besides, these bottles don't fit on standard racks in temperature-controlled units, and the argument that they're de rigueur for wines requiring long-term aging is contradicted by Australia's great, age-worthy Penfolds Grange ($330), which uses a standard Bordeaux-style bottle. Ditto Chateau Lafite-Rothschild ($450, weight 2.67 pounds) and Chateau Petrus.

U.K. supermarket chains like Tesco are cutting the bottle weight of their own house-label wines and pressing suppliers to use lighter ones. The world's largest wine importer, the U.K. consumes about 1.36 billion 750-milliliter bottles of wine a year, according to Waste & Resources Action Programme, which has helped spearhead the effort.

This summer the well-known London-based wine writer Jancis Robinson, who first coined the term bodybuilder bottles, started a ``name and shame'' campaign on her Web site to embarrass big- bottle producers.

So kudos to the huge Vina Carmen winery in Chile, which announced last month that it's embracing lighter glass bottles. It expects this to result in an annual saving of 1,875 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to that from 500 cars. Sonoma winery Siduri downsized its bottles after complaints from customers. Will other wineries follow suit?

No-Oak Chardonnay

When it comes to wine silliness, of course, fashion often trumps taste. Take no-oak chardonnay, produced as a reaction to the many obnoxious over-oaked California whites that smell like butterscotch, taste like kissing a two-by-four and still haven't disappeared.

I welcomed the first wines labeled ``unwooded'' and ``un- oaked'' such as Morgan Metallico (California, $22) and Chehalem Vineyards Inox (Oregon, $19). Both showed crisp acidity, bright fruit flavors and attractive complexity.

Yet now wineries cashing in on the naked grape trend are pumping out lightweight chardonnays that have left out character as well as wood.

Shipping Rules

While I'm at it, may I mention the continuing legal nonsense that dogs the wine market thanks to Prohibition's hangover? Maybe you recall the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2005 Granholm v. Heald decision, which ruled that Michigan and New York couldn't ban out-of-state wineries from shipping wine direct to consumers if they allowed in-state producers to do so. Alas, it failed to end the direct-shipping wars.

You can buy a laptop and practically anything else via the Internet and have it sent to you, so it seems crazy that in 15 states you still can't get a bottle of your favorite cab delivered from a California winery to your home. In 38 of them, you can't order it from a retailer in another state.

The situation just got worse for residents of Indiana. After a year of permitting unrestricted direct shipping, an August ruling reinstates a law requiring residents to fill in an age- verification form (in person, no less!) at the winery before they can order wine.

Pennsylvania technically permits direct shipping, though the latest proposed bill would route all shipped wine through the state liquor authority, adding to the cost (and the state's coffers), according to a report published last week in the Wine Spectator.

To be fair, the U.S. has no monopoly on wine idiocy. Look at France, where earlier this year a Paris court ruled that just as wine advertisements must display health warnings, so should articles on wine.

Excuse me, I feel the need to pour myself a glass of naked grape juice from an obese bottle.

(Elin McCoy writes on wine and spirits for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Elin McCoy at emcwine@aol.com.

Last Updated: September 4, 2008 00:01 EDT