Review

The bottles are provided as six transparent brown and six transparent green sprues; each sprue holds sixteen bottles, two styles each (short necked, long and narrow bottles and long necked, “chubby” ones).

We also get twelve large crates (the same crate as the champagne bottle set) holding fifteen bottles each. The crates have a somewhat strong, out of scale wood grain, which makes painting easier. (Let’s face it; in-scale the grain would be invisible.)

The parts for the crates are very thin, so be careful when cutting them off the sprue. The sprue attachment points are thicker than the crate parts, so cleaning them off is a somewhat delicate process. (If you damage the wooden part a bit, it’s not a problem as the wood tends to get damaged in the real crates as well.)

The bottles have no mold seams, and in general they look good. The only thing about the plastic is that there are some bubbles present which is unfortunate. (They are not very noticeable.)

The decals are very fine, but there is some where the different colors were printed a bit off-set. Again, the difference is less than a millimetre, but if you look close it’s there. You’ll need to work with a decal setting solution to get the decals conform the round surface; it took me about 20 minutes to apply the solution, wait, massage the decals into place, then repeat, until they were in place.

We only get the labels as decals; the foil/wax seal covering the neck of the bottles will need to be painted on.

The assembly and decal guide is on the back of the box; while it’s not an issue with the assembly, it might have been a bit more useful to have a more comprehensive decal guide than putting on the box art with the decal numbers on it. The bottles probably represent real wine brands, so check the box art what color the wooden crates should be painted for the different types.