For the past three years, the Star Trek Wines team has been scoring big points with Trek collectors and wine aficionados alike, as they’ve made real Jean-Luc Picard’s family cru Bordeaux, Klingon bloodwine, and more since their 2019 debut.

This year, the company is venturing even further into the final frontier, as their 2021 lineup includes a bright blue Andorian wine, inspired by the denizens of the icy cliffs of Andoria, and Cardassian Kanar, the dark alcohol seen everywhere from Quark’s Bar to the halls of the Central Command on Cardassia Prime.

We first showed you their new bottles and told you about the wine itself back during August’s Las Vegas Star Trek convention, and during that event, we sat down with Spencer Brewer, Craig Spurrier, and Howard Jackowitz from Wines That Rock — the company behind Star Trek Wines — who told us about the complicated challenges they had to overcome to bring these new offerings to fans.

TREKCORE: The Cardassian Kanar bottle is something Deep Space Nine fans have wanted to see for years — how difficult was it to put this together?

STAR TREK WINES TEAM: We looked for the original-style bottles that they used in Deep Space Nine for three years, and we were only able to find five originals in all that time.

Of those five, only one had the ‘spiral’ design truly well-defined all the way from the base to the top of the bottle — the others were produced later in the original manufacturing run, when the glass molds had begun to wear down from extended use. So the one we used as our ‘base’ was from an early production run, and we’re lucky to have found it.

In our research, we found that the last company who made the snake-spiral bottles actually went out of business in the 1970s — and after that, the design was changed to feature grape leaves, and those versions were still being built into the 1990s and even as recently as 2014, by one company.

But we got deep enough into our research that we found the family of the guy who imported all the original bottles into the United States back in the ’60s, and eventually the secretary who worked for them who was able to confirm the original molds were long gone; to be safe, we also talked to lawyers who told us that it’s very difficult to copyright glass.

Even so, we think we’ve made enough changes to the original design — all very slight — to avoid any issues there.

TREKCORE: The bottles on display have this nice glass topper, which isn’t something that was used on the show. Can you tell us more about that decision?

STW Team: One change we ended up going with is a glass Vinoseal stopper for the Kanar bottle. The original bottles from the 1960s — used for Chiantis, vinegars, or olive oils — had very short corks, and they weren’t meant to last long. We went to all sorts of cork manufacturers, eight or nine around the world, and they told us they couldn’t do it because there wasn’t room for a cork when we made the new bottle.

Our bottle is molded from a a 3D-rendered replica of the original design, and it had to have the neck slightly extended because there has to be a half-a-millimeter lip on the opening to grab the Vinoseal stopper to really seal the bottle tightly — so that had to be built into the 3D model for the stopper to work, and we had both the bottle manufacturer and the Vinoseal manufacturer work together to get all the dimensions just right.

When we seal up the wine bottles for customers, we’ll vacuum-seal the Vinoseal stopper in place with a shrink-wrap plastic — so there won’t be any leaks — and all of the printed text normally found on a wine label will go on that removable shrink-wrap.

TREKCORE: That’s great for collectors, once you take that wrap off you’re back into the Star Trek world.

STW Team: Really, that decision came from the shape of the bottle’s base; any label we tried to get printed for the back of the bottle would crease and just not look right — we went to five different label printers and not one of them said they could do it.

We did get the design for the front label from Doug Drexler, who did the original Cardassian graphic for the Deep Space Nine prop bottle, and the text for the ‘necker’ tag comes from Star Trek novelist Una McCormack, the expert in all things Cardassign.

Also, the alternate Zamac metal stopper will be packaged separately and be included with every Kanar bottle we sell; it was also 3D rendered from a show-used prop.

We love this project, and even after doing hundreds of different brands of wines, we’ve never done anything like this before. We’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and this it the first bottle we’ve ever made from scratch, and we found a really good manufacturing partner to help us.

TREKCORE: The Andorian wine is something pretty different; it’s the first color-dyed wine in the Star Trek series. 

STAR TREK WINES TEAM: It’s wild that it’s so blue, right? But it was a challenge to find the right color, and keep it as natural as possible.

While we were developing it, we contacted seven or eight different companies that specialize in food dyes, because blue is tough to pull off naturally. We did a bunch of different test bottles, each with a different number of drops of blue dye, to get it just the right color. “Show me, um, eleven drops?” That’s kind of how things went.

We kept going until all of a sudden, we all thought, “Yeah, that feels right, that looks fresh.” The base Chardonnay is a yellow wine, so as you add blue drops, it turns green — until we got to seven drops of blue, then it starts changing to a fully blue color and we found the right spot to stop.

After all of our research, talking to all these experts, we were going to go with spirulina — it’s natural, has no taste, it’s easily accessible, and a great blue color…. but then we did some more research, and found that the FDA hasn’t approved it for use with alcohol.

And on top of that, we spoke to a food scientist who told us that after two years, spirulina dye in Chardonnay would fade back to yellow. It would last in hard alcohol, but the pH in wine is what causes it to fade out — so that was the end of that!

We also tried a type of butterfly die from South America, but ran into those same FDA approval and pH issues, and really thought we were heading into a dead end, because we didn’t want to use Blue Dye #2, you know? Can’t have it looking like toilet bowl water!

Finally, we found this scientist whose whole job is relating to his PhD in dye — talk about a needle in a haystack — and he was a Trekkie too! Eventually after talking it all through, he told us, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll make up the organic components to make your dye.”

And with that, we finally got to the blue color we liked — and then sat one of our blue bottles in the sun for four months to make sure it wouldn’t fade.

Once we had that down, we also got the metal plaques designed for the outside of the Andorian bottles, and went through five or six variations of that with different manufacturers until we had it right.

All of us, we’re just trying to raise the bar every time, and we want these Star Trek releases to be special — and the best part of the whole [Las Vegas convention] has been everyone coming up and telling us how much they appreciate the level of detail, just going “Wow!” when they see it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.