Why no two Dancing Sands bottles look the same

If you've bought more than one bottle of Dancing Sands gin, you might have noticed something odd. Line two of them up and they don't quite match. One has a faint blue tint. The other is nearly clear. The next might sit somewhere between the two.

It's not a manufacturing fault we hope you won't notice. It's the result of a deliberate decision we made in 2023, and the story behind it involves recycled pasta sauce jars, a glass plant in Auckland, and a thing called transition glass.

Here's how our bottles got to be the way they are.

The day we stopped buying from France

For most of our distillery's life, our bottles came from France. They were beautiful: heavy, consistent, technically perfect. They were also shipped halfway around the world to a small distillery in Golden Bay, which never sat quite right with us.

In 2023 we moved production to Visy Glass in Auckland. They're the only commercial glass bottle manufacturers in New Zealand, and their bottles are made with recycled glass, sourced from Auckland's kerbside collection.

The practical translation: the bottle you're holding likely started life as someone's empty pasta sauce jar in Mt Eden, or a discarded wine bottle in Grey Lynn. It went into a recycling bin, got collected, crushed into cullet, melted down, and reformed. Roughly half the material in your bottle has been a bottle before.

That alone would have been a good story. But it gets better.

The genius of transition glass

A glass plant doesn't make one kind of glass. It makes lots of types, in different colours, for different customers. To switch from one colour to another, the plant has to flush the entire molten supply through the system. You can't just stop blue and start clear. There's a transition.

That transition glass is real, usable glass. It's also unwanted by most customers, who specify exact colours and reject anything that drifts. So it usually gets set aside or melted back down and used in another run.

But what if you make your bottles during the transition?

It turns out you can. The bottles produced during a transition run vary in colour depending on exactly where the plant is in its colour change. A bottle made early in the switch from blue to clear comes out a stronger blue. A bottle made near the end is almost clear. In between, you get every shade. The result is a batch of bottles where no two are quite the same.

What this means for your bottle

The bottle in your hand is, in a small way, a one-off. Its exact shade depends on the timing of the production run that made it. We don't sort the bottles by colour or grade them. They come off the line in whatever shade they happened to be, get filled with spirits, get labelled, and go out.

Some are a deep blue. Some are almost clear. Most sit somewhere between with a soft tint that catches the light differently depending on what's in the bottle and what's behind it.

Why it was worth the trade-off

Choosing transition glass over standard production glass uses less virgin glass. Making bottles from recycled cullet uses less energy than making them from raw materials, and pulls less new sand and minerals out of the ground.

We also keep our supply chain in New Zealand. The carbon footprint of shipping empty bottles from France to Nelson is not insignificant, and it goes against everything else we do to make this gin locally.

Glass that would otherwise be discarded gets a second life. Transition glass doesn't usually find a use. Now it does, holding our gin.

One last thing

If you've picked up a Dancing Sands bottle and thought "this looks different to the last one", now you know why. We'd rather have honest bottles than identical ones.

If you've got a row of them on your shelf, or you spot one in a bar that looks particularly blue, send us a photo. We love seeing them.

Try our spirits here

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