Packing for a trip is stressful enough—but packing wine or spirits in your suitcase is potentially wardrobe-ruining if you don’t take proper care to ensure all that alcohol stays in the bottle where it belongs.
Whether you’re planning to bring home a few vintage bottles from the vineyard you toured in France or want to surprise dad with his favorite scotch the next time you’re visiting home, we spoke to a handful of travel and culinary professionals to get their best tips on how to pack wine or liquor in a suitcase.
These tried-and-true methods require a little more effort than simply wrapping your vino in a sock—but they provide peace of mind by ensuring your booze makes it from gate to gate without breaking in your suitcase.
Choose the right suitcase
Always pack wine or spirits in a hard-sided spinning suitcase rather than a soft-sided suitcase or duffel bag—the more durable the better. Look for hard-sided options that are made with heavy-duty material like aluminum or polycarbonate. This will ensure that the contents don’t get squished or move around while in transit and will also help to absorb any inevitable shock from external factors between gates.
Wine-specific suitcases exist if you frequently purchase wine or spirits as a souvenir. These types of suitcases used to be bulky and inconvenient for regular travel but have recently become much more versatile.
“One of my favorite ways to travel with wine or to pack wine on the way home from a trip is to use FlyWithWine’s VinGardeValise suitcases,” says Brianne Cohen, a Los Angeles–based wine educator and sommelier. “They come in five, eight, and twelve bottle options and what is so great about these hard-sided suitcases is that they are modular in design, and you can pull out the bottle inserts as needed.”
“For example, if I’m traveling to wine country, I keep the inserts on one side of the suitcase (this side travels empty on my way to wine country) and remove the inserts on the other side, which is where I pack my clothes and toiletries,” explains Cohen. “On the way home, I pop my new wines into the empty side with inserts, and they travel perfectly.”
VinGardeValise wine suitcase
Cushion your wine or spirit bottle to absorb impact
If you're bringing wine home from a trip, set yourself up for success the moment you start packing. First off, pack wine in your checked luggage, not your carry-on—it's too much liquid to bring on the plane. From there, it's all about cushion.
“To avoid breakage, start by packing a good layer of clothing above and below your wine bottle,” says Carrie Ann Karstunen, a former flight attendant and travel blogger. “It's a good idea to pack shoes (I put mine in shoe bags) around the perimeter for an added shock absorber.”
Keeping everything as tight and secure as possible will yield the best result. You’ll want to pack your thicker clothes on the bottom, the wine in the middle, and smaller and lighter clothes around the bottle. Finally, you should pad the top of the suitcase with thicker clothing like sweaters or jeans.
Never pack two bottles next to one another
When you're packing more than one bottle of wine in your luggage, expect the worst if those bottles strike one another in transit.
