Heidi Klum Has Put Wine in Blood Bags
Wine / Marketing
Heidi Klum Has Put Wine in Blood Bags
Apothic and the queen of Halloween have made a limited-edition transfusion bag you fill with red wine yourself. It costs $10.31, which is a reference to October 31, and it went on sale at 10:31pm. It is completely ridiculous. It is also one of the smartest things the American wine industry has done all year.
By Vim, Editor of 12×75
In brief
- Apothic, owned by E&J Gallo, has partnered with Heidi Klum on the Apothic Type ‘A’ Blood Bag: a collectible designed to look like a medical blood transfusion bag, signed by Klum and delivered in a custom red cooler.
- You get two empty bags for $10.31, and you fill them yourself with Apothic Red, which retails around $10.99 for a 750ml bottle at 13.5% ABV.
- The first drop went live at 10:31pm ET on September 17 at ApothicBloodTypeA.com. A second drop is teased, with the clue “look to the full moon.”
- Apothic is an official sponsor of Klum’s 25th annual Halloween party, and ran a sweepstakes for one fan to attend.
- The strategy underneath the gore: Gallo calls it a “usage vehicle” for getting wine into party occasions it has been losing for a decade.
Let us deal with the obvious first. It is a bag of blood. You fill it with red wine and drink out of it, presumably through the tube, at a party, while dressed as something. There is no sophisticated way to describe this product, and Apothic, which is owned by the largest wine company in America, is not attempting one.
And yet. I have spent this year writing about a 168-year-old winery filing for Chapter 11, about American wine volumes falling for a fourth straight year, and about a generation that never picked up the habit. Against that, the largest wine company in the United States has produced a $10.31 novelty that got covered by every entertainment outlet in the country. Call it undignified if you like. It is also the most attention any American red wine has received this month.
What it actually is
Apothic Type ‘A’ Blood Bag
What you getTwo empty bags, designed to resemble a blood transfusion bag, in a custom red cooler
Signed byHeidi Klum
Price$10.31 for the set, a reference to October 31
First dropSeptember 17, 2026, at 10:31pm ET, at ApothicBloodTypeA.com
Second dropTeased, with the clue “look to the full moon”
The bagsNon-breakable and resealable
What goes in themApothic Red: a blend of Zinfandel, Syrah, Merlot and other varieties, 13.5% ABV, about $10.99 a bottle
AvailabilityUS only, 21 and over, while supplies last
Also includedKlum is an official partner of Apothic’s Halloween campaign and the brand sponsors her 25th annual party
Sources: VinePair, Dexerto and All Hallows Geek.
The detail worth pausing on is that the bags come empty. You are not buying wine in a blood bag; you are buying two blood bags and a cooler for $10.31, then decanting an $11 bottle of Apothic Red into them yourself. That is a curious piece of product design, and it is also the whole point, which I will come back to.
Klum’s own description is the best quote in the campaign: “It’s super gory, but it couldn’t be more fitting, because obviously you normally need a blood transfusion bag when something is seriously wrong with you, but Halloween, that’s what Halloween is all about.” Her motto, she adds, has always been go big or go home. Twenty-five years of increasingly unrecognisable costumes suggest she means it.
The strategy hiding behind the gore
Gallo’s vice president for power and ascending brands, Marshall Dawson, said something to VinePair that is more revealing than anything in the press release. “This is not a limited-time offer of a different product. It’s a usage vehicle that connects with the idea that is fun, different, and occasion based.”
“It’s a usage vehicle.” Translated: wine has lost the party, and this is an attempt to get it back in the room.
Gallo VP Marshall Dawson, on the blood bag
Translate that out of marketing and it is a confession. The bags are empty because the product being sold is not wine, it is an occasion. Gallo is not trying to shift two bags of plastic. It is trying to get a bottle of Apothic Red into a Halloween party, a costume night, a horror movie marathon, the kind of gathering where for the last decade people have reached for a canned cocktail or a hard seltzer and not for a bottle that requires a corkscrew, a glass and a surface to put it on.
That is wine’s actual problem, and it is a packaging and occasion problem long before it is a taste problem. A bottle is heavy, breakable, needs opening, needs glassware, and goes off once you open it. A can does not. Dawson also notes the demographic overlap: Apothic’s core drinker is millennial to younger Gen X, and so is Klum’s audience. Gallo is not chasing a new customer here so much as reminding an existing one that wine can come to a party too.
It is the same logic as Gallo’s wider push into alternative packaging, TetraPaks included, and it is why I would file this under strategy rather than stunt. A non-breakable, resealable bag is a genuinely better format for a crowded room than glass. The fact that it looks like it came out of a hospital is the bit that got it on the news.
Is the wine any good?
Apothic Red is America’s biggest-selling red blend and one of the most divisive wines in the country among people who write about wine for a living. It is a blend of Zinfandel, Syrah, Merlot and others, at 13.5%, and the house style is unmistakable: soft, dark, jammy, noticeably sweet, with the blueberry, boysenberry, vanilla and mocha notes the brand describes on the label.
Whether that is a good wine depends on a question I have never found useful, which is whether a wine should be judged against a critic’s idea of balance or against what the person holding the glass actually wants. Apothic is sweeter than most dry reds, deliberately, and it has built an enormous business by understanding that a great many people prefer that. Residual sugar in red wine is one of the least-discussed and most commercially significant facts in the trade, and the sweetness question applies to reds as much as whites.
At $10.99 it is doing exactly what it sets out to do. If you want a red for eleven dollars that tastes drier and more interesting, the wines that win my blind tastings under $25 are a better use of the money, and a cheap Italian red will give you more grip with food. But nobody is buying a blood bag for the tannin structure.
The celebrity drinks machine, Halloween edition
Zoom out and this is the year celebrity drinks partnerships stopped being about ownership and started being about occasions. Christina Aguilera bought into Champagne this month on a low-sugar platform. Apothic itself ran a Halloween campaign with Sarah Michelle Gellar. The celebrity spirits gold rush has moved on from putting a famous face on a bottle to renting a famous person’s cultural territory for a season.
Klum is an unusually good fit for that, because she genuinely owns Halloween in a way no brand could manufacture. Twenty-five years of a party that other celebrities compete to be invited to is a real asset, and the $10.31 price, the 10:31pm drop time and the full-moon clue are the work of someone who understands that the audience for this will enjoy the puzzle as much as the product.
The one thing I would note is how cheap it all is. Ten dollars and thirty-one cents, an $11 bottle, a limited online drop. Compare that with the money being spent on luxury positioning elsewhere in drinks and this looks like what it is: a mass-market brand buying a cultural moment at a fraction of the cost of a media campaign, and getting written about by every outlet in America for its trouble. Including, as you may have noticed, this one.
The verdict
It is silly, it is plastic, it is the opposite of everything the wine trade normally tells you to value, and it is working. The bags sold out fast enough that a second drop is already teased, and the campaign has put an $11 supermarket red in front of an audience that has spent a decade drinking something else at exactly the occasions Apothic is targeting.
There is a version of the wine industry’s current predicament where the answer is to talk more earnestly about terroir to people who are not listening. There is another where you accept that the format is the barrier and make something people want to carry into a room. One of those is more dignified. The other is a blood bag, and the blood bag is the one getting attention.
American wine is having its worst year in decades. Its biggest producer just responded with a plastic bag of pretend blood, and it is the most talked-about thing wine has done all month.
Sources
- VinePair: Apothic collabs with Heidi Klum, including comments from Gallo’s Marshall Dawson
- Dexerto: pricing, drop timing and campaign detail
- All Hallows Geek: launch details and sweepstakes
Product details and pricing are as published at launch and may change between drops. Apothic Red is a commercially available wine; tasting descriptions are the producer’s own and the author’s. Correct as of September 25, 2026. Please drink responsibly.
