Message in a bottle

Bottle on the right is the heavyweight

I bought a bottle of wine with a rating of 91 the other day. It was a very heavy bottle. I questioned whether winemakers use very heavy bottles to make it feel like premium wine. Alex chuckled at this notion but conceded that it could be the case. (It appears I hit the bottle on the nose with my thinking.) 

So Alex measured the weight of that bottle and compared it to an empty bottle from several days ago. The difference in weight was astonishing: 422gm vs 963gm. Really? More than twice the weight!

I've been reading about winemakers looking to reduce their carbon footprint in multiple ways, the primary one of interest is in reducing the packaging and making it more environmentally friendly. Some are choosing paper, others are going for lighter bottles. In either case, it reduces the impact of the manufacture of the bottle as well as the shipping impact. 

The Wine Society showed that glass bottles are the single biggest contributor to the wine industry's carbon footprint, accounting for 31% of total emissions. A further 21% of emissions result from shipping heavy bottles around the world to members’ doors. Plus, because glass can shatter, it requires extra packaging to protect it, which of course costs more to produce and ship. 

Glass is highly recyclable; however, only a small percentage of recycled glass becomes new bottles. Most of the glass is used in making composites so it's not as environmentally circular as one might think. 

The bag-in-box concept is actually quite a good one. It keeps the wine fresh and a study by Gaia Consulting in 2018 estimated the emissions of a 3L bag-in-box were nearly one-tenth that of a 0.75L glass bottle. 

Other alternatives being investigated are PET bottles which are much lighter than glass and can be made square so they fit together better. According to the Gaia study, a PET bottle has just under half of the CO2 emissions of a similarly sized one made from glass. But plastic is only recyclable a few times before it begins to break down and microplastics in the environment are a huge problem.

There are cans for bubbly and paper-like bottles, which have a unique presentation but what about their ability to withstand time. Not intuitive for me. 

If we keep our wine for our own consumption, we will certainly reuse the bottles multiple times. Perhaps that's the best solution. The message in the bottle is reduce, reuse, recycle. 

The Sustainable Wine Roundtable in 2023 produced a comprehensive report on the need to reduce the weight of bottles. 

For more information, check this out. 

Addendum 08-05-24

Verallia has introduced its lowest-weight glass bottle at 300g and it's made using an electric furnace powered exclusively by renewables. They will reduce their emissions by 60%. That's impressive. 

Addendum 17-05-24

And now there's a far more efficient hexagonal bottle design.