Why lighter bottles are good for the planet — and for business

It’s now an established fact that the manufacture and transportation of glass bottles are the biggest factors contributing to wine’s carbon footprint. An international group of retailers has been researching how to reduce this most effectively and is making real progress.

Of course, the ideal situation would be that all glass bottles were either reused or recycled because, unlike some materials, glass can be recycled virtually infinitely. (The proportion of recycled glass in bottles is currently 52 per cent in Europe, higher for green bottles and lower for clear ones.) But this doesn’t happen even in countries with admirable recycling schemes and clear guidelines for consumers. In the UK, recycling is administered by local authorities and councils, of which there are 333 in England alone. They all recycle differently — quite efficiently in Wales but less so elsewhere. The Scots have proposed a complicated returnable bottle scheme as part of establishing their independence from Westminster.

As a consumer who wants to do the right thing, I would love more interference from Westminster in this respect. Like many Brits, I’m confused by the guidance and far from convinced that what I so carefully put in the recycling bin doesn’t end up in landfill or get shipped off to Indonesia. According to The Wine Society’s director of sustainability Dom de Ville, Britain is “considered the dirty man of Europe” when it comes to recycling. Not good, and a bit worrying considering we’re considerably better at it than the world’s biggest wine market, the United States.

One option for reducing wine bottles’ carbon footprint that doesn’t rely on recycling is the campaign for lighter bottles. Working through Sustainable Wine Roundtable, a group of retailers — Waitrose, The Wine Society, Whole Foods, Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize — has joined with the alcohol monopolies in Sweden and Finland to fund research into this.

Since last September, Peter Stanbury has been interviewing interested parties and reviewing the literature with a view to coming up with a proposal that would see producers gradually using lighter and lighter bottles at the request of those they sell to. The SAQ, the alcohol monopoly in Quebec, has introduced such a scheme, though of course it’s easier to impose if there is a single retailer who can refuse to buy wine in bottles above a certain weight.

The SAQ has chosen 420g as the target weight for an empty wine bottle. (The heaviest empty bottle Stanbury has encountered was 2,850g.) The trade organisation British Glass says that its members have already successfully produced 250 million wine bottles that weigh less than 350g and they have proved resilient enough.

I’ve been campaigning for lighter bottles since 2006, for the sake of those who have to lift cases of them as well as for the good of the planet, and for the past two years have been including bottle weights in my reviews of wines tasted at home. An increasing number of producers seem to me to be using lighter bottles and I have also noticed that, despite my obsession with bottle weight, I am getting worse and worse at predicting from sight and feel alone which are the lighter bottles. Perhaps bottle designers are becoming more skilful at disguising a bottle that weighs less than 500g.

According to Stanbury, there are no massive practical problems associated with reducing bottle weights. The moulds may need to be slightly adjusted so as to strengthen the points at which bottles are most fragile, and high-speed bottling lines may have to be tinkered with. But he has concluded that a bottle weighing 420g or even lighter would be sturdy enough to be transported long distances. I know from experience that there is now a wide range of recyclable cardboard options for packing bottles with zero risk of breakage.

There are, of course, cost implications to using heavy glass. Stanbury, de Ville and I spent a day recently with Encirc, one of the UK’s most ambitious bottle producers, seeing just how simple bottle manufacture is if you can afford the energy to maintain a furnace at a constant temperature of 1,500C. The raw materials are just silica sand, soda ash and limestone. But as energy costs have been escalating, so have bottle prices.

Philip Cox of Cramele Recas, the biggest exporter of wine from Romania and a wine producer who is particularly concerned about carbon footprints, wrote to me recently, “frankly glass has now become too expensive for entry-level wines. Anything less than £6 a bottle is heavily impacted by bottle costs which have increased by over 20 cents per bottle in Europe in the last year (which translates to minimum 50p a bottle shelf price increase after all the margins and VAT). Not only has it gotten very expensive, there is very limited availability, which is even worse. We can’t get enough bottles.”

California vigneron Raj Parr told me he is determined to buy light US-made bottles for his Phelan Farm wines, bucking the national trend of shipping in bottles from China. Last year they cost 38 cents each. This year he’s paying $1.10.

But lighter bottles are, as a rule, cheaper than heavier ones. According to Stanbury, the manufacturers he has spoken to would be quite happy to sell more of them. They’d be cheaper to make and production volumes could be increased. The big retailers could easily start to impose maximum bottle weights on their suppliers — and might welcome the extra shelf space and savings in transport costs that would result.

The only stumbling block seems to be brand owners’ perceptions of what their customers think. Too many producers seem convinced that consumers still associate heavy bottles with wine quality (even though the Bordeaux first growths, for instance, which have represented the cream of the crop for nearly two centuries, don’t use especially heavy bottles).

An appellation such as Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which insists on a particularly heavy special bottle, may need to be convinced to change or incur a hefty surcharge.

I would argue that producers should update their viewpoint. Younger consumers are increasingly concerned with all aspects of sustainability (financial and social as well as environmental), as are wine drinkers in general. When UK retailer Laithwaites introduced, with much fanfare, a wine sold in a 100 per cent recycled glass bottle a year ago, it apparently sold out within 72 hours.

According to Stanbury’s research, it is mainly new wine drinkers who are reassured by heavy bottles, not experienced ones — and this is an impression that could be changed with education. His review of the literature concerning what makes people choose one wine over another suggests that bottle weight is much less important to consumers than factors such as price, label design and where the wine comes from. And anyway, so much more wine is now bought online, or in bars or restaurants, where we can’t handle bottles in advance of choosing them.

Stanbury aims to complete his research and make recommendations to retailers in the next two months. So if your bottle of wine starts to weigh less, please don’t complain.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first