Greener bottles | Financial Times

Aware of the heavy carbon footprint of glass bottles, Rosemary Cakebread has been researching options for lighter bottles for her exceptional Gallica wines made in Napa Valley. She emailed me recently with her dismayed reaction to what this research has revealed: “What I’ve learnt is that more and more wine glass available on the West Coast is in fact made in China.”

US imports of glass containers from China increased by 55 per cent to 2.1 billion in the five years to 2018, according to US trade data; industry estimates that year were that 70 per cent of the bottles filled by American wine bottlers were sourced from China, and that proportion is likely to have grown since. America’s domestic glass bottle industry has been shrinking too: between 2005 and 2011, 11 US glass container manufacturing plants closed, leaving 43.

Standard 75cl glass wine bottles vary in weight, from under 400g to more than a kilo. The heavier they are, the greater the carbon emissions from making and transporting them, which accounts for the greatest proportion of wine’s carbon footprint.

Increasingly aware of this, I started noting bottle weights in my tasting notes in February, wishing to highlight producers who use particularly heavy or light glass. On this basis, I would say that the average bottle used for wine is about 550g, although it varies by country, with producers in the US and Argentina favouring some of the heaviest.

In a recent collection of tasting notes on eastern European wines, I found one used by the Georgian producer Dugladze weighed as much as 1,025g whereas most bottles used by the Romanian producer Cramele Recas were only 345g. Recas co-owner Philip Cox points out that these lighter bottles — the fatter burgundy shape is easier to make lighter than the straight-sided bordeaux shape — cut transport costs by about 10 per cent.

Although many of her winemaking peers in Napa Valley seem happy to use bottles weighing 800g or more, Cakebread is clearly serious about switching to much lighter bottles. But she refuses to source them in China. “To my mind,” she wrote to me, “it’s not sustainable to buy a 400g bottle and then ship it nearly 7,000 miles.”

Despite the impact on the atmosphere, shipments of empty bottles around the globe are growing. Every month, for example, 200 shipping containers of glass bottles arrive in the UK from Al Tajir bottle factory in Dubai — albeit, in this case, mainly for beer. In 2018, meanwhile, Croxsons, a glass bottle supplier based in south London, acquired a furnace in China to supply customers in the US, Australia and New Zealand.

In a 2015 report for FEVE, the association of European glass manufacturers, consultancy EY put the proportion of glass bottles that travel more than 300km from furnace to filling line at 44 per cent. While China is by far the world’s biggest exporter of glass bottles, Germany is the second.

Some countries just don’t have glass-production facilities or offer little choice. New Zealand, for instance, has a single producer, whose bottles Master of Wine Steve Smith of Smith & Sheth has found so inconsistent that he imports bottles from Saverglass, based in France. According to him, Saverglass “seem well ahead of the pack on sustainability and their glass quality is first-class”.

In line with increased awareness of sustainability, there has been a laudable trend to reduce bottle weights. In 2019, the average weight of bottles had fallen by 30 per cent over the previous decade, according to figures from Statista. Accolade, the biggest wine bottler in the UK, has decreased its proportion of bottles over 500g from 17 per cent in 2017 to 3 per cent in 2020. Over the same period, the proportion of its bottles that weigh less than 390g has risen from 24 per cent to 42 per cent.

Yet for many, there still seems to be a perceived correlation between weight and wine quality. Sebastian Zuccardi is one of Argentina’s most respected winemakers and his company is the country’s leading organic producer. Yet he still uses some heavy 900g bottles for his Finca Piedra and Jose Zuccardi wines. He points out they used to be even heavier: “It’s really to do with consumers, because in some markets, size and weight of the bottle continue to be important.”

Indeed, part of the motivation for Croxsons’ investment in China was to supply heavier bottles. Its website reports “concerns amongst some of Croxsons’ customers that the industry has moved some bottles away from being super-premium, or even premium, to a lighter, standard-weight bottle. Clearly the risk to brands using a wrong-weight bottle is that consumers will feel a disconnection between the price point and the aesthetics that the bottle delivers.”

The substantial Languedoc producer Gérard Bertrand is another advocate of organic vine-growing but persists with heavy bottles for his top cuvées. His justification is common: he argues they represent only a small proportion of his production and that he is doing his bit for the planet in the vineyard and by using lighter bottles for the rest of his range.

The problem is that producers such as he, by putting their more expensive wines in heavier bottles, encourage the perception that good wine comes in heavy bottles. In fact, the world’s most expensive wines tend to be packaged really quite modestly. Bordeaux first growths, for instance, come in bottles that weigh not much more than 500g.

Chakana is one of Argentina’s biggest biodynamic wine producers. Winemaker Gabriel Bloise reports that when Chakana changed to lighter bottles 10 years ago, European markets welcomed it, but “in the USA we did meet resistance to lighter bottles and our importer says they have had a negative impact on sales . . . Asian markets insist on heavy bottles. But the only impact of heavy bottles is visual and they do not improve wine taste. We decided to spend the money [saved by choosing lighter bottles] on wine improvements (organics, biodynamics) rather than packaging, so we were able to improve quality, reduce the glass and keep our prices stable.”

Angelos Iatridis of Greece’s excellent Alpha Estate goes more than the extra mile along the path to sustainability and justifies the difficult-to-copy 887g bottle for his top Xinomavro as an anti-counterfeit measure. He is another fan of Saverglass.

Cakebread ended her email with the hopeful observation that in the US, “supply chain issues are forcing local glass plants to dust off their old equipment”. If “more wineries request locally made lightweight bottles, suppliers will take notice and there will be more options”.

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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