A heavy price

Making glass bottles lighter is an easy way to reduce wine's carbon emissions - yet it remains a weighty issue for the industry, with many producers yet to make changes

- RUPERT JOY

I don’t know about you, but wine is an important part of my life, and I want to feel good about drinking it. The inconvenient truth – to borrow the title of Al Gore’s 2006 film on global warming – is that wine lovers are complicit in an escalating climate emergency.

We are part of the problem. Of all the ways we can reduce the environmental impact of our consumption (see December 2021 issue, ‘Rethinking your drinking’), the easiest win is to avoid buying wine in heavy bottles, because glass bottles are the single largest source of carbon emissions in the wine supply chain.

From a purely functional perspective, the purpose of a glass bottle is to ensure the safe transport and storage of wine. The average empty bottle weight for still wine is about 500g, but it is not unusual to find bottles weighing more than 800g, with some in excess of 1kg.

Peter English of Accolade Wines, one of the world’s largest wine companies, considers 330g the lowest currently achievable bottle weight for still wines. Bottles for sparkling wine tend to be significantly heavier – at least 800g, depending on the pressure inside the bottle, the closure and the production technique used – but Accolade has a sparkling wine bottle that’s just 418g.

The more glass bottles weigh, the more they cost to produce and transport, and the higher their CO2 emissions – of particular significance, given that industry estimates suggest some two-thirds of glass bottles now used for US wine production are made in China and shipped across the Pacific before even being filled.

According to a study by packaging industry body Wrap in the UK, reducing bottle weight from 500g to about 300g could potentially save 30% of CO2 emissions per 750ml bottle in packaging production and transportation.