Wine packaging in the modern world is not (yet) sustainable

Much of the wine industry is still in a world with traditions that might have made sense back in the 1800s — but that was more than a century ago, and is separated from now by two world wars, several pandemics and recessions, plus global climate change. You’d think some things would have changed, and of course they have. However, many of the operating practices seem not to have done so.

Until now. The “upside-down world” created by the current pandemic has lead some of those people who have been thinking about these things to act on their thoughts. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Notably, people in the modern world care about global climate change, as caused by pumping excess carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere. The modern response from the wine industry therefore can be summarized thus:

A comprehensive “cradle to grave” life-cycle analysis of wine’s carbon footprint involves numerous stages, including vineyard planning, viticulture and grape growing, winemaking, packaging, transportation and distribution, storage, consumption, and finally the end of life process.

To this end, in recent years, there have been moves to make grape growing more energy efficient and environmentally less disruptive (How do organics and biodynamics affect a vineyard’s carbon footprint?); and there have been moves to make wineries energy neutral (How winemakers are saving their industry from climate change); but what about the processes after the wine is made?

The packaging and marketing of wine is being changed as I write; but it is solely the packaging that I would like to write about here. On the other hand, much of the media focus has been on the modern way of selling (Covid’s winery wake up call), with a shift away from the on-trade and towards retail, and notably e-commerce and social media. Recent commentary during the pandemic has, of course, been about changes in the main channels used for selling, and whether these changes are likely to continue long-term (Global consumer trends in the short term).

Packaging, on the other hand, has received less media attention.

Packaging

The basic issue is that we don’t need half of the packaging that we currently use, whether it be for food or drink — most of it is used solely to display marketing material. Most wine is drunk on the day it is purchased, unless it is in a cardboard box, in which case it may last a few extra days. The packaging therefore has a very short useful life, as packaging, and it is thereby mostly part of a “wine image”.

Is it really necessary for the image of fine wine to be so non-sustainable? Even a bag-in-box wine is likely to be more environmentally friendly than a bottled wine. For example, bag-in-box wine is usually packaged at its destination, not its source, which dramatically cuts down on the carbon footprint during transportation; and both the manufacture and recycling of cardboard + plastic has a much smaller footprint than either does for glass.

There are three main topics that seem to be worth addressing when discussing the carbon footprint of wine packaging: material, shape, and closure.

Glass vs plastic or aluminum or cardboard

Several materials have been used for wine, since we stopped using goat skins and clay jars. They differ in their environmental effect is a number of ways:

• energy efficiency of manufacture
• energy efficiency of reuse / recycling
• temperatures needed for making and recycling
• weight and the cost of shipping
• tendency to breakage

On each of these criteria, glass comes dead last. Many of the issues are summarized in this article: Trouble with bottles. Most notably, glass requires c. 1,700 ˚C to be made, and c. 1,500 ˚C to be recycled — nothing else requires this massive amount of energy. Even aluminum melts at 660 °C, and it also has other recycling advantages (Aluminum cans get boost from anger over plastic pollution).

Note, incidentally, glass bottles are rarely re-used for wine, but they could be. For example, in a number of wine-producing areas, empty wine flagons are returned to the winery in exchange for full ones — this is a bit harder to do in cities!

Not unexpectedly, then, alternatives to glass packaging are increasing in use in the modern world, as shown by this graph from a couple of years ago.

Notably, cans are no longer used just for the cheap stuff (How good is canned wine?), and it has been that way for a while now (The evolution of premium canned wine). Sales are booming (Canned wine sales are bursting at the seams), although the current pandemic is apparently creating supply problems (US producers face wine can shortage). The current global situation seems to be advantageous for can use to continue (Canned wine company grows exponentially during pandemic).

In the matter of recycling, plastic is actually a good idea, if you can manage to collect all of the used stuff (and the various plastics are recycling compatible). In the European Union, recycling centers are compulsory, and people do regularly use them; but elsewhere ... well, you just have to look at the roadsides, rivers and oceans (plastic is not biodegradable). We can definitely do better.

PET bottles are used for drinks because most other plastics are not really airtight. PET is actually a plastic resin, which reduces air inflow, although it does not eliminate it; and thus PET has a limited shelf life as a wine container. It can be recycled as food-grade PET, but is often made into fibers instead (for clothing, carpet, etc) (Recycling polyethylene terephthalate).

The classic bag-in-box wine had its 50th birthday a few years ago (The wine cask turns 50), having been pioneered in Australia in 1965 (1965 — Cask wine invented). As a recycling proposition it has a number of advantages, being cardboard and plastic (The wine innovation that deserves more attention).

More recently, the idea of making “bottles” out of paper products has moved over to the alcohol industry, for eons having been used for dairy products and fruit juices. The wine people seem to be more surprised than over-joyed (eg. Paper beer, wine and spirits bottles are becoming a reality; Paper wine bottle launched: what is it like?), although premium wines were first marketed a decade ago (Time could be right for tetra pak wine). The main advantage is the massively reduced carbon footprint (Paper wine bottle launched with 84% lower carbon footprint) — paper is also biodegradable, even if it is not recycled, unlike glass, aluminum, or plastic.

Round vs flat

Bottles can be manufactured in almost any shape you like, but cylindrical is the most common one for wine bottles (Why are wine bottles round in shape?). This is inefficient in at least two ways:

• spatial use for storage (warehouse / home)
• energy efficiency of delivery.

Put simply, stacking cylinders wastes space, and creating and using that extra space requires energy. I need to have a bigger storage space in my cellar, and transportation methods need to be larger. Making bottles flatter rather than round, means that they can be stacked much more efficiently. I could have a much smaller storage space; and trucks, boats and planes would all be transporting more wine per dollar of cost.

Irrespective of what they are made out of, a cylindrical shape is an unnecessary hang-over from previous times. Let's face it, a flat bottle will even fit through most letterboxes (In an upside-down world, is America ready for flat bottles?).

Obviously, bag-in-box wine stacks far more efficiently than does even a flattish bottle; and a Mateus Rosé glass bottle has the worst shape of all (which originally had to be filled by hand, because there were no suitable bottling lines).

Cork vs screw cap

For some people, it will always be a cork or nothing, as far as wine bottles are concerned. Cork is certainly better than an oily rag, which was used up until the 1600s; but our descendants may not be so enamored of continuing to use cork.

Environmentally, corks are generally neither reused nor recycled, although they actually can be recycled (Wine trash – new uses for old garbage). That sounds bad, in itself. This means that the Portuguese farmers who grow the trees need to keep producing new corks, indefinitely. This maintains the trees, of course, because the farmers would have to replace them with some other crop, if the cork trees cease to be economic. Most cork trees are on farms; and they would presumably become an endangered species if we completely stop using their bark (apparently, two-third of all cork usage is for wine bottles).

The main alternative to a cork closure is a screw cap, developed in France in the 1960s, but they were commissioned to do so by an Australian company (Who invented the screwcap?). There were commercial trials in Australia in the late 1970s, but these were abandoned by the winemakers, because the caps were not popular with wine drinkers.

However, by the end of the 1990s screw caps were widely championed in Australia and New Zealand, as the winemakers had gotten sick of the poor quality of the corks they usually ended up with (see: Everything you ever wanted to know about cork taint).* The dumping of poor corks in the southern hemisphere was denied, of course; but the quality of corks has allegedly been addressed since then, anyway (Cork Supply comes close to eliminating TCA), and everyone should now have access to the good ones. [Note: many of the complaints are actually about premature oxidation, not TCA taint.]

Anyway, it seems unlikely that the Australians and New Zealanders, in particular, will have much future need for those corks. The majority of their wines continue to do very well under a screw cap, in terms of both freshness and the ability to age for decades (eg. Trinity Hill Homage switches to screwcap).** So, why change back? The ceremony of using a corkscrew may be romantic, but it is very 1800s, not 2000s.

Barriers to change

These have been summed up simply by Wine Intelligence:

Despite the increasing environmental consciousness of consumers driving the purchase of alternative packaging, the main barrier to purchasing alternative packaging formats is the underlying preference for standard glass bottles. Smaller format bottles are seen as delivering comparatively poor value for money, whilst bag-in-box is considered to not keep wine as fresh. Additionally, the alternative packaging formats are strongly associated with specific wine drinking occasions – standard glass bottles and magnums for formal occasions, canned wine for on-the-go and bag-in-box for informal social events.

These barriers are psychological, and need to be changed by social pressure.

Concluding comments

We all care about our personal environment, because we have to live in it; and when we don't like that environment we complain about it. However, some people are more aware than others about what makes our environment the way it is, and what we might do to change it, if we don't like it that way. So, the distinction between our own environment and The Environment is purely semantic — thinking about The Environment is one way to improve our own environment.

For a wine consumer, the wine industry is part of both The Environment and our own environment — is it surprising that I sometimes wonder about the future of the wine business? Packaging needs to reflect this issue, just as it does in both the vineyard and the winery. It seems a bit sad that we would need an “upside-down world” created by a pandemic, to motivate a lot more thinking seriously about changes to the wine world.

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* As an example, in 2017 Chris Shanahan reported on a 60-vintage vertical tasting of Wynns Coonawarra Estate Cabernet Sauvignon (Australia): there was “wide variability in the condition of the wines we tasted” due to “cork-related oxidation”. He had noted the same thing about a comparative tasting of 27 rieslings from the Canberra region (Australia) in 2013: “The adoption of screw cap by Australian winemakers is one of the great quality breakthroughs of modern times.” Variation in storage conditions also has less of an impact on wines with screw caps, making cellaring more reliable.

** As a counter-point, in 2015 Chris Shanahan reported receiving this note from Bowen Estate, my favorite Coonawarra winery;

We have been bottling our red wines with cork or screw cap closures for at least the last ten years. Members of our mailing list and cellar door tasters can purchase their preference — and to date cork closure sales are winning. We also have found that the cork closure has stood above the screw cap in all of our tastings; that is not just our preference, but with trade and consumers tasters.

The once seemingly inherent and prolific problems with cork are being addressed in earnest by cork producers, and as the quality of cork improves we feel that the prevalence of ‘cork taint’ is decreasing. Cork producers are very conscious of their market share loss and are actively pursuing a ‘clean green and best’ closure.