I’ve explored sustainability from field to cellar, but how sustainable is it to get wine from vineyard to consumer?
The traditional image of Bordeaux is glass bottles packed in wooden cases, a challenge for its carbon footprint. But is this really traditional?
Château Bottling is a relatively recent phenomenon in Bordeaux. The Baron Philippe at Château Mouton Rothschild is credited with being the first to systematically chateau bottle his wines starting in the 1920s. It wasn’t until the 1970s that chateau bottling became common practice in Bordeaux, when properties reclaimed control of the process from vine to bottle. Before then, wine would be delivered to the negociants in barrels to finish ageing, blending and bottling in the cavernous cellars of the Quai des Chartrons in the city of Bordeaux. Some wines, including from the great growths, would even be shipped in barrels to clients overseas to be bottled on site.
Today about 40 percent of wine leaves the vineyards in bulk, to be bottled, sometimes aged and blended, by merchants or negociants before being shipped. Less than 5% of Bordeaux is shipped from Bordeaux in bulk.
A weighty matter
As early as 2008, research by the CIVB showed 20% of a property’s carbon footprint was transport, lighter bottles reduces this impact, but as well as transport there is the cost to produce glass and to dispose of it.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Jancis Robinson has been campaigning for lighter bottles. She includes their weight as part of her tasting notes and regularly writes about other options and initiatives.
Happily, just as there is a move away from over-heavy wines there seems to be a move away from over-heavy bottles. The lightest glass bottles (for still wine) are around 350g but can go up to a whopping 1,500g.
In addition to being heavy to transport, glass production is energy-intensive and generates emissions, but production is improving as manufacturers , under pressure from the industry and the consumer, try to reduce their carbon footprint through technology.
Glass has the advantage of being recyclable and currently about 70% of glass is recycled. In the EU, 12 million tons of raw materials are saved and 7m tons of CO2 are avoided each year thanks to recycling. White bottles can’t be made from recycled glass, but as over 85% of Bordeaux is red and most of the dry whites are bottled in coloured glass, recycled glass is an option.
In theory glass bottles are also reusable, although wine bottles rarely are, that could be changing – see below.
What’s the alternative? Last year I already looked at some of the options. It’s an emotive subject as packaging is important for image as well as for protection. But there are alternatives.
Bag in box is a light transport solution and, as more and more quality wines find their way into boxes, it is losing its ‘cheap’ image. In 2021 44% of the wine sold in French supermarkets was sold in BiB. Design helps with image, but recycling is complicated as plastic and cardboard components have to be separated out, but progress is being made on this too. Plastic pouches, with no carboard box, are also more common especially for rosé and white wines.
Plastic bottles also have a quality image problem, that reflects badly on the perceived quality of the product inside and eco-conscious consumers don’t want to buy plastic. This could be changing, luxury group LVMH have just released Nomade, the second wine of their Côtes de Provence property Château Galoupet, in a flat plastic bottle that is both light weight, space efficient and recycled. The bottle is made by Packamama, the new identity of Garcon Wines, mentioned in my previous post.
The plastic, or food safe PET to be more precise, is made from POP, Prevented Ocean Plastic, that is recycled from plastic collected from beaches, it’s slightly cloudy which some commentators think is an issue, but I think it’s kind of cool. Similarly, their premium wine from the chateau is bottled in coloured glass, a lovely amber colour as it’s made from recycled glass. It’s a risk for a Cotes de Provence Rosé as consumers often buy Rosé based on the colour seen through clear glass. If anyone can pull it off it’s a group like LVMH – watch this space.
Kegs and cans
Although kegs are a tiny part of Bordeaux packaging, it is a growing category across the wine world as on-premise buyers look for a sustainable and affordable way of serving wine by the glass.
Bordeaux wine merchant, Maison Idiart specialises in Key Kegs and Bulk Wine. The company is run by Nicolas Idiart, who travelled the wine world before coming back to his origins. They work with ICT Drinks, (In Can we Trust) part of Cacolac, for their canned wines.
For non-French readers, Cacolac is an iconic chocolate milk drink that dates from the 1950s, produced in Léognan in the Graves. Since 2011, they offer their canning expertise across the drinks industry and are building a new five-million-euro facility this year.
They work with a couple of negociants and cooperatives, including Univitis and Bordeaux Families. Although most of the wine they package is from outside Bordeaux with this new facility, watch this space. Cans offer a great branding opportunity with a support for bright colours and logos that appeal to a younger and more mobile market.
Closure
Back in bottles, natural cork is considered a carbon sink, it is a natural and renewable resource and can also be recycled, decreasing the carbon footprint of each wine bottle it closes. Screw caps do make bottles more difficult to recycle as the aluminium remains on the bottle neck.
Wooden cases or boxes
Wooden cases are deeply associated with quality wine, especially if it is destined for aging, and they do look terrific in a wine cellar. I looked into the subject of wooden cases this time last year, weighing for and against. I don’t think we’ll see a rejection of wooden cases any time soon but using cases made from certified sustainable forests is a way of reducing the impact.
Cardboard is lighter, uses 40% less energy to produce, is easier to recycle and can be delivered flat, taking up less space. Many properties will offer a choice to clients at bottling. Restaurants and retailers often prefer cardboard due to issues of storage space and recycling. It’s not always a simple choice, plastic tape and chemical inks are not that sustainable, but with new printing techniques it can be an environmentally responsible choice. It holds its own design wise, there are some fun cardboard cases designs out there, using biodegradable ink of course.
Labels
The same printing challenges apply to labels. Biodegradable inks and glues are more and more common and even self-adhesive labels can be sustainable. Vignobles Andre Lurton is in partnership with an organisation that collects and recycles the backing paper for their self-adhesive labels. Thanks to this, several tons of this paper are recycled every year.
Don’t recycle, reuse!
It might be hard for leading classified growths to let go of the control of on-site packaging and labelling, but these top growths only represent a tiny fraction of Bordeaux, (about 5%) so there’s plenty of room for innovation.
Damien Barton, 10th generation of the Barton family in Bordeaux, owners of Château Langoa and Leoville Barton in Saint Julien and, since 2011, Château Mauvesin Barton in Moulis, has launched a new initiative to bring wine bottling closer to the consumer. With the Borough market wine company in London, they have introduced a new Refill portfolio using his 225 range of red, white and rosé Bordeaux and the second wine of Château Mauvesin Barton, l’Impression de Mauvesin.
The 225 wines (how many litres are there in a Bordeaux barrel?) are all HVE certified, AOC Bordeaux, shipped in bulk to London and once there, bottled and labelled with labels made from sugar cane residue.
The Borough Market Wine Company are precursors, they started offering their customers bottling refilling back in 2002 using swing top bottles for immediate consumption. The new range offers corked bottles for wines that can wait awhile. These bottles are made from recycled glass and can be returned, sterilised and reused up to 30 times and then are 100% recyclable. Just 10 bottles reused and finally recycled saves the production of 300 glass bottles. They work with local stockists where bottles can be returned, collected and reused, all encouraged by a 50p refundable deposit. Clients pay for the wine, not the bottle.
Starting from scratch
As you can see there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. It’s difficult to change established habits and perceptions. Starting a new vineyard and creating a new brand is the opportunity to assess every option with no legacy from previous production. In 2015, when Sally Evans bought Château George 7, a three-ha vineyard in Fronsac, she made sustainability part of her underlying wine philosophy. As well as farming sustainably, she looked at the packaging options. Her Fronsac wines Château George 7 and Prince de George 7 are intended to age and so bottles were her obvious choice but, for her white, Château George 7 Blanc, she looked closely at alternative options. Being small may mean flexibility but it also has the disadvantage of no economies of scale when looking to innovate. After examining Bag in box (BiB), cans and Frugalpac, the prohibitive extra costs associated with small volumes and the uncertainty of the image impact and customer reach for a fledgling brand made her finally decide against these options.
Finally, she decided to stick with a traditional bottle, but chose green glass with an 87% recycled glass weighing 400g and working with a local bottle manufacturer with good sustainability credentials. Other than feedback from French clients ‘that the bottle doesn’t do the wine justice and should be ‘better quality’, the reaction has been generally positive.
She used 100% natural cork but made from offcuts. The first year she used Diam corks, bound together with beeswax and 100% vegetable polyols. For her latest 2021 vintage, just in bottle, she is using Amorin’s new cork where the offcuts are stuck together with a glue made from grape waste – that’s pretty circular. There’s no chemical ink used on the cork, the name is lasered on, it’s a bit more expensive but she considers it worth the cost. On a side note, Château George 7 also collects used corks for recycling if you’re calling into her tasting room.
Sally seals the bottles with recyclable aluminium capsules rather than plastic, and labels are locally produced from recycled, unbleached paper with a fine finish that doesn’t disintegrate in an ice bucket, which makes it about 90% eco-friendly. The label design is based on the wild flowers that grow in and around the vines, underlining her sustainability credentials.
Transport packaging is in simple, brown cardboard cartons made from 75% recycled cardboard (the rest from sustainable forests). The insert is made of recycled cardboard and can also be recycled, and it is all sealed with paper tape with no chemical printing so 100% easily recyclable. It may not be as impressive as her red wine cartons but again, it’s a compromise she’s happy with.
Sally emphasised just how much time it took to investigate all the options, she feels packaging suppliers still have work to do to play a more active role in sustainability, to help their clients.
A wine with promise
Established in the 19th century, right bank negociant house Jules Lebegue, sells a range of wines from Bordeaux and neighbouring Bergerac. I mentioned them in the previous post as they are CSR certified and promote their wines all have, at the very minimum, HVE certification.
The J’en fais Saerment range (a clever play on words serment = promise, sarment = vine clipping) are sourced from organic vineyards that protect biodiversity and terroirs that ensure wine growers are remunerated.
In 2020, with the Montpellier SupAgro agricultural engineering school, they launched Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that measures the environmental impact of each bottle of wine.
The wines are eco-designed and packaged to minimize the carbon footprint including bottle, cork, cap, label, cardboard and transport. A monthly follow-up measures water and energy consumption and waste production through the LCA dashboard.
Results show that a 145g lighter bottle made of recycled glass saves over 26% of glass per bottle, adding up to 21.75 tons of glass saved in 2020. Changing to natural cork has had a negative CO2 impact, the smaller label reduced almost 28% of paper use per year and digital printing reduced paper waste by 35%. Labels have no varnish or gilding and are printed without pollutants or solvents on 100% French recycled paper and are recyclable with a “wash-off” glue, with potential to move towards a bottle deposit system. Cartons are made from Forest Stewardship Council cardboard from local suppliers. according to the LCA, by using local suppliers they saved over 600km of transport.
Content or container?
How does this packaging influence the consumer purchasing decision? Do they judge the content by the container? Is sustainable packaging even on the consumer radar or is this a trade echo chamber?
Should the trade be raising awareness about sustainable packaging options so they become part of the buying decision or can producers make these new and innovative forms of packaging so attractive that consumers will want to experiment regardless of their sustainable credentials?
If lighter, eco-friendly packaging is perceived being used for lower quality wines, producers embracing these new solutions will be penalised by having an upper price limit that may be below its value. Or perhaps fun, light to carry, coloured bottles and cool designs on cans will appeal to a nomadic, younger clientele? A clientele wine producers are keen to seduce.
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To learn more about Bordeaux, you can buy Bordeaux Bootcamp here, and to learn more about Wine and Wellness read The Drinking Woman’s Diet here.