LVMH — often associated by wine drinkers with the likes of Krug, Dom Pérignon and first-growth bordeaux — has just launched a wine in a plastic bottle.
Galoupet Nomade is a Provençal rosé and there is nothing particularly unexpected about LVMH’s desire to invest in this booming category. The luxury goods empire bought the rather rundown Château Galoupet near Hyères in 2019, and possibly regretted it when, just a few months later, it managed to acquire a majority holding in Ch d’Esclans, which makes the best-selling rosé of all, Whispering Angel.
Thanks to the extraordinary global success of Whispering Angel, Provençal rosé has really taken off in the past decade or so, with producers competing for who can make the palest wine in the most eye-catching clear glass bottle. But I wonder how many devotees realise how bad for the planet the packaging for these wines is.
It is impossible to make a clear bottle from recycled glass and all these distinctive shapes will have required special production in energy-guzzling glass furnaces. The managing director of Ch Galoupet, Jessica Julmy, whose work has included stints in Shanghai and Buenos Aires and with Krug champagne, is more than aware of this. She has chosen an amber bottle that weighs less than 500g and is made of 70 per cent recycled glass to launch the estate’s rosé from its own vineyards. Glass is necessary for this wine as it is designed to age, although she admits the new bottle “created a bit of a tizzy because you can’t see the colour”.
The flat-shaped plastic bottle for Nomade, Galoupet’s second wine made from bought-in fruit, is the result of an analysis of various different ways of packaging wine and noting the dangerously high carbon emissions associated with the production and transport of heavy glass bottles.
On a recent visit to London, Julmy told me she was hoping this innovative bottle would widen the market for Nomade. Being so much lighter and unbreakable, it should be convenient for sporting events, sailing, festivals and so on.
Richard Lloyd, an operations manager at The Park, Accolade Wines’ plant outside Bristol, which packs about a quarter of all the wine sold in the UK, isn’t so sure. Accolade owns Britain’s only bottling line for this flat plastic bottle designed by Garçon Wines of London, but Lloyd reports that the package, so useful in terms of saving weight and space, “has not quite taken off”. He admits that the pandemic may have slowed uptake but wonders, “Does the consumer fully understand it’s recycled plastic?” Partly thanks to David Attenborough’s TV series Blue Planet, plastic is widely seen as the enemy. Even Julmy acknowledges that “plastic is a huge challenge in terms of optics”.
For festivals and the like, Lloyd is betting that canned wine will take off in the UK as it has in the US. He has seen sporting venues move away from small plastic bottles for wine and thinks cans will replace them.
Accolade offers virtually all possible ways of packaging wine. Lloyd is particularly keen on bag-in-box and admires Nordic nations that have taken to this convenient format, thanks to the monopolies there explaining its low carbon footprint.
St John in London has been a fan of boxed wine for 15 years and claims to be the only Michelin-starred restaurant to produce its own range: a Languedoc red, white and rosé. Trevor Gulliver of St John claims, “Everything is recyclable, from the cardboard exterior to the plastic interior bag.”
For Lloyd, “There will be a breakthrough for sales of boxed wine when someone cracks the recyclability of the plastic tap and the bag.” He is keenly aware of how difficult it is to recycle packaging made of different materials, which is not a problem with glass.
Damien Barton Sartorius is a more unexpected champion of sustainability. He represents the 10th generation of the Barton family who own the highly respected Chx Léoville Barton, Langoa Barton and Mauvesin Barton in Bordeaux. He is therefore deeply embedded in one of the most traditional wine cultures in the world, one that has taken its time, for instance, to embrace organic viticulture (though seems to be getting a move on at last).
But his perspective is unusually wide. For him, organic viticulture is just one small part of the jigsaw. “What about transport, water use and treatment, human respect, wildlife, our carbon footprint, relationships with local partners, health?” he asked in an interview with The Buyer. His eyes were opened when he attended an online conference organised by Sustainable Wine at the end of 2019.
One result has been his returnable bottle scheme. He sources a red, white and rosé in Bordeaux, branded 225 after the capacity of a traditional Bordeaux barrel, and ships them in bulk to London where they are put into reusable bottles by London City Bond to be sold by Borough Wines in London. Also included in the scheme is L’Impression de Mauvesin Barton, the second wine of his family’s property in Moulis-en-Médoc, possibly the poshest wine to be packaged in a returnable bottle.
The Gotham Project in the US was founded on wine in returnable kegs, like beer. It has introduced a reusable wine bottle scheme in several states. Co-founder Charles Bieler says, “It’s proving challenging to get consumers engaged. Keeping the empties and returning them to the bottle shop, despite a redemption incentive and consumers’ good intentions, seems to be a hard new habit for many wine lovers to adopt. I think that we will have to be patient on this one.” Recycling in general is less developed in the US than in Europe.
UK supermarket Tesco is trialling a returnable wine bottle in 10 of its stores as part of its co-operation with global reusable packaging platform Loop. According to Lloyd the bottle is a bit heavier than ideal at 530g because “it has to survive at least 10 lifecycles”.
Glass manufacturer O-I now offers a wine bottle as light as 300g but designed for single-use only. According to Melianthe Leeman of O-I, “We are currently also seeing an increased interest in returnable glass wine bottles for local markets, as this is the most sustainable packaging solution.”
For Lloyd, whose work involves being immersed in packaging wine, “My belief is that the wine industry’s biggest move needs to be a break from linking glass weight to wine quality. That is the fundamental change needed to lower wine’s carbon footprint. And the glass industry has a responsibility to make their furnaces more efficient.” He is hoping to see glass furnaces, which need to be heated to exceptionally high temperatures, powered by hydrogen.
I should point out that the liveliest tasting I went to last year was one at the Institute of Masters of Wine in November dedicated to wines in alternative packaging. Executive director Adrian Garforth observed that it was the noisiest event they had ever held. Beneath a live screen recording “the carbon footprint of single-use glass wine bottles in the UK so far this year” (726mn kg and rising) there was a sense of real excitement. And it was not just young people getting behind cans, bags in boxes, kegs, pouches and Frugalpac’s particularly light paper bottles. My co-author of The World Atlas of Wine, 83-year-old Hugh Johnson, was also tasting his way round the tables.
Inert glass bottles — however heavy, fragile and wasteful of space — are likely to continue to be the ideal package for fine wine that benefits from ageing, but there are now a host of alternatives for everyday wine.
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