In an important step towards more sustainable wine packaging, nine major wine retailers – Laithwaites, Lidl GB, Naked Wines UK, Naked Wines USA, Sweden’s Systembolaget AB, The Wine Society, Virgin Wines, Waitrose and Whole Foods Market – have agreed to reduce the average weight of their bottles by around 25% in the next three years.
Research led by Dr Peter Stanbury of the Sustainable Wine Roundtable (SWR) has shown that as much as half of the carbon impact of wine comes from glass bottles. His report on Reducing Wine Bottle Weight examines the facts and makes recommendations for change. The average weight of a 750ml still wine bottle is 550g, but Stanbury insists that: ‘There is no practical reason why all wines should not be presented in bottles around 420g or lighter.’ As Jancis Robinson MW and other leading wine commentators have argued for years, ‘lighter bottles is an easy win for the wine sector to reduce its carbon emissions’.
Stanbury hopes his research will dispel inaccurate assumptions about consumer preferences and bottle production constraints. ‘When you look in detail at certain factoids – for example that consumes prefer heavier bottles because they associate them with quality, or that lighter weight bottles are too fragile – it turns out that they’re simply not true. Consumers choose wine for a range of different reasons and making lighter bottles just requires slightly more careful handling on bottling lines.’
Under the SWR Bottle Weight Accord, launched on 10 October, the group of retailers
