Lageder is clearly taking a big step in the right direction with its new bottles, which are amongst the lightest glass bottles we have found. Super heavyweight wine bottle 750 ml: 1198 gramsĪn ultra-heavyweight bottle of a wine from China: 1218 grams. Older Lageder wine bottle 750 ml: 750 grams Previous Lageder wine bottle 750 ml: 650 grams New Lageder wine bottle:750 ml: 450 grams Lightweight wine bottle 750 ml: 444 grams One liter tetra-pak wine container: 40 grams. Wine can 375 ml: 16 grams (x 2 = 32 grams) Here is the range of weights from lightest to heaviest. Just for fun I got out the group of bottles and alternative packing that I used in the Wine Wars talks to provide context. Unexpected heavy and lightweight bottles are swept away to be weighed and recorded at the end of the meal. Sue hefts each bottle and makes the call. Lageder knows they can’t solve that problem, but they can take steps to help.īottle weight is a frequent topic of conversation at The Wine Economist dinner table. A lot of “recycled” materials end up in the landfill. Putting a bottle in the recycle bin doesn’t guarantee that it will actually be recycled. Lageder is also eliminating metal such as screwcaps and foil capsules that might make their bottles difficult to recycle. It is called Summa and is deliberately not patented so that many winemakers are motivated to switch to lightweight bottles,” adds Helena Lageder. Strangely enough, many people still believe today that a valuable wine must be equipped with a heavy bottle,” says Alois Clemens Lageder. “Of course, there are already lightweight bottles on the market, but there is hardly a Burgundy bottle that is so light and still meets the demands of a valuable wine. The difference is subtle, but it is there. The bottle on the left in the image above is the old heavier bottle and the one on the right is the new sleeker product. So they did it again.Īnd Lageder is doing it again, with a special new Burgundy-style bottle that takes the weight down to just 450 grams, which allows the winery to reduce glass use by 17% or 87 tons. Jackson moved to lighter glass and then waited for a negative reaction … that never came. But obviously this isn’t always the case, as Katie Jackson of Jackson Family Wines told us a couple of years ago at the Porto Climate Change Leadership Conference. Some winemakers I know think that the weight of the bottle is an important marketing factor - heavy bottles signal quality. Their search for improved operational sustainability caused them to start thinking about wine bottles back in 2013, when they reduced bottle weight from 750 grams per bottle to 650 grams. Lageder’s commitment to the environment is unquestioned - they are one of Italy’s leading biodynamic estates. I was reminded of the heavy bottle issue when a press release from Alois Lageder, the famous Alto Adige wine producer, appeared in my email inbox. They usually expressed great surprise at the difference and wondered why very heavy bottles were needed when lighter-weight alternatives are available. I asked for a couple of volunteers to come forward to heft bottles of different weights. I used to include a segment about wine bottle weight in one of my Wine Wars talks. I’d invite you to weigh the next ten wine bottles that you open just to see big the gap is between the heaviest and lightest bottles. Glass bottles are an important part of wine’s carbon footprint and reducing weight even a little can have a significant impact when multiplied by the billions of bottles of wine that are produced and sold each year. One simple action is this: use lighter bottles. What can a wine producer do to improve sustainability and signal it clearly to consumers? How much does that wine bottle weight? The answer, too often, is simply too much.Įveryone talks about sustainability in the wine business (or at least that’s what it feels like sometimes), but how much of it is backed up by action and how much amounts to little more than greenwashing? That’s an important question and a complicated one, since sustainability has so many aspects and complicated trade-offs.
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