While much is said about the environmental impact of improving farming practices, one of the main environmental culprits in the wine business is bottle glass. The heavier the bottle, the more energy consumed in production and more fossil fuels needed to transport the wine from here to there. And unfortunately, it has become standard to equate heavy bottle glass with high end product. We at Jus Soli have always chosen the lightest glass that we think will perform the simple task of keeping our wine safe inside (a rare occasion where being cheap does equal being greener) and are always interested in developments on this front. Fetzer is having a puntless bottle (the punt is the heavy indentation at the base of wine bottles) made for themselves that might be a great option for some of our bottlings as well. Don’t be fooled by heavy glass, it doesn’t make the wine taste any better, it just adds to greater consumption of energy in production and greater volume of CO2 emissions later. Who wants to pay more for that?

Here’s a Napa Valley Register article by Dan Berger on the subject.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Green Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.