Wine can be a healthy part of everyday life. It used to be a healthy part of my daily life but moving to an Islamic country has made that inconvenient.
Being a frugal sort of person, I have always tried to find the cheapest palatable local wine wherever I am. Back in Canada, it came in a box. To be accurate, I would have to say that it came in a heavy duty plastic bag that was inside a box. They probably did some market surveys and found that the term bagged wine didn’t have much appeal. I liked to partially inflate the bag and use it as a pillow.
I was able to find very affordable red wine in Malta. It was made from a blend of local and imported grapes and it came in a returnable glass bottle with a metal screw top.
Today I saw a tweet from a wine person about how plastic wine bottles are becoming popular. Frederic Jacquet gave a very positive review of plastic wine bottles in a French newspaper. Cheap wine tastes just as good in plastic as it does in glass.
I can’t argue with some of the facts. Plastic weighs less so the wine can be shipped using less energy. I can argue that if reducing fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions were primary concerns for the wine industry they should concentrate on increasing local sales instead of exports.
The top ten producers of wine are France, Italy, Spain, USA, Argentina, Australia, China, South Africa, Chile, and Germany. The list of top ten consumers looks pretty similar; France, Italy, USA, Germany, Spain, China, Agentina, UK, Russia, Romania. The real waste of fossil fuels is transcontinental export of wine. People should be drinking wine that is produced in their region in order to minimize the carbon footprint.
Sorry UK, no wine for you (you drink too much anyway).
The biggest problem that I see with plastic wine bottles is that they will add to the plastic that is carelessly discarded. When glass bottles are used with a deposit/return system, participation can be over 90% while plastic bottles get recycled (as in placed in the recycling stream) at rates between 10 and 25%.
When a consumer is finished with their plastic bottle of wine, they will be tipsy. If anything, that will reduce the likelihood of proper recycling.
I drink wine very infrequently now but when I do buy a bottle it is glass and it is locally made.
February 13th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Plenty of British wine now, mostly white – good vineyards in the south due to global warming!
February 13th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Thanks for pointing that out, bilblogz. I actually noticed the production amounts from the UK on the second page of stats that I was referencing but I left my jibe intact so as to open myself up to criticism. As far as the impact of transportation goes, trucking good red wine up to the UK from France is far less drastic than trucking wine from California to New York.