Wine’s glass bottle dilemma

What do you do when you’ve convinced consumers that “real” wine comes in heavy glass bottles?

Two recent news stories outlined wine’s glass bottle dilemma – if you’ll pardon the following – with crystal clear clarity.

In the first, a group of retailers, including Whole Foods and Naked Wines in the U.S., agreed to try to make the bottles they sell much lighter, given that glass bottle weight is wine’s biggest contribution to climate change.

But in the second, a survey found that consumers cared little about the bottle’s earth-killing carbon footprint. In fact, they saw heavy bottles as a sign of wine quality.

Talk about – sorry again – the glass being half full.

None of this is surprising to any of us who have been paying attention (or who reads the blog). The wine business has worked its way through any number of alternatives to glass over the past 25 years, where each as been declared the next big thing and then quietly faded away – be they boxes, TetraPaks, or cans.

My take, of course, is that the wine business could care less about getting rid of glass bottles, and that the survey is not so much a take on consumer sentiment as it is on the success the wine business has had in convincing us that wine has to come in a bottle – the heavier the better, and with a cork for good measure. Because only cranky ex-newspaper reporters want to drink cheap wine from a light bottle with a screwcap – or, Bacchus forbid, from a box.

So getting rid of heavy bottles is left to retailers.

Yes, some of that is because the retailers want to do the right thing. But lighter bottles will also save them millions of dollars in supply chain costs, and that figures in to their decision as much as anything. And, in one of those ironies that I love so much, the wine business might even benefit because someone else did the work that it didn’t want to do.