Glass bottles and tetra packs 6 November 2006

Statistics about how wine is sold might cause surprise

Wine comes, basically in a 750 millilitre glass bottle…. doesn’t it? Yes, probably – for most readers of this website, at any rate those who lead something of a sheltered existence and worry whether a screwcap on a glass bottle is indanger of seeming pretty downmarket. But of all the ‘natural wine’ sold in South Africa, scarcely more than a quarter is sold in this way. True, 45 per cent of wine by volume is sold in glass containers, but over 40 percent of that wine is in larger bottles (up to 4.5 litres) – or smaller ones, although only a very little of the latter, presumably mostly to airlines.

If less than half the volume of wine sales is in glass what about the rest? Bag-in-box (overwhelmingly in five-litre packages) accounts for a bit over one-fifth of the volume (21.3 percent), and plastic containers are in third place, accounting for just a little less (20.7 percent).

The more-or-less-infamous foil bags – the packaging which seem destined to be soon outlawed in the probably vain hope that the move will help deal with deeply entrenched problems of alcoholism ­– contain over 11 percent of wine sold; again, the size of these bags is mostly five litres.

In last place come tetra-packs – mostly half-litre or one-litre ‘bricks’. Just 1.6 percent of wine is sold in this way.

The figures – released in the latest ‘Wine Industry Information’ newsletter from Sawis (South African Wine Industry Information and Statistics) – are for the first eight months of 2006. Sawis draws comparisons with the situation in 2006, showing that sales of wine in glass containers have been steadily increasing over the period – no doubt gladdening the hearts of shareholders in monopolistic Consol Glass. Sales of the despised foil bags decreased by 56.1 percent from 2002 to 2006 – a rate more likely consequent on the continued threat of their being made illegal than on a decline in their popularity.