Not so green green bottles 8 January 2008

Shouldn't we be reacting more negatively to the overweight packaging of smart wine? wonders Tim James

Hypocrisy or self-delusion, or at least resolutely looking the other way, seem occasionally inevitable for those who try to behave with a little decency in a world which tries to make mere consumers of us. You can pick your way around as carefully as possible, but it’s hard to opt out. I sadly realised long since that if my drinking were to be solely guided by a concern for squashed vineyard chameleons or squashed vineyard workers, I’d go pretty thirsty.

Nowdays, those with delicate consciences must also think (or carefully avoid thinking) about the carbon footprints of their indulgences. To help them feel less guilty about their next plane-flight, many in Europe particularly are now woriedly examining the global-warming implications of such matters as food and wine. Local producers should take note, and tremble a little. Or do as Backsberg is doing, sequestrating its carbon emissions and becoming the first carbon-neutral wine farm in the country.

Some months ago New Zealand winemakers did some serious trembling, partly in anger, at a London Times article. The paper was running a series urging readers to put their lives on a low-carbon diet – including choosing goods in the light of how much fuel it had taken to bring them to market. Along with advice on insulating attics came the suggestion to buy French wine rather than a bottle that had travelled all the way from New Zealand.

It’s not quite as simple an alternative as that, as Kiwis quickly pointed out - a lorry-load of wine from Lyons to Dover might well be more carbon-guilty than a shipping container from Wellington. But logic is not always the last thought-process to be jettisoned when the average Times reader wants to buy a sense of virtue at low personal cost.

It is true, though, that wine is guiltier than many products of packaging sins, especially when it comes in glass bottles. They are recyclable, yes, but not always convincingly so when it comes to saving energy, especially when the bottles are emptied at a great distance (London, say) from the place where they’re filled (Paarl, say). There’s apparently already vastly too much green glass in England awaiting recycling.

The worst offenders are those producers for whom size matters. It’s difficult to think of a more egregious example of irrelevant pomp than some of the ultra-heavyweight bottles around. This obesity is a thing of the last few decades, but few prestigious wines anywhere in the world are now immune to the need to look imposing. Only some of the long-pedigreed ones can get away with the equivalent of an aristocratically tatty tweed jacket.

Locally, it’s probable that all expensive wines are obliged by the perverted values of the market to come in much heavier bottles than (by any rational standards) they need to be. Some are truly monstrous. The most wrist-cracking examples I can think of quickly are Vergelegen V, the flagship red from Capaia, Ashbourne (the brilliant pinotage made by the Hamilton Russell team) and Mvemve Raats De Compostella – but there are others just as grotesquely absurd. All good wines, incidentally, that should be able to get by without each 750 millilitres being packed in two bottles-worth of glass.

White wine also plays the pretention game: there’s a Reserve white blend shortly coming from Vergelegen in a bottle that is a vitrified hymn to conspicuous consumption. The bottle’s punt - the depression in the base – swallows my fist virtually up to the elbow. Its sole purpose is to add weight and, thus, impressiveness. (Originally punts probably developed to supply strength to the base of the bottle or to help give stability to hand-blown bottles by providing a non-rocking bottom.)

Worse, from a carbon-producing point of view, these massive bottles are all imported. So some will travel here from the factory in Europe, get filled … and go all the way back. If the readers of the Times find this all a ridiculous waste of the earth’s resources, who could do other than nod in agreement?

It’s perhaps something that consumers here should think about too. Whether they’ll be willing to swop their heavy bottles for the avowedly carbon-friendly (and rather attractive) two-litre plastic ‘pouches’ of Arniston Bay and Versus, let alone the Distell wines in garish ‘Prisma packs’, is another matter. But by the time Vergelegen V appears in a pouch, probably global warming will have already turned the Western Cape into a summer-rainfall (or no-rainfall) area and Stellenbosch will be growing agaves for tequila.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'

COMMENTS

From Jean-VIncent Ridon of Signal Hill Winery:
These are very valid points, and we must all start seriously caring about the consequences of our actions. At Signal Hill we started the year by moving all our wines into a recycled lighter style of bottles. The next step will be to offset the carbon footprint of the transport to our different export clients, so they do not feel guilty about purchasing our wine rather than their domestic counterpart. And I am sure the industry will follow, as we just have to look at Tunisia to foresee what our vineyards could be like at the same latitude.