The message in a reusable wine bottle: Combat climate change

LAST month, a 24,000-litre hermetically sealed plastic container, or flexitank, carrying organically grown pinot grigio from Sicily arrived in a cargo container at Filling Station East, a wine packaging facility near the port in Bayonne, New Jersey.

The wine was for Gotham Project, a company that specialises in kegged wine, which it sells to bars and restaurants in almost 40 states. The Sicilian pinot grigio, the equivalent of about 32,000 750-millilitre bottles, was siphoned through a thick hose from the flexitank into a 6,400-gallon stainless steel tank. Eventually, it will fill kegs, cans and bottles.

But those bottles will not be the ordinary single-use wine variety that should be recycled (but more likely get trashed). These Gotham Project bottles are intended to be reused multiple times.

Researchers have known for at least a decade that the single largest portion of the carbon footprint of a bottle of wine comes from the energy used to manufacture that bottle, transport it to the winery to be filled and then distribute it around the globe for consumption.Some in the wine industry have begun to examine alternatives to the long-accepted, energy-guzzling methods for bottling and shipping wine. It turns out that some of the best solutions may be old methods of shipping and packaging, long ago discarded, like bottles that can be returned, sanitised and reused 10 times or more.

Gotham Project is one of a few companies experimenting with returnable bottles. Gotham's look like sturdy Burgundy bottles, green glass for reds and clear for whites and rosés. But they are embossed with "Return & Reuse" and sealed solely with corks, avoiding the waste that would come with foil capsules.

Gotham is trying out the bottles with a small group of retailers and restaurants in three states: New York, Massachusetts and Colorado. The reusable bottles are a natural next step for a company that for more than a decade has promoted the use of its stainless steel wine kegs as a better, less wasteful method of selling wines by the glass in restaurants and bars.

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"First and foremost, we care about how the wine tastes: Freshness was top of mind," said Bruce Schneider, who, with a partner, Charles Bieler, founded Gotham in 2010. "The second factor was carbon footprint and reducing packaging waste." Mr Schneider estimates that by selling wine in reusable stainless steel kegs, which each hold the equivalent of 26 750ml bottles, Gotham has eliminated more than five million single-use glass bottles from being tossed."Over three billion bottles a year go to landfill," Mr Schneider said. "Only around 30 per cent of glass bottles are recycled in the US. It's a huge problem."

And because the kegs use inert gas to fill the empty space as wine is poured out through a tap, the wine is kept fresher than it would be in bottles, which might sit around half empty for several days in a restaurant, slowly oxidising, before they are emptied. From Mr Schneider's perspective, reusable bottles are a natural evolution. It's after all not a new technology. Older generations may still remember the early morning arrival of the milkman, who would leave fresh bottles and take back the empties.

Reusable bottles have a long history in wine, particularly in European wine regions, where even today shoppers might carry their own demijohns to a nearby wine shop or cooperative, to be filled from a tank. Nonetheless, frugality largely gave way to convenience in the last third of the 20th century.

Gotham is not the only company to introduce reusable wine bottles. Good Goods, a New York startup, began testing its reusable bottle with 14 retailers around the country last year. Zach Lawless, CEO of Good Goods, says wine producers who are environmentally conscious in their farming and production have a special incentive to adopt the bottles. Simply switching to reusable bottles could diminish the amount of glass thrown away, but it cannot reduce the carbon footprint appreciably unless the shipping angle is addressed as well. That's where the flexitank comes in.

Wine bottles are relatively heavy. Environmentally conscious producers have tried to shave off weight, using lighter bottles. Nonetheless, plenty of producers continue to opt for wasteful trophy bottles, relying on a tried-and-true formula in which consumers equate heavier bottles with higher quality.

A far better solution would be to ship wine in bulk, using flexitanks, essentially giant plastic bladders within metal frames, rather than bottles, and then to bottle the wine close to where it will be sold. This cuts way down on the weight of shipping.

Shipping in bulk

Shipping in bulk is nothing novel. Every year wine is sold in bulk, often by producers making inexpensive wine that will be sold elsewhere in the world under any number of proprietary labels.

Gotham Project does not buy wine on the bulk market. Rather, under long-term agreements it buys directly from producers who farm organically or sustainably in Europe, South America, California and New York.

I tasted Beaujolais, California sauvignon blanc, rosé from the south of France, Tuscan sangiovese and Finger Lakes cabernet franc, all packaged in Gotham's returnable bottles. Each was fresh, clean and unpretentious, all delightful, inexpensive wines that were a pleasure to drink.

The British, by the way, are today far ahead of Americans in point-of-sale bottling. Jancis Robinson, British wine writer, estimates that as much as 45 per cent of all still wine imported into Britain arrives in bulk and is bottled there, generally by supermarkets that sell a great deal of inexpensive wine.

Creating a reusable bottle system is not nearly so simple as asking people to return the bottles they buy. Returnable bottles must be thicker and heavier than those intended for single use, horrifyingly so if they were to be shipped any long distance rather than being bottled and sold locally. They need to be sturdy enough to withstand repeated cleanings, along with being shipped back and forth from filling facility to distributor to retailer to merchant. Reusable bottles must also have labels that are easy to remove when cleaning.

While reusable bottles are laudable and idealistic, they are worthless if consumers don't hold up their end by returning them. When Good Goods first tested its reusable bottle last summer, Mr Lawless said, only 25 per cent of them were actually returned.

Mr Lawless said they learned asking for a small deposit, to be returned when the bottles were brought back, was not a sufficient incentive. But when Good Goods switched to offering store credit for returning the bottles, Mr Lawless said, compliance rose to 85 per cent. Gotham Project has not asked for a deposit. Instead, Gotham is testing an app that will give consumers a choice of receiving a small cash reward for returning bottles or donating that amount to an environmental charity. NYTIMES