It’s good to light a fire under producers to lightweight bottles; wine lags other beverages, which have been constantly reducing the weight of their packaging over the past few decades. However, the LCBO is only applying this rule, applicable in 2013, to bottles selling for less than C$15.

Thus the new rule still valorizes heavy bottles: Producers may still try to position their premium wines with shelf-bending bottles under the false assumption that heavy bottles means better wines. But still, most of the wines at the LCBO sell for less than C$15 so the move will have a big impact from a volume perspective on reducing carbon emissions of the wine trade. Perhaps the move will encourage high-volume producers to opt for lighter bottles for all of North America, the same way Kleenex and other produces have French written on them when producers want labeling compliance for all US and Canada with a single package.

What do you think: brilliant move or despicable over-regulation?

But now it will remain like this…

…thanks to Green Party gains at the recent state elections. Read more.

Raise a glass of Kabinett!

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Already the largest producer of wine bottle corks, ripped from the bark of trees in Portugal, now they want their corks back!

Amorim operates a newish program under the name ReCORK America that claims to keep post-consumer corks out of landfills, a laudable goal. They have already signed up some Whole Foods locations in Northern California and they recently announced the addition of American Airlines Admirals Club lounges. Soon to be heard in taxis everywhere, “Yes, honey, I’ve got the passports but let’s go back and grab the corks and bring them to the lounge!”

Despite language in the press release to the contrary, ReCORK America currently has no specific plans on what to do with the corks they receive other than to store them in a warehouse in Napa, as stated on their web site. Contacted via email to see if their plans had congealed, they only pointed out that their partners pay to ship the corks back to the warehouse.

By contrast, the green building firm in Missouri, Yemm & Hart has collected almost 8,000 pounds (about one million corks) of post consumer corks since 2004. They make them into cork tiles for flooring and are still accepting donations. Let’s hope one day they start making cork iPhone cases!

With 13 billion corks pulled from wine bottles every year by Amorim’s estimate, there are still a lot of corks headed to landfills. Because corks are a natural product, they can also be shredded and used as mulch in the garden or added to compost as a way to keep them out of landfills. And don’t forget cork art!

Decanter has a wrap on the event in which a Green party member decries the bridge as simply stimulus money. Johnson is quoted saying, “Bridges have been built from nowhere to nowhere, but don’t let that happen. Don’t think that this can’t be stopped.” And to top it off, the bridge as depicted in the above rendering is an anodyne collection of matchsticks, not even a soaring Calatrava creation!

The bridge would shorten the commute from Belgium and Holland to the Frankfurt-Hahn airport. Opponents of the bridge say it would shave only 30 minutes of the journey. The state of Rheinland-Pfalz seeks to turn the airport into a cargo hub. But it already is a hub for Ryanair, the low-cost carrier that even charges for printing boarding passes, collecting lost and found, and threatens charging for on-board toilets!

If this burns you up, Stuart Pigott, for his part, previously was reported to have supported the burning of a puppet representing the state prime minister of the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, Kurt Beck, in effigy. (Where does one get a good effigy these days?) But if you want to try another, less-combustible approach, you could try writing to the Chancellor. We received a somewhat cheesy sample letter here today, which is reproduced after the jump.

“As a lover of German wine, I beg you to intervene on behalf of the winegrowers of the Mosel and put a stop to the construction in Rheinland-Pfalz of the Mosel High Bridge. This bridge will compromise some of the finest vineyard land in Europe. By allowing this construction to continue, you do a disservice to your nation and to the generations that will follow us.”

1. Kicking things off, consider this gorgeous “bowling ball” from Minnesota artist Jan Elftmann. We’ll come back to her at the end, but this is a good one to get things, er, rolling.

2. The wall o’ corks as you may remember from the 15,000 cork wall at Frankly Wine, a Manhattan wine shop

3. The cork vase: easy and can bring back some wine memories. As seen here at Pottery Barn. (Where we saved you $14 last year!)

4. Exquisite miniatures emerge from the Design Within Reach annual contest: the foil, capsule, wire, and cork from two Champagne corks to make a chair. Behold this year’s judge’s choice (and previous winners):

5. Recycle! A sustainable building firm in Missouri will collect corks to recondition into building materials: Since 2004, wine consumers have mailed in 1.5 tons of corks (approximately 400,000). Amorim, the large cork producer from Portugal, has also started a program called “Recork America” that may reconstitute wine corks into flooring and bulletin boards. There are drop points at some wineries and Whole Foods locations. But since flooring is boring to look at (except when serving as the background for this web site), here’s a picture of the cork cover for the iPhone!

6. Tip out a clock: similar to the popular cork wreath but a little more sleek and stylish. This one’s available for purchase at Etsy.

7. A trivet/hot plate pad or cork bulletin board. Classic yet practical–as well as actually feasible.

8. Apartment Therapy saw some nice ‘n easy place card holders.

9. Make a cork castle, such as this one in a wine shop window in Chicago’s Lincoln Square. And why not put Obama there? ChiBart

10. A chair made of 3,000 corks. Click through to the Gabriel Wiese gallery for many more styles…

11–BONUS! But the person we all need to emulate for cork artistry is clearly Jan Elftmann. In over 20 years, she has collected 50,000 corks. Perhaps her piece de resistence is her truck, which is covered in 10,000 corks. She also had a display of her Cork Bowling Alley at the Minneapolis Institute of Art click through to her site for videos and more of her art.

So what are you waiting for? Start uncorking your favorite wines! Or check out corks for sale on EBay. What do you do with your leftover corks?

Well, not exactly make water, which, of course is free from the tap. But I received a carbonating contraption known as SodaStream that adds some sparkle to your H2O. Fill a one-liter bottle with water, twist onto the nozzle, press button three times and voila! Sparkling water! Just like an old-fashioned seltzer water maker. After making probably close to a hundred liters of such water now, I find it to be very good (though it is best to carbonate immediately before consuming) and convenient (no running out of sparkling water).

And, of course, it’s low carbon footprint! As an offset to my wine consumption, I gave up bottled water almost entirely last year and it was the sparkling water that I missed most. Now it’s great to have it back on my table. In fact, since grape fermentation produces both alcohol and carbon dioxide, I’ll be looking out for the first carbonation cartridge that comes from captured fermentation CO2!

As to the pricing, it’s about $100 for the Fountain Jet model that I got with two cartridges and a refillable bottle (but having extra bottles helps since you can just keep them full in the fridge; UPDATE–enter code SODAGIFT to get $25 off a new soda maker for the holidays). At 50-60 liters of carbonation per $15 cartridge, or $0.25 a bottle, it’s neither as cheap as tap water nor as cheap as I would like, but it’s less expensive than bottled water–and lower carbon footprint, clearly, without the trucks hauling glass bottles and water from Maine or the Alps.

Now if only I can get the courage up to try carbonating still wines, then I’ll really be undercutting the market price for bubbly!

As a part of the launch to their new exhibit “Climate Change: The Threat To Life and A New Energy Future,” I’ll participate on a panel at the American Museum of Natural History about wine and climate change on October 28. Gregory Jones, a leading researcher on how climate change affects wine growing regions, will be flying in from Southern Oregon University. I’ll be talking my own research findings about the carbon footprint of wine. And Evan Springarn of David Bowler Wines, an importer and distributor, will talk about the various shades of eco-wines. Best of all, he’ll be bringing four such wines for us to taste!

Head on over to the AMNH web site to book your tickets ($20) now and prepare to stimulate the mind and the palate.

One point I’d like to underscore is that by far the majority wines in the US are consumed, oh, about an hour after purchase. There’s a joke in the wine trade that we Americans do have wine cellars–they’re called the back seat of the car.

Another important point is about freshness. Wine bottled with cork closure can be with oxidized or, worse, plagued by TCA, also known as cork taint, which afflicts annoyingly high percentage of wines–nobody knows for sure, but one bottle per case is certainly a plausible guess. Do you really want to donate eight percent of your wine budget to spoiled wines gods? For box wine, this is not an issue since there is no cork.

Finally, I’m really excited that nine out of every ten respondents in the poll say they would try good wine in a box. I think wine consumers–or a strong subset of consumers–are really ahead of the trade on this issue. With good wine, box wine’s longtime stigma can be used as a counter-culture sign of hipsters!

Okay, let’s roll with your questions and comments about recycling, aesthetics, wine picks, and more!

How is putting wine in a plastic bag with a plastic spigot more environmentally friendly than using recyclable glass?
— GG, Minnesota
This issue came up a lot, in fact, more than even the issue of aesthetics. But the trouble is that new glass is just as cheap to make from virgin materials as opposed to recycled and therefore has a low commodity value. With low levels of recycling in America, the majority of glass will end up in landfills and the plastic bag, if not recycled, will take up less landfill space. The cardboard of bag-in-box wines is recyclable. And even if the glass is not a petroleum byproduct in and of itself, it is so heavy that it requires so much carbon to be burned to transport it from the winery to the consumer. In the U.S., as I point out in the op-ed, 90% of American wine is made in California yet much of the population lives east of the Mississippi. So transportation is a huge component of the greenhouse gas emissions of a bottle of wine. With ultralight packaging, it’s wine with a little bit of packaging that’s being transported; with glass it’s often mostly glass with some wine in it.

The PCB effect of the plastic bags, inside the box and recycling the box were mentioned here. But, what about the oil it takes to make the plastic (non-renewable resource, right?) and is that plastic bag then recycleable?
— Unintended consequence, Lewisville, TX
Plastic bags are not made from plastics that have been known to leach chemicals such as BP-A. They are also likely to be recyclable.

I agree with the previous poster about the recyclability of the plastic wine bag with spigot. While it takes up less landfill space, it still can’t be (easily) recycled. And box sellers should make it easy to remove said box for recycling. –BL Dell
True, the plastic spigot is a slight minus. Perhaps one day you will be able to keep the spigot and stick it onto the next bag-in-box for the next use.

As for the bags, they are really tough, so much so that I use them for flotation in my boat, filled moderately with air (to allow for expansion in hot weather). I also use them for carrying and storing water, and as camping pillows. — Alan S., Maine
If only I were so resourceful!

Is there a taste difference between wine in plastic and wine in a bottle? –Sandy
It’s hard to make the comparison because a producer usually either puts all the production in glass bottles or all boxes. However, I did try the Cuvée de Pena three years ago when it was available in both formats. I could taste no difference blind. I was discussing this with another wine writer yesterday and he said that he went to a press tasting last year and they poured two samples of the same wine blind, one from bag-in-box and one from bottle. He said that one tasted fresh, the other tired. When it was revealed, he preferred the one from the box.

In Venice I enjoyed taking our own bottles to the wine store and having our choice of barreled wine from which to fill up! Saves on packaging and you purchase any amount you want/need. –Judith
Great thought, Judith. This really is the ideal from a carbon footprint perspective since it reduces packaging and reuses materials, such as tanks and bottles (though as a wine lover, I’d want to be sure about the freshness of the wine in the barrel). Unfortunately, it’s really not an option in the U.S. right now.

Could you please help me out with your math about the carbon footprint. what you say seems about extreme. if it’s true i’ll shout it from the mountain top with you, but i need to see the math. where/how did you calculate those numbers? –David Eifrig
The calculations are based on the carbon calculator that I developed in my research with Pablo Paster, a sustainability metrics engineer. You can see a summary of our findings here with a link to the full paper. You’ll see that we evaluated seven components of the land, vineyard, winery, packaging production and transportation, which often has the most impact on the final carbon footprint of a wine. As we stated, not all miles are created equal: air freight is worse than trucking, which in turn is worse than rail. The most efficient from a CO2e perspective is sea freight. That explains why for a wine lover in New York, a bottle of Bordeaux has a smaller carbon footprint than a bottle of the same wine trucked in from California. See more about our green line for wine.

I seriously question whether the “400,000 less cars” statistic is accurate. — Tom Hilde, Minneapolis
According to Jon Fredrikson, author of the Fredrikson Gomberg annual report on the US wine industry, Americans purchased 314 million cases of wine in 2007. I conservatively estimated each bottle to have a C02 intensity of 1.8kgs C02 emissions or 21.6kgs per case — or 6.782 million metric tons. The emissions of a box is .53 of a bottle (normalized per ounce). That would be 3.594 million tons if the switch were entirely from bottles to box (a savings of 3.188 million tons of C02). If the average American car travels 12,000 miles a year and has a rate of 20 miles per gallon it produces 12,000 pounds of CO2e or 5.4 metric tons. Divide 3.188 million tons by 5.4 tons per auto = the C02 emissions of 590,000 cars. Actually more than I stated in the article.

Carton boxes are ugly, unfriendly to taste, extremely common and all-around annoying. The ritual of uncorking a bottle, airing the wine, pouring in the exact right way has already been butchered by the insane screwcap craze. Take the bottle away, along with the pleasure of looking at how the light plays on the color of the wine (not to mention the label etc), and we’re well and truly lost. –Claudia
Well, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While I would not bring a 3L box of wine to a host (unless I were staying a long time), I think it is a beautiful thing to have a fresh, low-cost option for wine by the glass for weeknights. I have brought the succulent Yellow + Blue organic malbec in 1L TetraPak (find this wine) though to friends–it’s a great conversation piece.

* Great article on box wine, really enjoyed. We have been looking into for a few years for some of our brands, hopefully this will renew the conversation.–Susan
* We are working on a box from Friuli. I was hoping to roll out the white by next spring but it looks like we might need to accelerate the program a bit.–Jim
Excellent! So glad we might soon have more options. Beyond the picks that I mention in the article, someone else emailed about a new Cotes du Rhone 3L box that will be out this fall from the importer World Wide Wine. And something may be in the works from a Long Island winery. Let’s hope more importers and producers follow!

You are a killjoy. There are much more effective ways to reduce carbon emissions; why don’t you focus on those instead of this relatively minor problem. –wilburpup
True enough, wine consumption is but a mere canapé in our overall carbon diet. You will reduce your carbon footprint more by turning down your thermostat in the winter, taking public transportation instead of your own car, cycling to work, and eating less meat to name a few things–as well as throwing away the keys to the stretch Hummer! But the fact is that almost everything we consume has a carbon footprint so if we’re thinking about it for something like wine, hopefully we’re already thinking about the bigger things too. Also, since I’m a wine enthusiast, I’m not advocating giving up wine–why not perform your own carbon offset by doing something like giving up bottled water?

The excellent image is by Grady McFerrin and ran with the story.

First up, from the Loire was Thierry Puzelat, naturalista wine maker who made it through to the quarterfinals in the Wine Madness tourney back in March. I was ready for Thierry to bring the shazam since I am a fan of his wines. But the cork on the Vin Pétillant de France Naturel Non-dosé released with a whimper rather than a bang. The mousse–the foamy part–was weak! This pétillant did not have the gas (literally) to keep it frothing! Upon tasting, it was more like cider than Champagne–that non-dosé stuff can be tough to make. A bummer! One person dumped her glass! (Ahem!) Puzelat, upended! Shades of Wine Madness all over again!

Then it was on to the Strohmeier…I mean come on, who’s ever heard of Strohmeier? They’re an Austrian producer founded in 1990, which is practically a New World time frame. And it’s not even from the esteemed Wachau–it’s from Styria! Some southern part of Austria that has produced, among other things, the Governator! And the grape in this Schilcher Sekt nonvintage–Blauer Wildbacher? Let’s get serious! Now to the pour: major mousse! Frothing all over the place. Bright pink effervescence in the glass! Now on to the taste. Oooh, it’s got hints of strawberry, it’s juicy, it’s got good acidity–in short, a delightful summer sipper on the deck! No glasses dumped on the geraniums! Strohmeier takes home the trophy in this spontaneous $18 bubbly showdown!

Find the Puzelat petillant
Find the Strohmeier Schilcher Sekt nonvintage

That’s the subject of a short piece that I did for the new Hearst website, The Daily Green. Well, OK, I didn’t get to mention any patchouli. Click through and see the six “natural” wine producers that I did mention!

Actually, here, I’ll spare you the click through and list them here. But you still have to click through for the pretty slide show and descriptions! One day I’ll learn how to do a slide show here…

Clos Roche Blanche, Touraine, sauvignon blanc 2006 (about $14, find this wine)
Albert Mann, cremant d’Alsace (sparkling pinot blanc; about $20 find this wine)
Ocone Falanghina del Turbano, 2007 (find this wine)
Cooper Mountain, pinot gris 2006 (about $15, find this wine)
Porter Creek, Fiona Hill Vineyard, Russian River Valley, pinot noir. (about $39, find this wine)
Chateau Oupia, Minervois, 2006. (about $10, find this wine)

Blown to bits by a volcano in 1640 BC, the sliver of a Greek isle that is today Santorini has many old vines. They struggle. They cling to the earth. And the vineyard workers prune them into these nest/baskets intentionally to help them against the elements, notably the near-constant wind blowing over the treeless slopes. The other element is water. The vines survive the scorching summer days by collecting moisture in the nests at night when the fog rolls in. Sounds quite dramatic and I’ll have to check it out with Mrs. Vino one day. And the sunsets. And the food. But back to the wine!

Domaine Sigalas, Assyritiko-Athiri 2007, $16 (find this wine)
This dry wine has a nice creaminess on top of good acidity that makes it extremely user friendly. The importer, Ted Diamantis, told me that it’s the Athiri grape that gives it that richness. The Domaine farms organically.

For wine geeks, the other wine, a straight assyritiko varietal wine (find this wine), has some off-the-charts briney qualities with a faint smokiness and minerality–the gout de terroir of Santorini, no doubt. Ted suggested pairing it with shellfish with high iodine-levels, like oysters. Sounds like a plan.

In lieu of their own winery website, here’s a link to Domaine Sigalas on the useful site All About Greek Wine.
Check out a nice pic of a Santorini vineyard over here.

They tracked three hypothetical bottles from California, Australia and France and varied the mode of transport, with California going by air and the other two using shipping. Their results mirrored ours showing that the mode of transportation matters and that the mass of packaging also plays a role. Several students proposed that wine be shipped in bulk and bottled at the point of sale or consumption. He also added this detail:

The class discussion was concluded with an experimental component in which the students had the opportunity to sample a Yellowtail Cabernet Sauvignon (2005), Muscadet de Sevre and Maine (Loire, 2006), and a Ravenswood Zinfandel (2005, actually Sonoma + Mendocino but that is close enough to Napa). They agreed that (1) this made the assignment more interesting and (2) there are factors other than carbon emissions that should be taken into account when choosing wines.

I’m glad they enjoyed the research!

On a related note, the NYT ran a graphic with some of our findings in the excellent recent article, “Movable Feast Carries a Pollution Price Tag,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

There comes a point in the wine lovers’ evolution where getting wine from the local store just won’t suffice. We want a certain bottle, sometimes from the winery or sometimes from a store that offers a better price. So we have the wine sent by UPS or FedEx.

Of the boxes I receive, about half are filled with Styrofoam and about half with cardboard inserts to protect the bottles during transportation. In honor of Earth Day, which is the “greener” material?

My collaborator Pablo Paster calls it “a philosophical choice.” That’s because Styrofoam is much lighter than cardboard thus the box emits fewer greenhouse gases during transportation (though its manufacture emits 8.6 times the equivalent amount of cardboard says Pablo). Even though it can be recycled, it rarely is; new polystyrene is so cheap to manufacture. Thus it ends up in landfills where it takes up a lot of space and needs hundreds of years to break down. Cardboard can be recycled more readily. Both can be reused but probably aren’t reused more than once or twice.

Since I’ve expressed my opinions about the dreaded Styrofoam before, I’ll put the question to you: Which packaging material do you prefer, cardboard, with higher GHG transport emissions today, or Styrofoam, which doesn’t biodegrade?

Matthew Cain, regional sales director for fine wine importer Kermit Lynch for nine years, will be importing the wine through his new company, J. Soif. “Over a period of time I came to the realization that the wine business just doesn’t work,” he told me in a telephone interview last week. “Eighty percent of wine is drunk within a week. It doesn’t make sense to put nine liters of wine in a 40 pound box and ship it thousands of miles.”

So Cain, 38, looked to TetraPak. In other countries, he noted, “people are using alternative packaging to bring down the cost of wine. It’s not just for poor wine but for good wine. Here in the US, it’s only been used as a gimmick.” He added about his wine, “I’ve been in the fine wine trade my entire life and I have no interest in bad wine.”

Explaining his motivation, Cain said that he has seen wine prices go up, transportation prices go up, and that made him want to “bring a great wine to the market at a reasonable price.” His interest in environmental issues and research on this site about wine’s carbon footprint pushed him to make a sustainable wine from beginning to end.

Used his contacts in the fine wine business, he went to Argentina to find a producer growing certified organic grapes. The grapes were destined for bottled wine, not bulk wine, but Cain bought them. Instead of bottling the wine in Mendoza, he put them in a 24,000 liter flexitank. The wine was trucked over the Andes, loaded onto a ship on the Chilean coast, then shipped through the Panama canal and up to Montreal below deck in an insulated container (but not refrigerated). There it was trucked to Toronto where the TetraPak packaging material was waiting. Click on the map to the right to see the route.

The facility in Toronto is also certified organic. The wine is put in the one liter boxes that weigh 40 grams each (compared to 500 – 750g for a bottle) and loaded onto a truck for a warehouse in New Jersey. The total amount of wine will be about 10,000 nine-liter cases.

Using my carbon calculator, I ran the numbers on this wine, called “Yellow + Blue” (makes green–get it?). I figure that each 750 ml of Yellow + Blue Malbec has about half the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional bottle of wine from Argentina that followed the same route.

The price will follow a similar discount: Yellow + Blue will sell for $10.99 in stores and Cain suggests that the same wine in bottle would sell for about $20. But Yellow + Blue, weighing in at one liter, holds a third more wine than a regular bottle. I look forward to trying it. Are you?

find this wine (release about May 1)

Site reader Conrad sent in this picture of the Belem under full sail. As you may recall, the three-masted barque (schooner?) built in 1896 has been enlisted to transport wine from Languedoc to Ireland with a zero carbon footprint.

Sail.ie recaps the story and has the excellent picture. As a green enthusiast, I think it’s a cute, if somewhat headline grabbing effort (barque worse than their bite?). But as a wine enthusiast, whoa, if the boat’s a rockin’…