Always disliked the heavy wine bottles with increased circumferences as they don’t fit easily into my cellar. Here’s an additional thought-they have larger carbon footprints:
They do, but I suspect the difference is dwarfed by, say, shipping an NZ wine from there to the US, the EU or Britain. While I’m very much in favor of reducing carbon footprint there’s something slightly amusing about a country whose economy is export drive and that ships products around the world worrying about the difference between a heavy and a regular bottle. But I suppose it’s one of those zero impact changes that saves a little and that’s better than nothing.
The carbon footprint different of a heavy bottle versus a light bottle, while not insignificant, is dwarfed by the carbon footprint of drinking wine from far-flung locales rather than closer to home, and is particularly dwarfed by the carbon footprint of longterm temperature and humidity controlled storage. If every winery on earth switched to SQN-sized bottles, it would have no material carbon impact. This whole idea is ridiculous. If you are really hellbent on lowering your carbon footprint for moral/political reasons, then switch to drinking young domestic wines. Worrying about the weight of your bottles is like Pol Pot donating $20 bucks to charity.
I don’t often read things that make me laugh out loud but this did. Not easy to make Pol Pot sound funny but consider it done. Yeah, the winery green thing is something I find so overstated. Certainly there are things we can do to have lower carbon footprints but ultimately there’s a LOT of stuff being shipped long, long distances wrapped up in plastic.
No kidding. But shipping either bottle from New Zealand to the US has a far bigger impact than the difference between the bottles.
Like David notes, it’s not that there’s not savings to be had, it’s that they’re tiny compared to the overall cost to ship bottles thousands of miles and then keep them for years in active temp controlled storage. Saying “I care about my carbon footprint so I’m going to look for lighter bottles to ship around the world” is missing the point.
Again, it’s not that one shouldn’t look for small changes as well as large, but that it’s the large changes that make a real difference. A non-wine example… I replaced all of my lightbulbs with CFLs. My 60 watt lights now take 14 or 12 or something like that. Yay! I also work from home and leave the heat at 60F in my house all day, keeping my home office warmer with a small space heater. Guess which change makes the most impact?
Too many of us talk the talk, but don’t back it up. We worry about carbon footprint, but buy fruit from Chile in the winter. We buy European wine (or S American or NZ/Oz).The problem is, if we don’t do any of this, if we retract into only local things and only local travel that has its own set of issues.
I suspect the carbon footprint of travel depends a lot on factors other than distance. Some modes of transportion are hugely more efficient than others. If you’re on the East Coast, it is quite possible a bottle of European wine that traveled mostly by ship has smaller footprint that a bottle of CA wine that got there by truck but maybe not compared to one that traveled by rail.
There was an excellent Dr. Vino post on this a few years ago that addresses the carbon footprint issue, etc that Ibelieve was discussed pretty extensively on ebob.
His discussion regarding the “green line” is just great… Points west of the line benefit from drinking trucked in domestic wine from Cali, while points east of the line benefit from container ship delivery from Europe. This conclusion has made it much easier for me to justify my preference for old world goodies… After all, I’m just trying to help the planet!
If the transportation is temp controlled, I’m not sure that’s right. Refrigeration is hugely energy intensive, and it takes a long time for a container to make its way across the Atlantic (as any Premier Cru shopper is well aware).
Carl… the article I referenced above covers this if you follow the link to the full PDF report Dr. vino compiled, but in short, reefer container shipping is still much more “green” than reefer trucking. Page 8 has a great table looking at the relative footprints.
“The greatest climate impact from the wine supply chain comes from transportation. This transportation impact begins with the delivery of agrichemicals, barrels, and bottles, but is primarily accumulated during the final product shipment to the customer. While unrefrigerated container shipping is most efficient, it also takes a long time. And air cargo, which can deliver product to virtually any destination around the world in a matter of hours, has an emissions factor of over 11 times that of container shipping. Emissions factors for cargo are in terms of g·t-1·km-1, or grams of CO2e per ton of cargo per km transported. The emissions factor applied for container shipping is 52.1 g·t-1·km-1 (CE Delft 2006). The trucking emissions factor used is 252 g·t-1·km-1, and trains emit 200 g·t-1·km-1(GHG Protocol).4 The emissions factor used for refrigerated container shipping is 67.1 g·t-1·km-1 (2003). Finally, we use 570 g·t-1·km-1 for air cargo (CE Delft 2006).”
Either way, it’s sobering to see the relative difference between the carbon footprint difference between trucking, trains, and ships.
The last few pages describe different scanrios shipping to Chicago and the results are pretty cool… Reefer ships do the job pretty well.
Not sure how much of that was tongue in cheek, but…
Le Havre to New York takes about 6.5 days.
New York to California ports, via the Panama Canal, takes 12-13 days.
Agree with the above…but oversized heavy bottles still suck. I don’t want to pay more for something that actually detracts from value (tiny fraction more difficult to move, significantly more difficult to store given standard rack sizing and the like), and I wish the marketing person who decided they were a sign of cool could be bludgeoned with one.
It is stunning. I worked as a operations analyst at Dole Packaged Foods in the mid-90’s. Margins are very thin so their cost data is extremely accurate and detailed. I worked with it all the time. The cost of getting a case of canned pineapple from Bangkok to Long Beach was a fraction of the cost getting it from Long Beach to, say, Phoenix. Aside from the volume advantage a container ship has over a tractor-trailer, I imagine there is a larger margin for efficiency improvement with the container ship.
And I’m sure Bordeaux can adopt Dole’s approach to pineapple juice; heat it down to a concentrate, ship it in frozen blocks, contract U.S. co-packers to reconstitute and can it before shipping it to distributors. Very efficient.
+1 on heavy bottles bad and long shipping as the biggest carbon factor.
I think it is worth noting that the heavier bottles have more glass, so more energy is used in making them. They also cost more, which more than likely reflects increased energy input. So, it is not just shipping them where the increased carbon is seen.
For those of you who have an interest, below is a link to the Carbon Reduction Program. It is but one program in the wine industry that is establishing new ground in this area. As understanding and practices improve, it is hoped that informed decisions will lead to decreased overall energy use and fewer impacts to the environment. Nothing is perfect, but good, and getting better, is a preferred place.