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He believes that as the public starts to pay attention to the product’s carbon footprint, they will favor lower-weight wine bottles over the aesthetic appeal of heavy bottles.

Haas also noted that as organizations, like the International Wineries for Climate Action, gain more ground in the industry, more wineries will realize that these heavy bottles are a relic.

“They’re one of the things that have got to go if we are serious about the reality of climate change,” Haas said.

Talk to Your Glass Provider: The Win-Win Step

One of the mantras at Jackson Family Wines is that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” so it follows that when the company—comprised of some 40 wineries—calculated its carbon footprint in 2015, it learned that a big portion of its carbon emissions was coming from packaging.

“Approximately 25 to 30 percent of our carbon emissions’ footprint comes from packaging, specifically our glass bottles,” said Sean Carroll, the company’s director of communications for social impact and environmental sustainability. “So we started to proactively work with our glass suppliers to update our bottle molds and reduce the weight of our four highest volume bottles, including our Kendall-Jackson Vintners Reserve Chardonnay, which has been the No. 1 Chardonnay in America for close to 40 years now. We also started working with our glass suppliers to use more recycled material in our glass, which now accounts for 55 percent of the glass we use.”

Carroll said that moving to lighter-weight bottles saves Jackson Family Wines approximately $1 million annually in materials costs and close to $500,000 a year in fuel costs.

Given this success, the company is now evaluating and identifying other brands that can make the switch.

Bogle Family Wine Collection is the 13th largest wine company in the U.S. with 2.7 million cases sold in 2022, and it too has been talking with its glass supplier about reducing the weight of its bottles.

Ryan Bogle, vice president and chief financial officer of the Clarksburg, Calif. winery, told WBM that the winery is halfway through its glass initiative—with about half of its bottles now in lighter-weight bottles.

“This year we’re going through current inventory on some of the bottles, and then we’re working with our supplier, Encore Glass, on finalizing some molds on some other lines,” Bogle explained.

At publication time, Bogle is waiting on a finalized design for the lightweight glass molds, which have a premium look and will cut weight by 10 percent, from 550 grams to 500 grams.

“We’re seeing some cost savings on the glass. With prices increasing on pretty much everything, it’s probably helping us just keep up with inflation on pricing anyways,” Bogle said. “In the long run, we’ll probably be about flat, but for us it was more about looking at the overall environmental impact on that glass and just the way to reduce that carbon footprint.”

Although the lighter glass bottles will allow Bogle to stack pallets four high and be more efficient with storage space, the team continues to stack three pallets high, “just for safety.”

WBM