Green Your Wine Cellar

My husband sent me an email with the subject line of "NYTimes.com: Drink Outside the Box", a note saying "Slowly the world catches up with you.", and a link to an article about boxed wine. The gist of the article was that bag-in-a-box wine is more environmentally friendly, easier to store, and European wine makers are increasingly putting their good wines in them.

I had noticed the trend years ago as I watched better wines being boxed and sold in my local liquor stores. What I liked about the boxed wine was it stored in the cabinet or refrigerator better than a bottle, blocks light from hitting the wine, and kept air from getting to the wine between glasses. At one point I even saved the bags to use for my water supply while backpacking!

What I didn't like about boxed wine was that quality wine wasn't sold that way, at least not for a long time. But several years ago I noticed a higher quality wine was being sold in boxes, and now I see that Australian and European vintners are going that route for "environmental" reasons.

I put environmental in quotes there because boxing liquids is a complex issue from an environmental stance, and sometimes (often, even?) cost-saving initiatives are marketed as environmental initiatives. Wine in a box may be such a moment, as is packaging any liquid in a box, or bagged-in-a-box.

The environmental benefits of boxed wine is that cardboard and plastic bags weigh much less than bottles. One winery reported it takes "11 trucks to carry the same number of empty bottles as 1 truck of flattened 3L SlimCasks to our winery", reducing their environmental footprint. And reducing their costs without necessarily doing service to their wine quality.

But if you look downstream from them, to the footprint of their users, taking the recyclability of the packaging into account you have to wonder if it's really a smaller footprint. It seems that more people recycle beer bottles than wine bottles, but then there is a deposit-return campaign on beer bottles in many areas (Canada seems to have a great program for that) so people have a financial incentive to recycle. But the Tetra-pak containers aren't recyclable in very many places at all, making it hard to recycle them even for those who like to recycle.

Then there is the issue of what possible health problems arises from storing and serving foods out of plastic. How much leaching takes place from the plastic bags or plastic liner in wine boxes into the wine itself? Does it effect the taste of the wine? Does the plastic introduce health issues via the chemicals leached into the wine, if leaching occurs? Time will tell, I suppose.

And don't forget that the petroleum used in the plastic bags or co-extruded ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) layered with polypropylene is yet another reliance on foreign oil. Part of being environmentally sensitive, in my opinion, is reducing our use of petro-chemicals and reliance on foreign oil. This box-bottle approach doesn't support that environmental initiative.

You know I'm all about being more environmentally active. And I'm totally against green washing. So though I love the concept of reducing waste, transportation costs, and making wine easier and better, I'm not convinced wine-in-a-box or boxed wine is the right answer. At least today. I don't know that this is a case of green washing, but I'm going slowly on adopting this is a green initiative for the hospitality industry.