Serious Grape: Back to the Barrels? An Old-Fashioned Proposal
On Fridays, Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 drops by with Serious Grape. This week, she rethinks how we should make, package, and ship wine.
Photograph from brewrat on Flickr
Picture yourself walking into your favorite market. You've got your reusable grocery bags and a few wine bottles with screw caps.
You do your shopping, you head to the wine section before checking out, and a nice person in the wine section takes your wine bottles. He or she either fills them with wine or cleans them and gives you replacements, filling the new bottles with wine and screwing on the cap.
In a time when everyone is thinking about alternative packaging and the environment, why isn't anyone talking about going back to the days of buying wine straight from the barrels?
I was inspired to think about these issues by my fellow wine blogger, Tyler Colman. Author of the recently published book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (University of California Press), Colman blogs about wine under the nickname Dr. Vino. Because of his thoughtful research and writing, I've come to share his concerns about the enormous carbon footprint that wine leaves on the environment.
Much of this footprint results from shipping. Essentially, we ship wine very inefficiently in multiple, relatively small, containers. Glass is heavy, as are the liquids the glass carries. Sure, there's boxed wine, but this hasn't really caught the public imagination, and it still involves recycling and shipping issues. Ship wine in a bigger container, however, and you leave a smaller footprint.
One barrel contains enough wine to fill 300 bottles. When you ship wine in a big, reusable and recyclable container like a barrel, you are moving wine from its source to its destination, which does far less damage to the environment.
Wine is sold from barrels directly to consumers all over the world. Here in the United States, wine used to be sold this way—before Prohibition. Since Prohibition, however, the government has erected complicated legal barriers that restrict consumer access to wine and limit the ways wine can be bought and sold.
It's time for all that to change.
If you feel it's time for politicians to get out of the wine business, you can make your feelings known at Free the Grapes!, an organization established to help remove the last vestiges of Prohibition from the United States.
If you also feel that it's time for us to start considering alternative ways to buy wine and find alternative energy sources, then start lobbying your local markets. We know that many Americans (specifically Whole Foods shoppers) are willing to pay more and make an extra effort if it means making less of an impact on the environment.
I'm not saying it will be easy or happen overnight, but Tyler Colman's work has convinced me that we need to rethink how we make, package, and ship wine. Do you agree?
View other entries from Serious Grape.
Add a comment:
Previewing your comment:
HTML Hints
Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>
Comment Guidelines
Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.
If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.
12 Comments:
I'm pretty certain that in Quebec, you can do this. Last time I was at the SAQ Depot in Hull they had a sort of "fill-your-own" station there. Probably wouldn't fly in Ontario though. Any other Canadian Eaters know much about this?
indykrap at 11:32AM on 10/03/08
Hmm, seems much easier to store a couple cases of one wine and not an entire barrel. Think of how many wines Whole Foods carries. Imagine having a barrel for each. How big is the carbon footprint from building that huge storage room? And once you have your giant storage room, now there has to be some sort of very good system so your wine fetcher doesn't get lost in the maze just trying to fill your bottle.
amanda0730 at 1:20PM on 10/03/08
There are still some wineries that do this. But the biggest problem for doing it in retail spaces is that it severely reduces the wines that a store will carry. How many grocery stores are going to stock 30 full-sized wine barrels? (That would be 5 options for 6 different varietals or styles, that is far fewer than all but what most gas station convenience stores carry). The American retail system is about choice, while this could work for a chain's private label, they would have to continue stocking conventional wines/bottles in order to draw enough consumers. The other big concern I see is the wine going bad within the barrel if it is sitting for too long. Other than adding constant nitrogen to force out oxygen, the option is to ship the wine in a bag in a barrel and then the barrel is doing nothing but adding to shipping weight.
CPWineman at 1:30PM on 10/03/08
The way this worked in Italy when I was there years ago was that there was a barrel of red and a barrel of white in the back of the grocery/general store. Table wines but perfectly fine, and cheap. You always had an empty wine bottle from somewhere, and you could fill it up for a few lire. If you didn't like the wines the guy on your street carried, you walked a block or two over and tried the next one. It was perfect for broke students like me back then, but upscale WH types? Maybe a few cheap and cheerful house wines might sell from the barrel, but I can't see it working for most broad market wine sellers.
pourgirl at 1:38PM on 10/03/08
Deb, thanks for mentioning Free the Grapes! Yes, the exclamation point is part of our name and our goal is to channel consumer frustration over direct shipping prohibitions into constructive action (i.e., better laws). The Supreme Court may have ruled on the issue, but we still have more grapes to free.
JeremyBenson at 4:29PM on 10/03/08
I'd have to agree with the previous commenters, as much as I really love the notion (and by the way, I think it may be legal for producers in CA to do this - for example, some micro-breweries have refillable "growlers". But I suspect this is at the producer location only, not the retailer.)
A barrel weighs several hundred pounds full, so you would need a large enough truck to make that delivery safely, and a forklift at each end to move it - you either have to take the 'lift with you or there has to be one available. Kind of leaves the smaller retailers out of the picture...
eljefe at 4:46PM on 10/03/08
I'd have to agree with the previous commenters, as much as I really love the notion (and by the way, I think it may be legal for producers in CA to do this - for example, some micro-breweries have refillable "growlers". But I suspect this is at the producer location only, not the retailer.)
A barrel weighs several hundred pounds full, so you would need a large enough truck to make that delivery safely, and a forklift at each end to move it - you either have to take the 'lift with you or there has to be one available. Kind of leaves the smaller retailers out of the picture...
eljefe at 1:25AM on 10/04/08
Very very traditional consumers of wine much prefer to buy wines directly from the barrel or the vat. This has been usual in our winery in the last decades. Some of them come here between March and May, just after the malolatic fermentation has occurred, with their own bottles and demijohns to take home a wine they think is healthier and more genuine.
As you say, probably is old-fashioned, but wineries can find here a good way to sell their wines.
oscarquevedo at 7:16AM on 10/04/08
I can't drink alcohol so this might be a bit odd coming from me, but in principle if this ever went through, this would be a wonderful boon for local growers by potentially opening people's eyes and going to the source to purchase wins, or as Pourgirl mentions, patronizing a store that has a particular flavor that you want.
I guess it's really silly how many wines there are at your average grocery store chain (300+ types), and thinking about how each wine comes in a(several) case(s), and each case is delivered to each grocery store. For the amount of floor space all those wines take, 3 barrels would take up less than 1/2 the floor space.
If the particular barrel doesn't sell well, get a different type next time an order needs to be placed. Warehousing, ordering, and contract negotiation for wine would change, but I'm sure all that's changed over time anyway.
Cassaendra at 9:42AM on 10/04/08
One other issue would most likely be storage....can we trust them to store the wines properly, at the right temp, etc?!? Knowing how most grocery stores' storage conditions are less than stellar, I don't know that I'd trust them with my wine. But we certainly should continue to think of alternatives and move in different directions.
http://gonzogastro.wordpress.com
vinovamp at 12:52PM on 10/06/08
As previous posters have mentioned, the American market is about choice. Throughout Europe. drinkers have a CHOICE. You can decide to go to your local wine shop and buy the bulk table wines available, or you can spend more money and buy the premium bottlings.
Having been to both Italy and France, where these options exist, this gives the consumer the option to decide what they want to do. In Italy, some of the best wine I had was a bulk local Barbera, sold for about 5 euros a liter. I certainly had wonderful bottles of wine, but for the quality and price point you couldn't beat it.
If we can offer a choice in the States, fill your own for everyday varietals, or go to the 300+ bottle shop, and increasing the recycling efforts, carbon neutral wineries, and better environmental responsibility, then we can achieve a balance.
oh, and WORLD PEACE! ;-)
The Wine Brat at 7:12PM on 10/09/08
I intend on finding out the possibility of this tonight at my local wine shoppe. This is a very thought provoking article! When I lived in Prague there was a new wine festival in the Fall and you could do something similar to this; just bring any bottle to a spigot and for a dollar fill 'er up!
JR Moreau at 4:45PM on 10/10/08