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It took skyrocketing oil prices and the prospect of an overheated planet to stem the tide, but finally those overweight wine bottles, the pretentious ones with glass so thick they're sometimes mistaken for 1.5-litre magnums, are becoming unfashionable.

A good example of the shift comes this week in the form of a wine called Terra d'Aligi Tatone, a popular $16 red from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Shoppers in Ontario and Quebec, where the 2004 is being rolled out, may have noticed a change from the 2003 vintage. It's lighter - 150 grams lighter, to be exact, thanks to thin-glass construction aimed at curbing carbon emissions associated with shipping the wine thousands of kilometres across the ocean.

The decision to move to lighter glass was motivated by changes at the large British supermarket chain Tesco.

It has begun pressing suppliers to cut packaging in an effort to create what chief executive officer Sir Terry Leahy has called a "low-carbon economy." Sir Terry, a forward-thinking chap, hopes one day to have in place a system of carbon-emission labels for every one of Tesco's 70,000 products, akin to nutritional statistics on many food items. If society can make pariahs out of calories and carbohydrates, why not that other nasty C word, carbon?

The new Tatone bottle tips the scales at 500 grams empty, down from 650 grams for the old bottle. Each 40-foot shipping container, which holds 1,400 cases of 12, is 2,520 kilograms lighter.

It may seem like a no-brainer move, but it wasn't without hurdles.

One was technical. Spinelli, the wine's producer, had to make sure the thinner glass would survive the carnival-ride jostling of Tesco's high-speed conveyor belts.

Second, there were fickle wine consumers to deal with. Less weight and smaller size can erroneously imply less wine, which would scare people to another brand. Just as bad, an impressionable wine shopper might get the idea that the wine is of lower quality.

"Mr. Consumer feels that if the bottle's heavy the wine must be good," said Vincent Liberatore of Vinaio Canada, the wine's Toronto-based agent. The key, he said, was to maintain the premium product's tall stature, which entailed shaving down the sides and giving the bottle a narrower look.

The result is a more elegant bottle, easier to grasp because of the reduced diameter and easier to cram into the fridge next to the ketchup should one want to save an opened bottle for a few days.

And it sure contrasts with those boat anchors that have been surfacing with increasing frequency in recent years. Ironically, Spinelli itself sells for one of the heaviest bottles I've encountered, a behemoth called Tolos, the winery's top-end red, which has an indentation, or "punt," on the underside cavernous enough to hide a small child. The 750-millilitre bottle containing the 2002 vintage weighs a remarkable 1.23 kilograms empty. Mr. Liberatore says Spinelli plans to move Tolos to a lighter bottle after the 2006 vintage.

Other hernia-inducing examples include top offerings from Château des Charmes from Niagara and Santa Carolina Cabernet Sauvignon Reserva de Familia from Chile.

So gratuitous are the heavy bottles that such noted international wine personalities as Jancis Robinson and Oz Clarke recently lashed out against them. Ms. Robinson, a widely published author and London-based columnist, months ago started a "name and shame" campaign on her website in an attempt to embarrass egregious producers.

"It's just obnoxious," says Tyler Colman, a New York-based political economist and co-author of a 2007 research report on the cost of carbon in the global wine trade. "The producer is trying to convey quality that may or may not be there."

Big bottles seem particularly offensive when you consider that the most valuable and sought-after wines, including premier and grand cru Burgundies, tend to come in plain bottles. Penfolds Grange, Australia's most famous and collectible wine (at $330 a bottle), comes in a compact bottle almost too cheap-looking for hobo sherry.

Dr. Colman, who writes a blog at DrVino.com, found it's not just wines from far away that have a significant carbon footprint. In his study, he found it's more environmentally benign for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, because it has been shipped by sea, than wine trucked from Napa, Calif., even though the latter is closer.

Air, of course, is the worst way to go if you're a heavy wine bottle. No producers know this better than makers of Beaujolais Nouveau, the fresh-pressed novelty wine typically transported by air to reach stores around the world on the third Thursday of November.

To mitigate the environmental impact and mounting financial burden of air freight, one exporter of Beaujolais Nouveau plans to cut out glass altogether. In an industry first, Boisset Family Estates, whose brands include Mommessin and Bouchard Aîné & Fils, will use lightweight polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, bottles this year for all Beaujolais Nouveau wines bound for North America. Jean-Charles Boisset, the Burgundy-based company's president, says the PET bottles, which when full weigh a mere 10 kilograms compared with the typical 17 kilograms for a conventional case, will cut fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions by almost half.

PET bottles were pioneered in the industry by Australia-based Foster's Group, whose Wolf Blass division launched the world's first premium wine line, Bilyara Reserve, in the plastic containers in Ontario two years ago. To help reinforce its environmental focus, the company will rebrand the line as "Green Tier" in North America later this year. "Most people don't see a problem with glass bottles," said Oliver Horn, Wolf Blass's global brand director, adding that plastic is a better option to reduce greenhouse gases. (Incidentally, research has shown PET does not contain the controversial chemical bisphenol A found in some soup-can liners and baby bottles.)

Boisset has also been experimenting with glass bottles as light as 300 grams, which are considered close to the limit for shatter resistance, in the domestic French market for years. But Mr. Boisset says it's been a challenge persuading international retailers to accept the format given the longer and more complicated route to market.

That said, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is expected to receive his first 300-gram export bottles, under the Bouchard Aîné brand, in Nov- ember.

"Without the LCBO, this whole movement would not be as strong as it is," says Mr. Boisset, who has used the board's embrace of alternative packaging to launch other pioneering products, such as Tetra Paks under the French Rabbit brand and PET bottles under the Yellow Jersey brand.

Chris Layton, a spokesman for the LCBO, says that while most activity in the field of "lightweighting" has taken the form of cardboard Tetra Paks and PET bottles, the "greatest potential" for greenhouse-gas reduction lies in reducing glass weight on existing packages simply because glass will continue to be the preferred packaging material for wines and spirits. "Glass will continue to be the dominant format in our stores."