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."
