by frog
I never thought I would be writing this. I confess to liking a drop or two of the good stuff, and thought I had done my bit for the environment by forgoing those pesky corks for plastic plugs.
Chris Higgins of MentalFloss argues the case for the cask:
In the U.S., wine sold in a box used to be synonymous with cheap, bland junk. But in recent years the benefits boxed wine have started changing that perception. For one thing, the box typically contains three or four bottles’ worth, and also costs less per volume than the bottled stuff. The box also stays fresh far longer after opening, because air doesn’t get to its contents…so you can take your time working your way through your liters and liters of vino. Indeed, several major producers are currently putting good wine in boxes, which are even sold in fancy-pants grocery stores — though in the States, we’re late to the “good wine in a box? party by many years.
More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.
I am gobsmacked at the figures and I confess I will just have to put aside my snobbery and check out the quality of some of those cask wines. (I’m a red fan by the way, if you feel inclined to recommend a box.) I am also glad to see that an American can speak metric, even if he cannot spell it!
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Interesting statistics indeed.
I wonder what the evidence for them is? To me, an average Mac-Truck on route 66 consumes x litres of fuel on an average journey from The Valley to Manhattan. So the output is the constant here. What this suggests is that 4 times the volume of wine does not generate the equivalent of 4 times the volume of fuel consumption!
There is no direct comparison, i.e. a truck will create y tonnes of C)2 on this journey and can transport x litres of wine in cases of 12 x 750 mil bottles vs y litres in cases of n boxes of 4 liter casks.
That approach would give something to understand. What this does is go from 5.2 lbs to 400,000 cars in one fell swoop. Sounds like green-screen to me when posited in these terms!
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2 litre casks of Yalumba Cab Sav or Merlot is probably the better Chateau cardboard around. I hope you won’t be suggesting wine in a can as even more environmentally friendly!
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Yep, Zippy, the Yalumba range is certainly very drinkable.
You are never going to get Château Pétrus in a box, but drinking wine of that quality is for very special occasions. The only time I have ever bought a bottle of that wine was when France abandoned nuclear testing in the Pacific. Cost a fortune, but worth it to celebrate 20 years of abstention from drinking French wine.
Boxed wine is not all Velluto Rosso quality these days – there really are drinkable boxed wines available in New Zealand, and have been for about 15 years.
But with boxed, as with bottled, wine, check out the label for the origin of the grapes. If something is a mix of Chilean, Australian and South African grape sources, there are carbon emission implications in that before the wine is even bottled/boxed.
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Strings, a typical packing box of wine with 12 bottles in is about H37cm x W41cm x D29cm. This works out to a volume of 40 litres per box to carry 9 litres of wine. Contrast this with the volume for box wines – almost the same as the boxes used to ship them.
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De Bortoli cask reds are also worth a look. They’re 2L like the Yalumba, and a similar price. Then again, since both these casks are Australian, whereas most of the bottled wine I drink is from NZ, I’m not sure that the same benefits apply as would for Americans whose casks and bottles come from the same region.
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Ah yes. The glass is much heavier than the box which is why glass milk bottles are not so green. But then the box actually contains a plastic bag and we know how bad they are.
But the glass is recyclable and the box is not. The plastic sealing bung uses more of everything than a screw cap.
Just another that no one knows how to calculate the carbon footprint of a pencil – let along a building.
And I am sure we were shocked to learn that Phelp’s carbon footprint from food is four times that of the average person. So imagine what would happen if the whole world started training for the Olympic Games.
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Owen, get a life!
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musbee said: Then again, since both these casks are Australian, whereas most of the bottled wine I drink is from NZ
Yep, you’ve got a point musbee.
Drink local!
Occasionally, splash out on a bottle of Château Pétrus, or what else takes your fancy, musbee. But if you drink wine regularly, the Green solution relates to the cliamte impact of getting grapes and wine to the consumer.
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I’m so disappointed, I thought this was going to be about someone producing wine in wooden barrels.
This is a no-brainer. Drink wine that is produced closest to you. Doesn’t matter what it comes in, although sorry I am never going to drink wine from a plastic bag (for so many reasons). Better yet, drink organic local wine.
I hate these carbon calculations because they are so one dimensional. I really want to see the total footprint of a pencil not just the carbon one
btw Frog, I thought corks were better because it supported the sustainable growing of cork trees in Europe.
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Owen- it should be easy enough to make the taps modular so that they can be re-used. Then the only problem is the whole tetrapak thing.
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Casks for me everytime – I just love to see those high class women look down their noses when you dump it on the counter. Anything that gets rid of wines bottles has got to be good. O apart from sparkling wine in casks of course – which the Irish found had a few problems.
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What’s wrong with wine bottles?
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They somehow seem to get empty rather quickly compared to a ‘box’.
Seriously though from production-transport-filling- dumping or re-using [do they?] or sending them back to be melted down seems rather an energy wastefull system. Carcboard casks, the only problem is the plastic bladder, locally we don’t recycle some grades of plastic. Someone must have found a use for them???? They are too small for camping pillows but do make great water containers [until you sit on one too hard!].
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>
>>check out the label for the origin of the grapes. If something is a mix of Chilean, Australian and South African grape sources, there are carbon emission implications in that before the wine is even bottled/boxed.
I don’t care!
Life is about more things than carbon footprints. Little things like enjoyment and pleasure come into play as well!
There are VERY FEW decent red wines produced in NZ from local grapes, and those that are are so over priced as to be ridiculous.right now I’m looking at a y2k (that’s vintage 2000) bottle of Chateau d’Ampuis Cote- Rotie which I intend to empty one Sunday with a nice piece of dark red meat. It was shipped from France, in its very own polystyrene container, via air-mail. It will now go into my wine storage area (under the spare bed) to calm down and relax after its journey. I expect it to be sumptuous, with chew-ability and a distinct personality. De-corking and decanting it will be a bit of a ritual that will add to the pleasure of its consumption.
You can’t get that from a plastic bag of fermented domestic grape juice!
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Strings, I too enjoy the occasional bottle of imported red – note my reference above to my celebration bottle of Château Pétrus when France announced it was ceasing nuclear testing.
Just as I enjoy the occasional overseas holiday.
But in the context of carbon footprints, I’m suggesting its best things like this are special treats, rather than regular occurrances.
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Goodness. If it wasn’t my Gold Card birthday I doubt anyone would have sent me this bottle here Toad.
However, I still suggest to you that, if EVERYTHING was judged on its TRUE carbon footprint, and nothing else, our lives would be very different to what they are, and our civilisation would be envying those of many countries in central and north Africa – who have almost no carbon footprint, or quality of life, at all!
(PS. And you still can’t get a decent domestic red at a decent price)
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You drinking at 8.58am, Strings? Bit early for me I’m afraid.
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Nah Toad
Just gazing at the bottle which the nice courier man delivered this morning! I love surprise birthday presents! Don’t you?
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Toad,
Get a life and you might see a joke when it stares you in the face.
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My point is that I didn’t actually think it was funny Owen.
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Carcboard casks, the only problem is the plastic bladder, locally we don’t recycle some grades of plastic.
It’s a significant problem though, stopwhaling. Try keeping your plastic and burying it in your own backyard (as opposed to someone else’s aka the tip) and you’ll see how significant it gets
I also think there are health issues associated with plastic and food, especially soft plastics. And the acidity of wine may make that worse.
Using casks instead of bottles is a short term solution. In the long term it makes more sense to drink local, to use a container that can be re-used many times, and to get winemakers to reuse bottles.
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# akew Says:
August 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am
> Using casks instead of bottles is a short term solution. In the long term it makes more sense to drink local, to use a container that can be re-used many times, and to get winemakers to reuse bottles.
yep, but you’ll have to get them to agree to a standardised bottle design to do that.
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stopwhaling said: They somehow seem to get empty rather quickly compared to a ‘box’.
Yes, that is a major disadvantage. More wine should be bottled in jeroboams.
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presumably even lower emmissions per litre could be obtained if they transported the plastic bags naked & packed them into boxes once they reached their destination
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Actually the emissions from shipping something like wine that doesn’t need to be transported quickly are pretty negligible anyway. I bet the courier who took that bottle of wine to Strings created more carbon emissions than that boittle’s share of the emissions from the ship that brought it from Europe.
Don’t worry about emissions from shipping wine around the world. The fact that rolled oats bought in a supermarket in Gore are trucked from a warehouse in Christchurch, which gets them by train from a mill in Dunedin, which gets them by truck from a field near Gore, is probably a rather bigger source of emissions.
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kahikatea
Good on yer
Now if we could just get people to understand that out of season fruit and veg come from overseas, and that we don’t really need strawberries in August in the Southern Hemisphere, we could probably halve the cost of airfreight as the demand would be so much lower!
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Right you are, akew. Glass is inert compared with plastic. Holds the product longer and glass is recyclable (in theory. What’s up with those wine bottle mountain ranges, eh?).
Two ideas. One, we find a better use for old bottles. There’s talk of using crushed glass as filler under roading, but a better use might be bottle as building material. For example, this Oz dude is using 13,500 bottles to build a wine cellar (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/recycled_wine_b.php). So, a lifetime of drinking and you might build your own home!
Secondly, take a leaf from the Fill Your Flagon scheme and reduce the level of packaging. Have bulk delivery of wine in 100 litre casks or so to the retailer. Consumers bring their own bottle and fill it. It wouldn’t be universally applicable, but the bulk of the empties would go.
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