Green Champagne?

Thirteen years ago, I wrote about Stephen Clarke's book "1000 Years Annoying the French." It was his best witty book about the Brits' hereditary friends. A sequel to this book did not reach the same class of British humor.

One chapter of Clarke's initial book dealt with champagne bottles. I learned that thanks to the Brits who made the first rigid bottles in Newcastle, the Champagne bottled in France could be safely shipped across the Channel.

At that time, French bottles had difficulties sustaining the internal pressure of up to 600 kPa (about 6 atmospheres) that builds up during the second, the "méthode champenoise" fermentation inside the bottle. Domestic bottles had "excorkulations" and frequently exploded.

Indeed, the carbon dioxide trapped within the bottle causes a pressure intense enough to require very thick, strong, and heavy glass. Champagne bottles must withstand the natural forces of sparkling wines. They are designed to resist a minimum pressure of 2000 kPa (about 20 atmospheres) for safety reasons.

So, at the beginning of the 20th century, The standard Champagne bottle still weighed 1,250 grams. In the meantime, the weight has lightened considerably. By 2010, the Comité Interprofessional des Vins de Champagne, starting with a 900-gram bottle, adopted a standard lightweight of 835 grams.

Why is weight reduction so important? Bottles have an oversized impact on a winery's carbon footprint. According to a study from the California Wine Institute, the glass alone is worth about 29%. Still, if you add the packaging and transportation, the whole bottle is responsible for 51% of a winery's carbon output.

The race is on for further weight reductions without compromising champagne bottle safety.

Champagne producers want to go green. Ludovic du Plessis, President of the Telmont Group, pledges, "We are committed to creating the most sustainable, organic Champagne possible, and we are heavily focused on preservation and biodiversity." The Group partnered with French glassmakers and reduced the weight of their Champagne bottles from 835 grams to 800 grams, producing them with 87% recycled glass. Has the Champagne become green?

Generally, empty champagne and wine bottles end up in glass containers and are recycled. Melting them down and producing new bottles is highly energy-consuming.

With a standard 0.5 l beer bottle, the situation is different in Germany. There is an established deposit system. Bottles are reused, i.e., collected, returned, cleaned, and refilled at the brewery up to 50 times.

What is established for beer bottles is not valid for the standard 0.75 l wine bottle. A deposit system is complicated because all wine bottles sold in the north of the republic would have to be transported to the south. There are virtually no winegrowers in the north, while breweries are more evenly distributed geographically in Germany.

Nowadays, white wine generally is bottled with screw caps. Consumers have long since accepted this solution and even welcomed it. Once a bottle has been opened, it can easily be resealed, and the wine is enjoyed glass by glass.

To ensure that wine bottles can also be recycled, a start-up in Cologne called "Abgefüllt (bottled)" fills wine into standard 0.5 l beer bottles and seals them with a crown cork. 

What this means for the consumption of alcohol is not yet clear, as a bottle with a crown cork cannot be resealed as easily and, like beer, invites you to drink up. Drinking wine like beer from the bottle? What a brutalization of drinking habits!

©Gerold Zink/BZ

Recently, Freiburg State Winery jumped on the bandwagon, selling some of their white wines in beer bottles, too.

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