There’s a harmless little prank I like to play at wine tastings to illustrate a point. I ask a person in the audience to come up and tell me which of two wine bottles is the heavier. After one bottle is found to be marginally heavier than the other, I remove its capsule, tip the bottle upside down and ‘pour’ the contents over the ‘victim’. To everyone’s surprise, and the ‘victim’s’ relief, they stay nice and dry. The bottle, empty of course, is the horrendous dark green 1.2 kilo affair which weighs more when empty than a light bottle full of wine. Wine’s equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV, this padded-shouldered monstrosity is a waste of glass, the energy required to make it, and the CO2 emissions caused by its transportation.

The wine industry, which is responsible for only 0.1 per cent of global greenhouse gases, was given a pat on the back by Al Gore at the climate change and wine conference in Barcelona last month for reducing its own emissions of hot air. In this country, the leading supermarkets are doing their bit to introduce lighter wine bottles at least for their own ranges of wines imported from overseas. Compared with an industry-standard bottle of 500 – 550 grams, Sainsbury’s has put 40 of its biggest-selling wines in a lightweight 400 gram glass bottle, while Tesco has a similar number in even lighter 340 gram bottles, with 410 gram bottles for the Tesco Finest range. In line with its policy of reducing packaging weight by 25 per cent by 2010, Tesco claims to have made 2,600 tonnes of glass savings. Both say they want their overseas suppliers to go lighter too.

Shipping wine in bulk for bottling in the UK can bring savings in the amount of glass used and the energy required in its production and transportation. There are buts though. The transported wine has to be filtered before it’s bottled in the UK, adding an extra level of processing that arguably strips out flavour. Co-operatives and Fairtrade groups can also find themselves at a disadvantage if bottling in the UK removes jobs and detracts from their own investment in the brand. Availability of glass is another tricky issue. Britons drink around 1 billion bottles of wine, roughly half a million tons of glass, each year. For all the campaigning by WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, to encourage recycling and develop ways of reducing the volume of imported green glass, UK glass manufacturers simply can’t cope with the level of demand for recycled bottles.

Following in the footsteps of the bag-in-box (which can’t be recycled because of its aluminium inside) and the tetrapak (commonly used in Japan for cheap sake), the well-known Australian producer, Wolf Blass, has come up with a recyclable plastic bottle, or PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate), for a crisp, pineappley 2006 Green Label Chardonnay and a juicy, blackcurranty 2006 Green Label Cabernet Shiraz, both £7.49, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrison’s, Thresher, Asda, Londis and Budgens. One tenth the weight of a standard wine bottle at 54 grams, they follow in the footsteps of Sainsbury’s successful summer trial of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and Australian Shiraz in plastic bottles. If it were to become mainstream, going to the lightest available package would, according to WRAP, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90,000 tonnes.

Although Sainsbury’s long-standing 1.5 litre wines in plastic apparently sell ‘like hot cakes’, the reaction to the Wolf Blass PET bottles, despite both containing respectable quality wine, has been mixed. Some consumers think that it’s smaller than the average bottle and that they’re being short-changed. Others see the plastic bottle as cheap and tacky. Yet the plastic bottle has plenty of potential outdoors appeal for picnics, barbecues and with summer festival-goers and sporting crowds. If ever we have a summer then, who knows, perhaps PET, with a back-patting Al Gore endorsement, will catch on. If not, then at least I have another trick up my sleeve for wine tastings: drop it on the floor and watch as the ‘bottle’ bounces back up again.

Something For the Weekend 8 March 2008

Under a Fiver

2006 Coteaux du Tricastin, Delas, £6.99, buy 2 = £4.99, to 7 April, Majestic.

Well worth taking advantage of, this Easter discount, which started yesterday, offers the chance to pick up the Rhône wine merchant Delas’ powerfully spicy, peppery blend of grenache, syrah and cinsault at a less than full-bodied price.

Under a Tenner

2007 Sincerely Sauvignon Blanc, Neil Ellis, £6.99, Sainsburys.

The tongue-in-cheek label is a wry dig at the Sancerre, the dry Cape sauvignon blanc itself displaying assertive green bean and capsicum aromas and refreshingly zingy gooseberryish fruitiness in a style that’s not a million miles from the famous Loire Valley appellation.

Splash Out

2006 Rogers & Peterson Schoolhouse Block Yarra Valley Pinot Noir, Victoria, £17.99, Philglas and Swiggot, Battersea, Richmond and Marylebone (020 7402 0002. www.philglas-swiggot.co.uk.

From Philglas’s own Mike and Karen Rogers, this classic Victorian cool climate, single vineyard pinot noir shows fragrant cherryish undertones and an opulent smooth middle of ripe strawberry fruit and spicy oak in a modest framework of 13 per cent alcohol.