Why Size Matters

Wednesday’s installment of the email wine and spirits industry press release links from Business Wire carried two intriguing stories about wineries that are doing something for the environment, one flashy, glitzy and way cool, the other boring and mundane—and ultimately more important.

Napa’s Far Niente Winery, home to fancy Cabernets and Chardonnays, the parent enterprise behind the ultra-luxe Dolce dessert wine brand and the Nickel & Nickel spin-off, home to a nifty collection of Ferraris, Corvettes and other racing cars, just flipped the switch on an array of solar panels that will produce all the winery’s electricity. Solar isn’t news in Napa, but putting the arrays on pontoons in the winery’s irrigation pond—“Floatovoltaics,” they call it—certainly is. The up-front investment was substantial, though one advantage of this configuration is that no precious vineyard land had to be sacrificed, which would have cost Far Niente an estimated $150,000 a year in Cabernet production. The PR advantage of the solar showpiece is also palpable; it made the san Francisco Chronicle front page Thursday—not the wine section, the news section—and notices are posted all over the web.

Meanwhile, the other press release was freighted with a little more history and perhaps a touch of sadness. The legendary Almaden and Inglenook wine brands, founded respectively in 1852 and 1879, are being transitioned from jugs to the bag-in-box format. In wine-snob sheer status terms, that’s going from bad to worse. Both of these pioneering wineries did a great deal to raise the quality of California wine in their heydays; both were inflated into generic, monster brands in the 1960s and 1970s, pumped full of whatever grapes anybody could find; both have passed through more corporate hands than a winery needs at harvest time. In February, the two brands were bought from Constellation by The Wine Group, masters of the bag-in-box universe, starting with their flagship Franzia label. The new packaging was just a matter of time.

In economic terms, the switch is a no-brainer for The Wine Group, which is already set up to manufacture and market bag-in-box on a grand scale. But in environmental terms, this is actually a pretty big deal: it will save 11 million pounds of packaging waste, mostly glass, and cut the carbon footprint for the two brands by a combined 60%. And these are not trivial brands, certainly not by volume.

I suspect that the Almaden-Inglenook news will pass below the radar for most premium wine fans, while the Far Niente story will generate a good deal of buzz. Those who hear about the move from jug to box will likely see it as yet another indignity, proof that corporations have no souls. (Let it be said there is some evidence for this position.) But in the big scheme of things, the “new” Inglenook and Almaden are doing more to save the planet.