Jancis Robinson MW gave a keynote speech at the Sustainability in Drinks conference, London, October 2024

“I’ve been banging on about bottle weight since 1976. Bottle production and transport is the biggest contributor to wine’s carbon footprint.

“Glass, of course, is the ideal inert material for wine designed to be aged for many years, but most wines are consumed within weeks, days, hours or even minutes of purchase. It really is crazy to be shipping wine around the world in a package as heavy, space-hungry and breakable as glass bottles.”

“A lot of people are complaining that young people aren’t starting to drink wine. I honestly think a main reason for that is because most wine is sold in 75cl bottles. They have to invest quite a lot of money to buy quite a lot of wine, and in many cases must buy a special instrument just to get into it. A 25cl can would be so much more attractive for a young person wanting to try wine.”

“There are huge opportunities for alternative packaging. Why dither? Make lightweighting decisions now.

“I urge you to encourage people to put wines of better and better quality in these alternative packages. They may never really catch on if they’re seen simply as a way of shifting the most basic quality wine.

“Do as the Nordics have done and remove the stigma from bag in box.”

“Our recycling system in this country may be much better than the American one, but it is shamefully inferior to what is the norm across most of mainland Europe.

“The drinks industry is the cork industry’s biggest customer and in theory, corks are recyclable, but in practice most of them just go to landfill. For those that are recycled, they are usually shipped back to Portugal – an energy and emission-intensive exercise – to be repurposed into other cork products.

“We need a genuinely impartial, comparative lifecycle analysis of all bottle closures available, which has been lacking.”