New Sustainable Wine and Spirits Packaging is Here. Will Consumers Buy It?

Bee Lightly in Packamama Bottle

Would you drink wine from a plastic bottle? How about a paper bottle? Aluminum? In California and beyond, vintners and distillers are staring straight at a tough reality: glass bottles, for wine, spirits and other products, are responsible for more than 30% of a beverage’s carbon footprint. “Glass bottles are the single largest contributor to wines’ carbon footprint,” says CEO and Founder of Packamama, Santiago Navarro. Add in packaging transit and transport for finished goods, and the percentage nudges over 50. In their search for solutions, wine and spirits innovators are embracing new packaging technologies: aluminum, paper and plastic bottles that negate the significant harmful environmental impacts of glass, without sacrificing taste.

rPET Leads the Way in New Plastics

Based in the United Kingdom, Packamama’s mission is “to provide innovative, climate-friendly packaging for the drinks industry.” Bee Lightly Wines, imported from France to the United States by Marin-based WX Brands, sells chardonnay and rosé packaged in Packamama’s rPET plastic bottle. It’s made with 100% recycled plastic and lined with a proprietary gas barrier and UV inhibitor, ensuring the wine inside makes no contact with the plastic, and its flavor stays stable.

The carbon reduction of using rPET adds up quickly. The angular bottle is 86% lighter than glass and its flat-pack design allows 79% more bottles per pallet and 44% fewer pallets, reducing transportation emissions.

No Taste Compromise

Blue Bin Wines and owner Ron Robin

Sold at Safeway in Marin and Albertsons Companies around the United States, Bee Lightly launched in the U.S. market in August 2024. Ron Rubin’s Blue Bin Wines came to market a year earlier, in June 2023. Rubin is owner of Larkspur’s The Republic of Tea and a vintner with Sonoma’s River Road Family Vineyards and Winery, a certified B Corp business and producer for Blue Bin. “Our bottle is 100% recycled plastic that can endlessly be made into another bottle,” Rubin says. Lined with an ultra-thin layer of glass known as Plasmax, Blue Bin’s rPET bottles are designed to ensure the wine’s taste and quality are unaltered. “The wine does not touch the plastic bottle,” Rubin says. “There’s no difference in taste.” The difference is shelf life. Wine in plastic bottles lasts anywhere from 12 to 18 months. Prompt selling is key.

According to a study by Sonoma State University, “20% of consumers drink within 24 hours,” Rubin told me. “31% within two or three days, and another 39% within three weeks.” That is, more than 90% of wine sold in the United States is drunk within a month of purchase. This quick turn of product from shelf to consumption gave the vintners and bottlers I spoke with confidence that alternative vessels are not only appropriate for wine, but could be marketed as a quality product.

California Wine Drinkers Diss Plastic

Bumps in consumer behavior buffet any new product in the marketplace. The word “plastic” is a detractor for some wine consumers who may not yet understand the distinction between Plasmax-lined rPET used for Blue Bin’s rosé, sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio and chardonnay. Or perhaps consumers are aware that, on average, only about 5% to 6% of plastic in the United States is recycled and don’t want to add more to the trash pile. Yet products like Blue Bin and Bee Lightly are addressing the plastic trash issue, utilizing only recycled plastics to make bottles again and again. The most hesitant plastic bottle purchasers? “California,” says Rubin. “Retailers don’t quite understand that it’s made from recyclable plastic.” Blue Bin is selling well in Florida and Texas. Could the issue be the wine industry here and perceived quality of wine in plastic versus glass bottles? It’s too soon to tell.

Do California wine consumers feel the same way about wine packaged in aluminum bottles? Like Rubin, Jody Bogle, vice president of consumer relations at Bogle Family Wine Collection in Clarksburg, California, noted the information gap in getting the low carbon message to the consumer. “People in the industry are micro-dialed into these issues,” Bogle says. While looking for ways to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, Bogle used internal research that consumers want to make small changes that add up to big differences. External research pointed to aluminum’s infinite reuse and low energy profile. “It requires only 5% of the original energy to create the next generation,” Bogle says. And, unlike plastic, aluminum is highly recycled. As a result, around 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today. The shift from glass to aluminum was obvious. Element(AL), a new brand in the Bogle family, launched in 2024 with pinot noir, pinot grigio, chardonnay and rosé.

ElementAL Wines

Like Bee Lightly’s flatter bottle design, Element(AL)’s bottle was custom-built, the package design printed directly onto the bottle. Slimmer with narrower shoulders than most glass bottles, Element(AL)’s lined bottle is fitted with a standard 28 mm screw cap fitted with a foam liner. “We wanted no wine in contact with aluminum at the very top,” Bogle says. A year’s worth of internal triangle tasting in search of differentiation between wines packaged in glass and wines packaged in the new aluminum bottle led to a clear result: No differentiation in taste. “We’re challenging the notion that wine in cans has to be simple,” Bogle says. “You don’t have to sacrifice quality just because you want to drink wine by the pool or on a hike.”

A Packaging Machine to Reduce Sticky Carbon Footprints

Half Shell Vodka

Distillers are getting in on the low carbon packaging options, too. When sustainability-driven Half Shell Vodka co-founder Harrison Holditch sought out a glass alternative for his vodka, he was shocked to find few options other than glass. With more than 75% of glass bottles used for wine and spirits packaging in the United States sourced from India, Mexico and elsewhere and the high environmental cost of making and shipping recycled glass, Holditch began a search for alternatives. That led him to the United Kingdom’s Frugalpac.

Bonny Doon's Carbon Nay

Malcolm Waugh, CEO of Frugalpac, develops low-carbon packaging innovations for the food and drinks market. They’ve developed a paper bottle for the wine and spirits industry, a bottle that unfolds flat and can be placed in the recycle bin with paper. With a commitment to low carbon at all points of the supply chain, Frugalpac sells the machines that make the bottles, placing the manufacture of the bottle as close as possible to where it is filled to lower or eliminate the carbon footprint of packaging and filling. Since paper also acts as an insulator, Waugh’s bottle will stay cooler for 25% longer than a glass bottle, reducing the need for energy-hogging ice and ice buckets. Ice buckets are old-fashioned and less common than in years past yet, Waugh admits, “our bottle is inelegant if placed in an ice bucket.” He recommends a stainless-steel sleeve instead.

The soggy factor may be paper bottles’ only downside; they prevent light absorption, they are five times lighter than a glass bottle and paper, like aluminum, is highly recycled. (The paper recycling rate in the United States is steady at about 68%.) When I received a sample of Florida’s Half Shell Vodka packed in Frugalpac’s bottle, I noticed another flaw: the neck ripped when I unscrewed the cap. “There is an openability issue if the distiller or vintner puts the cap on too tight,” Waugh confirmed. No vodka spilled out, however. Inside the paper was a pure polyethylene bag, fitted to the cap neck. Made from a fairly even split of HDPE (#2) and LDPE (#4), the bag can be recycled (dry, of course!) with plastic grocery bags.

A New Way of Thinking, With Some Glitches

Frugalpac Product Demo

Holditch admits there are some glitches with the new bottles. “Imagine the first iPhone,” he says. “It was bulky, but it revolutionized the business. We joke that this version of the bottle is the iPhone 1.” Half Shell, the first U.S.-filled spirit sold in a 100% recyclable bottle, continues to lead the carbon reduction charge. The Florida company will soon sell California-distilled Half Shell, packed using a Frugalpac bottle using a machine based in California. Their carbon footprint will shrink even further.

“It’s a new way of thinking,” Bogle says. “Really. None of us is saying get rid of glass. But we’re excited to create alternatives.”


Chrisitina Mueller

Christina Mueller is a long-time Bay Area food writer. She hails from the East Coast and has spent way too much time in South America and Europe. She discovered her talent as a wordsmith in college and her love of all things epicurean in grad school. She has written for Condé Nast Contract Publishing, Sunset, and the Marin Independent Journal, among others. She volunteers with California State Parks and at her childrens’ schools, and supports the Marin Audubon Society, PEN America, and Planned Parenthood. When she is not drinking wine by a fire, she is known to spend time with her extended family.