A Clarksburg winery is hoping to shake up the wine market with a new innovation in packaging.
The Bogle Family Wine Collection has launched a new wine label, called Element[AL], that is selling all its wine in aluminum bottles.
“What we wanted to do is create that opportunity for the consumer to make that eco-friendly choice without having to sacrifice what they love about wine,” said Jody Bogle, vice president of consumer relations. Bogle spoke Monday morning at an event launching the brand at Bogle’s distribution center in West Sacramento.
“The bottle feels good in your hand. It looks beautiful on a table. There's the romance of pouring it out of the bottle,” Bogle said.
The brand launched with a chardonnay, pinot grigio, pinot noir and a rosé. They sell for around $18. The wines are specially made to age well in the aluminum bottle, and the company says their internal taste tests show it tastes the same at least a year after bottling.
The new bottles are the same shape as a traditional wine bottle, and they hold the same 750 milliliters of wine, but weigh almost a pound less. That means trucks can carry 43% more wine per load, meaning fewer truck trips are needed to carry the same amount of wine.
“Glass is about 30% of the carbon footprint of wine,” Bogle said.
There is interest in the industry at large in finding alternatives to glass bottles, but the trend so far has been for wineries to put their wine in the same 12-ounce aluminum cans that beer and soda are sold in.
“A lot of the cans that you see out there that have been on the market are either single-serving or occasion-based, marketed very much for quick trips or outdoors or that kind of thing,” Bogle said.
But canned wine has not replaced the glass bottle in places like the dinner table or at restaurants. That’s where Bogle is hoping their new bottle comes in, said Paul Englert, vice president of marketing.
“The aluminum can, the box wine, the Tetra Paks, these are packaging choices that people make when glass is not practical,” Englert said. “But with our bottle, we want those same people to buy us even when a glass bottle is practical because they like it. They think it's cool. Maybe they want to do something better for the Earth and make a more environmentally friendly choice.”
The bottle itself is a feat of engineering and design that the company has been working on for nearly four years.
“Three-and-a-half years ago when we started talking about this, every aluminum company said making this bottle from aluminum is impossible,” Englert said.
Eventually, Bogle found an engineer with access to new manufacturing equipment that he thought could pull it off.
“We found a way, with an American manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, to get this done when no one else had done it before,” Englert said.
Between the cost of testing, new bottling equipment that had to be custom-made, and the smaller run of the new bottles, Englert said the new bottle costs Bogle about twice as much to use as its glass bottle.
“We hope that that comes down over time as more and more wineries adopt this,” he said.
He said Bogle hasn’t patented the bottle.
“When we worked with the aluminum company, the only thing we asked them is that we want to be first,” he said. “We wanted to prove that it could work, put great wine in the bottle, make sure that we overdeliver, and then our hope is that other wineries follow us down this path.”
