Ecological Info For Bag-in-Box Wines

Here in the UK, the major retailers like to sell us wine in bottles. This is partly because the tax is very high (£2.55 a litre +VAT on full price) also it makes it easy to control 'offers' However, most of the wine is bottled in the Uk shortly before you see it. Wine is transported across continents in huge tanks. The enviromental cost of bottling wine for no good reason is very high indeed. Old wine that has been stored in bottles fore years is one good reason to buy wine in bottles. I cant think of another. I have also noticed that as well as only offering a token selection of Bag in Box wines, some brands are using inferior quality wine in the boxed products as opposed to the bottled wine. I am uncertain as to why this is but it definately occurs. Our Bag in box products are grade A quality and keep the wine fresh for 6-8 weeks or more after opening, so every glass tastes like its from a new 'bottle'. Great for the odd glass plus the container is far more environmentally friendly than Green glass bottles which we produce far too many of. Buying your wine in boxes as opposed to bottles is the most environmentally friendly way of purchasing it. The figures shown below are taken from research posted on the website of Rapak,part of DS Smith Plastics PLC. "In terms of the real world examples, Therefore, every 1000 litres of wine contained in the 3 litre metallised barrier laminate BIB instead of the 0.75 litre glass bottle saves 621kg of CO2 eg a 20 Tonne truck travelling from Birmingham to Paris For every 24,000L container packed in Bag in Box instead of bottles is equivalent to 14 trucks travelling Lands End to John O Groats" it quotes. A thousand Litres is not a lot of wine so the carbon footprint of bottles is very high compared to Bag in Box.