Flat Bottled Wines Make the World Go Round

© Garçon Wines
| The flat, light bottles are easier to stack and easier to transport.

Santiago Navarro CEO, co-founder and entrepreneur of Garçon Wines, is sure of one thing: if we want to save the planet we need to dump the bottle.

Both passionate and informed about the climate crisis the world currently finds itself in, Navarro is determined to make a difference. His mission to wean the world off the heavy round glass bottles – which are both cumbersome and carbon-gluttonous – and replace them with the sleek, flat, PET bottle that Garçon Wines now manufactures.

The PET bottle is 40 percent smaller and 87 percent lighter than the traditional glass wine bottle, while still holding the same 750ml. Importantly, each bottle is also 100 percent recycled and 100 percent recyclable.

He spoke to Wine-Searcher about the need for change and his own emerging climate awareness.

Have you always been aware of the natural environment and the damage it incurs?

I was aware of the environmental mess being created by the poor management of materials and it’s not just plastic. I’m a diver, I come from the island of Malta, if you go into the seas, you’ll see all sorts of things from old white goods, to cars, to bottles, to metal and on the surface you see plastic because it floats.

You know the world treats our oceans like dumping grounds and that’s a big, big, big pity. So I wanted to create a product that was a leading example of sustainable use of materials, and recycled PET is a wonder material. It is so, so, so energy efficient, it’s so low carbon footprint.

Atmospheric carbon is something not many people are aware of, but you track it?

Many people might follow the New York Stock Exchange or FTSE index, but very few people follow atmospheric carbon.

I was born at 335 parts per million. We’ve passed 420, 421, 422, depends what data you’re looking at – that’s [an increase of] 85 parts per million in my lifetime. When we get to 1.5 degrees, we’re at 430. At 450, we’re at two degrees Celsius. So we’re at 420, we’ve got 10 parts per million to go to 1.5 degrees and 30 parts per million to go to 450 for two degrees and I’ve lived 85 parts per million increase already in my 40 years of life.

Nobody talks about things like atmospheric carbon and it’s so so important. And we will surpass two degrees. I mean, there’s no way the 1.5 will be attained. There’s highly unlikely we’ll keep it in 2 [degrees] and, yes, and the problem with wine actually is concentrated in the glass bottle.

How dire is climate change?

Most of the world is already experiencing significant extreme weather events. Even central London – just recently, Portobello Road just looked like a river, like gushing, and all these basement floods totally all flooded. Places like Knightsbridge, where you wouldn’t imagine, outside the Mandarin Hotel, totally, totally underwater.

The reality is, the world will wake up or Mother Nature has a very good way of regularly waking us up with very significant shocks. Should we not listen, it’s us who will suffer. Ultimately, the natural world will continue on, probably recoup without us. But it’ll be a shame, because at least 8000 years of history of the wine industry might be changed forever.

Most of those who were lucky enough to inherit the bounties of the land from their parents and grandparents are not doing enough to ensure that their children and grandchildren will be able to keep doing stuff there. Because they continue to ship wines that don’t benefit from glass in a format that has a grotesque and unnecessary carbon footprint because that’s the only way you can describe it. It’s grotesque and it’s totally unnecessary. For 85 percent of the world of wine, we need a better format.

So, to me, failure to innovate is accelerating everyone’s unfortunate but likely demise as a result of global warming, and the wine industry will experience it worse than most because Vitis vinifera is so sensitive to temperature.

Is the wine industry doing its part?

Too few are willing to do a lot, which is why I think businesses need to do their part – the wine industry has a duty of care beyond most other products.

It will be much easier to communicate to people if wine shows leadership and, at the moment, wine is not showing leadership. Wine is great at organizing conferences and talking about stuff, but does too little. Even when it has fires raging through California, fires was raging through Australia, we’re humbled by the positive response. But the reality is that the response should be of many magnitudes more.

Showing step change in wine, putting, strong messaging on labels and saying: “Hey, we can cut our carbon footprint,” that should hopefully get people to think “what energy provider do I use? How do I commute to get to work? Am I being the most considered in what I eat?”

And whilst [there’s] me and a team of 10 in central London, we should be 10,000, we should be using our technology for others. I will do all within my lifetime to make an above average impact for a person. As a business leader, I will leverage my company and all I can so that I have at least done my part.

What sparked the idea for flat PET bottles?

Just being aware of macroenvironmental and macroeconomic data as an entrepreneur, I like to look at what might create the next big opportunity to create a big impact and to have an exciting career.

So, my first entrepreneurial venture was an online wine store. I noticed quite quickly, when shipping wine through the online channel using couriers, it was that the wine industry had a bigger problem than just having another online wine retailer to compete with all the rest.

An unduly large amount of problems with failed deliveries, with broken bottles, with more and more secondary packaging, or protective, or transit packaging…  rather than try to compete in the online space – which was really tough to be another online retailer competing on cost per acquisition, lifetime value, the traditional metrics of online – I said, “There’s got to be a better way about it.”

At that point, I realized that round glass bottles are 19th Century product technology being used in 21st Century business models. They are an innovation over a 17th Century scaled onion wine bottle. I would argue if you brought smart ladies and men around the table to come up with a format to deliver wine between a winery, a bottling facility and the dining table in this day and age, they would not come up with a round glass bottle.

Why is making a better bottle so important?

Studies show from California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, the Australian Wine Research Institute, University at the Polytechnic Catalonia, they all show that the vast majority of wines carbon footprint comes from the glass bottle. Its creation, its movement, its recycling.

So Australian Wine Research Institute says 68 percent of wines entire carbon footprint comes from the packaging and its transportation. If you take the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, it’s 51 percent.

If the wine industry wants to slash its carbon footprint overnight, they need to change their bottle – there’s no two ways about it. They need a better bottle.

Going flat out

In my view, wine does not just need alternative packaging – the world of wine seems to think it’s either a round glass bottle, or it’s a box or a can – the wine industry needs a better bottle. It needs a bottle that is shaped efficient, energy efficient. Lightweight, strong, very little secondary packaging that is for the vast majority of wines.

© Garçon Wines
| CEO Santiago Navarro says the wine world needs to get serious about the environment.

Why make the bottles flat?

The benefit of rethinking something from base assumptions can be significant. We went back to the drawing board and said: “How do you create a bottle that has all the nice bits of the world of wine, but sheds all the inefficiencies?”

So how do you shed glass? Use total recycled PET, one of the first bottles in the world for any drink made from entirely recycled materials – I did it way in advance of Blue Planet II – and then, how do you save space? You go flat. We’re flat, we are uniquely space-saving, no one in the world can pack 1100 bottles on a pallet, even Accolade Wines, they get up to 91 percent more product on a pallet, that’s significant.

In some instances, I’ve spoken to wineries that get 456 bottles on a pallet, in that case, we’d get more than twice a product on a pallet. It’s because flat products pack like books, and round products are totally inefficient at packing.

There’s research that’d say that a bottle that is wider and taller commands a presence on shelf and actually could demand the greater price premium. So, for us, the fact that we create this billboard effect for something like Hardys on shelf, we’re two centimeters taller, we still fit on a retail shelf very comfortably, we pack very efficiently, we fit in fridge doors.

Why PET plastic?

We are a very specific type of recycled flat PET bottle. So for us, it’s the best in class material by any measure of economic or environmental metric.

We are now starting to source material that comes from the Bay of Jakarta. So we will be collecting material through our network and through suppliers. That’s material that’s at risk of getting into the oceans, as a large amount of plastic unfortunately gets into oceans in Asia through rivers.

We’re about to launch production in Australia and the US, and there we will use domestically produced recycled PET. So just encouraging the local ecosystem to recycle and to up recycling rates.

We must not ignore a wonder material like recycled PET because some countries have poor recycling rates because it would be like abandoning electric vehicle technology because there’s not enough charging points. We must put in place more charging points – not abandon electric vehicles.

I understand some of the anti-plastic sentiment, some plastic should be banned immediately.

We should not be using polystyrene for food packaging. Polystyrene is so hard to recycle. It should just not be an option, government should just say no, not allowed. PVC, same thing, a hard-to-recycle material. Why we using PVC for products which have only a short lifetime, it’s nuts.

We need material like PET, it’s so easy to work with, it’s so easy to recycle. It has very similar properties to glass when you think about the visual aspect, which is important.

If every bottle of wine was replaced by one of yours, what would the reduction in emissions be?

There have been third-party lifecycle analyses conducted on our bottle comparing our bottle to the lowest weight glass bottle available – the technical limitation on lowest – and we see somewhere between 45 and 55 percent reduction. So it will be significant, at least 50 percent would be a rough estimation.

Of course, [it’s] a very hypothetical question, but great to place it. Reality is that the wine world talks about light-weighting bottles but research shows that if you lightweight a glass bottle to its technical limit of how low you can go for 750ml, the maximum you can cut in carbon footprint is 15 percent.

Things like you know Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, a perfect product because a lot of it is bottled in New Zealand and a lot of it goes right across the world and must have a totally unnecessary carbon footprint.

So light-weighting bottles is incremental innovation. It is innovation yeah but it’s incremental. We need step change.

Does glass still have its place?

We are not for the DRCs, we’re not for the First Growth Bordeaux, we’re not for the super Tuscans, we’re not for 15 percent of the world’s production.

So, 85 percent of the world of wine does not benefit from the glass it’s packaged in – 15 percent of the world of wine must stay in glass, there is no other material that provides the oxygen barrier.

Champagne is a great example of something that needs to be round, there needs to be glass because of the extreme pressure in that bottle. But they need to encourage those around them who are not needing the oxygen barrier, or the strength.

Should that 15 percent care about the rest of the wine world?

So whilst First Growth Bordeauxs et cetera must stay in glass, they must also be very concerned about what the rest of the world of wine is using.

If you’re drinking tonight a Sassicaia or Tignanello, you should be concerned about what just a simple wine from Puglia is being bottled in. Because that Puglia wine is going to be drunk within a year, it doesn’t benefit from glass, it’s contributing to a very large part of the carbon footprint of wine.

Lands that are limited tends to be fine wine, is pegged to very small areas. Many wines that can be produced from other lands, brands not specific to a special hill in Burgundy, they can be moved down the road and it’s not going to make a difference; people will still buy the brand.

But those ones that are pegged to lands and that creates such beautiful wines, they’re so under threat and those traditionalists might be the one wishing that I never existed, but actually I’m here to help them.

I think the discomfort that traditionalists might feel with innovation pales in comparison to the concern they should have about the loss of their land to the climate crisis.