Introducing Alouette, a chillable Grenache for which we leave the glass bottle behind

While we make a lot of wines at Tablas Creek, we don’t make a lot of new wines at Tablas Creek. Yes, we’ve added a few varietal bottlings in recent years, and we launched the Lignée de Tablas series in 2023. Those are always exciting. Before that, you have to go back to our Le Complice, which we came up with in 2017. But if you read my red blending blog from a couple of months ago, you’re already aware that we’re adding a new wine to our portfolio: a chillable Grenache that we’re calling Alouette.

Grenache always produces a range of wines here at Tablas Creek, from the chewy, black cherry and licorice lots that we use in our Panoplie and Esprit de Tablas to the spicy, red cherry and chalky mineral lots that typically form the base of our Cotes de Tablas and go into our varietal Grenache. It’s also a famously great rosé grape, because it comes with good fruit and good acid, and doesn’t need a lot of skin contact to pick up that fruit character. In the vineyard, it’s vigorous and generally productive, making large clusters of large berries and ample canopy to shade and ripen them.

Grenache’s vigor can lead to wider swings in production than any other grape we grow. A moderate year might give us three tons to the acre, where with Mourvedre we might get two. A productive year might see Mourvedre increase to three tons an acre, while Grenache could double to six. That means that in order to have enough Grenache in the lean years we sometimes have to be creative in the productive ones. This year, when we began our blending trials, it was clear we would have to find a home for a lot of Grenache. In fact, we had nearly as much Grenache as we did all our other reds combined! So after we blended Panoplie, Esprit, En Gobelet, Le Complice, and Cotes de Tablas (all of which include a healthy chunk of Grenache) we still had enough Grenache left to make nearly 3000 cases. From that we decided to make two wines: our traditional varietal bottling of Grenache, from the more classic, structured, deeper lots, and a new wine from the highest-toned, palest, and juiciest lots that we’re calling Alouette. In character it’s somewhere between a dark rosé and a light red, with high-toned cherry and cranberry fruit flavors, bright acids, a hint of tannin, and a lightly herbal finish like all the parts of a wild strawberry, from leaves to flowers to fruit.

The name Alouette literally translates from the French as “lark”, with both the meanings that it carries in English. Yes, the songbird, but also something done on a whim, or for fun. It’s also the first line of a common French children's song that I learned in middle school French class and which (I’m sorry) I’m guessing many of you are already humming to yourselves. It’s a fun name to say, has a fun meaning, and should be a great fit for a wine that’s eminently fun to drink.

As for a package, we’ll be sharing this wine in two ways. For our sales from the winery, we’re putting it into our three-liter boxes. This is a red wine that is lovely served chilled, so a box, which you can stash in your fridge and pour a glass from whenever you want, will be ideal. For the restaurant and wine bar world, we’re putting it into our 19.5-liter kegs. From there it can be poured by the glass or carafe while maintaining maximum freshness.

You might notice what we’re not putting the wine in: glass bottles. While they are unmatched at holding wine that you want to keep for years or decades in your cellar, they’re not a great container for wine that’s going to be opened and consumed in the near team. As we’ve written about in our blogs on the Patelin de Tablas boxes we’ve been making, glass is heavy and fragile, and requires lots of energy to mine, melt, mold, and transport.

When you look at the carbon footprint of various packages, both boxes and kegs pencil out well ahead of glass bottles. Stainless steel kegs are essentially infinitely reusable, and despite the additional energy costs of having to ship them back to their point of origin, our partners at Free Flow Wines have calculated that they offer a 76% reduction in carbon footprint compared to the 26 bottles required to hold the same volume of wine, not to mention the two-plus cases of cardboard cases and extra labels, capsules, and corks. They’re also zero-waste, which appeals to us. The 3L bag-in-box offers something like an 84% savings in carbon footprint compared to four glass bottles, as well as four pounds of savings in weight and a nearly 50% savings in packaging volume.

Plus, once you open a bottle, oxygen starts its destructive work on the wine within, and you only have a matter of days, perhaps a week if you’re careful, before the wine is compromised. With boxes, you have several weeks of prime drinking if it’s living in your fridge. With a keg, you have months.

Not that we expect it to be around that long.

Look for an email announcing the release of the Alouette the week of August 12^th.

To Infinity (Bottling) and Beyond -- a New Era for Tablas Creek Wine Boxes

By Chelsea Franchi

Tablas Creek is well-versed in the meaning of partnership.  After all, in business and practice, we are a partnership ourselves.  This winery was built upon the personal and professional relationship of two esteemed families: the Perrin Family of Chateau de Beaucastel and the Haas Family of Vineyard Brands.  This initial partnership not only shaped our present approach to business but also serves as a guiding principle in nurturing future collaborations.  We take great pride in the work we put forth in the vineyard, the cellar, and the business, so any ancillary associations we forge have some high standards to live up to.

In addition to taking pride in how we conduct ourselves with others, we prioritize sustainability and recognize the profound impact our actions have on the planet.  In 2022, we released our first wine packaged in the bag-in-box format.  This radical decision was driven by several factors, many of which Jason has outlined in previous blog posts (also here, here and here) but at its core was reducing our carbon footprint.  Bag-in-box packaging offers an impressive 84% reduction in carbon emissions compared to traditional glass bottles.  However, venturing into the realm of boxed wine presented challenges due to our smaller production scale.  Dry goods (the bags and boxes) are difficult to source at a reasonable minimum order quantity and companies that have traditionally filled bags for boxed wine are built to run tens of thousands of bags in a day.  We were able to source packaging supplies from a company that works with our scale and we purchased a small semi-automatic filling machine, enabling us to launch our boxed wine program.

After six successful runs during 2022 and 2023 of the three colors of Patelin de Tablas, we decided it was time to increase production so we could send a small number of boxes out into the market (so you may now see them on the shelf of your favorite wine shop!)  This expanded production meant we needed to find a packaging partner with expertise in bottling; as much as we'd like to keep everything in-house, we simply don't have the time to do it all ourselves.

We'd been in close contact with the team at Really Good Boxed Wine - a high-end boxed wine project started in 2021 - and their guidance was an invaluable resource as we navigated our way through this new-to-us world of boxed wine.  Jake, the founder of RGBW, connected us with Infinity Bottling in Napa Valley, as they had recently invested in a bag-in-box filling machine that would be able to accommodate our production amounts.

Infinity Bottling in American Canyon

A few months, some Zoom meetings, phone calls, and countless emails later, we loaded portable tanks of the 2023 Patelin de Tablas Blanc onto a temperature-controlled semi-truck bound for Infinity Bottling.  On the day of the boxing, I drove up to tour the facility, observe the boxing run, and meet the Infinity crew in person.  It was well worth the trip.  The facility is gleaming and maintained with obvious care, the team is small and tight with strong leadership at the helm, and the quality control is continuous, consistent, and robust.  The team's efficiency and expertise ensured a seamless boxing process, giving us peace of mind knowing our wine was in capable, caring hands.  Partnering with Infinity Bottling underscored our commitment to working with companies that share our values of excellence and integrity while simultaneously reflecting our dedication to delivering only the highest quality wines to our customers.

Here's a little of what the process looked like (compare, if you'd like, to what it looked like when we were doing it in-house):

The semi-automatic Torr filling machine manned by a bottling expert at Infinity

Tablas Creek 3L boxes getting sealed shut

Finished 3L boxes are packaged in case boxes and palletized for shipping

This journey has led us to outstanding partners and immersed us in a community of like-minded individuals striving to redefine industry standards.  If you're curious about that community, check out the new Alternative Packaging Alliance, which we and six other brands formed earlier this year to help spread the word on this customer-friendly, low-carbon package.  Whether it's reducing the carbon footprint of packaging, elevating the quality of boxed wine, or maintaining impeccable standards in the packaging process, we're thrilled to be part of this exciting and transformative movement.  We've found some excellent partners, indeed.

Patelin Blanc in a 3L box and its bottled equivalent

Solar Powered -- in Ways You'd Expect, and in Ways You Probably Wouldn't

[Editor's note: a couple of weeks ago, when I was on the road, Director of Marketing Ian Consoli put together a social media post about our energy use. I realized that it told a story that we'd never fully addressed on the blog. So I expanded it into this.] 

One way or another, nearly all the energy we use as a society comes from the sun. The question is just whether we’re going to harness its current output, or the past output as stored by ancient plants and turned over time into coal, oil, or natural gas. So, as a business which is concerned with its impact on the environment, you have to wrestle with two questions: how to use less energy, and how to choose the sources where that energy comes from. At Tablas Creek, we're trying to approach both choices thoughtfully.

Before even thinking about sources of energy, it's important to look at how you can use less energy overall. After all, there's a reason why the EPA warns you against solarizing your inefficiencies. Even renewable energy comes with costs, both in hard costs of manufacturing and installation, and in opportunity costs in other projects that don't get done. So, how do we use less energy overall? Here's a short list. Our winery and office are entirely outfitted with motion-sensitive lights. We use 100% electric forklifts and quads powered by our solar array. In 2020 we built a highly insulated night-cooled, solar-powered wine storage building to store our on-site inventory and reduce trips to outside warehouses. We forward-stage our wine club shipments so that they can be shipped ground rather than air and still get to customers with two days or less transit time. Our cellar is extremely well insulated and utilizes night air exchange. We have individual heating and cooling coils in most of our fermentation (and some of our aging) vessels, including the wooden upright tanks you see front and center when you come to our tasting room:

Now for some things you might not expect. Packaging accounts for half the carbon footprint of the average winery. Carbon footprint is, essentially, a proxy for energy use. We’ve used lightweight glass for nearly 15 years, which alone reduces the total carbon footprint of a winery by between 10% and 20% depending on the weight of the glass that they were using before. We’ve sold our wines to restaurants and wine bars in reusable, zero-waste stainless steel kegs for even longer. Those kegs, even with the return shipment to California for washing and reuse, result in a 76% reduction in carbon footprint compared to glass. And, of course, over the last couple of years we’ve been putting our Patelin de Tablas wines in 3L boxes, in large part because they have an 84% lower carbon footprint than the same wine packaged in glass (photo credit to my wife Meghan, who brought one of our new Patelin Rosé boxes on a weekend trip recently).

As for the energy we do use, we've decided that solar is the way to go. If there is a resource we have in abundance in Paso Robles, it’s sun. Our 320 days of sun each year are a key part of why it’s such a great place to grow wine grapes. It also makes producing our own energy a great option, with an ROI of less than 10 years. We have four solar arrays, installed in 2006, 2015, 2019, and 2021. These arrays total 245kWp in capacity, and in 2022 produced 102% of the electricity we used to power our winery, office, and tasting room (we don't yet have the total from 2023 but expect to do even better given the more limited need for cooling in that cooler vintage). Using renewable energy, generated on site, means that you basically eliminate the 11% of the average California winery's carbon footprint that comes from energy use (chart below from the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance): 

Finally, one last unexpected way we use the sun’s energy to power our operations. Don’t underestimate the power of photosynthesis. Every square inch of leaf is like a little photovoltaic cell. Our regenerative farming prescribes avoiding bare ground and using cover crops. The plants we grow, both the grapevines in the summer and the cover crops in the winter, capture the sun’s energy as the power source that turns atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Our flock of sheep is the next stage in this energy transfer, eating grasses and ground cover and transferring 80% of that biomass to our soil, where it powers the vineyard without needing to bring in fertilizer or other inputs.

Our sun has been shining for some 4.5 billion years, and has another 5 billion years to go. There isn't a more reliable source out there. Leaning in and learning how to use it? That seems the safest, and most sustainable, bet we can make.

Thinking about the Box in Which we are Thinking Inside the Box

By Ian Consoli

I remember the day Proprietor Jason Haas came to me with the decision to allocate a portion of our 2021 Patelin de Tablas Rosé to release in the Bag in Box (BIB) format. We had addressed the idea in multiple managers' meetings, so it wasn't a surprise, but we had a quick turnaround ahead of us. On a short timeline, we picked up a standardized, cardstock, square box, printed the same label we would put on a bottle, and wrapped it over two sides of the box. While we all knew we could make a bigger statement from a design standpoint, our belief in the concept outweighed our worry about the aesthetics. We turned to the old adage of don't let perfect be the enemy of good and carried forward.

The launch, as you may already know, was incredibly successful. Another day I will never forget was releasing 300 3L BIBs in an email and watching the website traffic go off the charts while Jason saw the sales pinging away. We were walking back and forth between our offices with our hands on our heads in jubilant exasperation to the oft-frequented term, "bonkers!"

300 boxes filled with premium wine at $95 a piece sold in four hours without a single comment on the lack of design on the box. Yeah, bonkers.

We released 400 more, followed by the 2021 Patelin de Tablas Blanc and 2021 Patelin de Tablas red. Noting the program's success as we entered the second year of releases, we knew we wanted to expand the BIB program from our mailing list to retail shelves. As Jason highlighted in this blog, there were significant barriers to scaling the program up. We just had to figure out how to work around them.

So begins the next chapter in our premium BIB story.

Jason told the story of our boxed wine success as the keynote speaker at the 2023 DTC Wine Symposium, noting the positive reception in the DTC market and the current limitations preventing us from offering these boxes to wine shops requesting them.

Afterwards, Jake Whitman of Really Good Boxed Wine (RGBW) approached us. While we and other wineries had worked to build the reputation of premium BIBs in the DTC market, Jake and RGBW had been paving the way for a premium category of BIBs on retail shelves. He thought there might be a way for us to collaborate to solve some of the issues we addressed and work together to develop the category.

We worked with the team at Really Good Boxed Wine over the past year to expand production and design a box that would stand out on retail shelves nationwide. We are happy to introduce that box to you now, along with its benefits:

Design: The previous version of our boxed wine made sense for our current customers. Our wine club and mailing list know who we are; they read our reasons for releasing the wine, know the wine is good, and see the benefits of the BIB packaging. What does it matter what the packaging says when the contents are what you want?

This is not the case when it comes to retail shelves. We needed a box that would speak for us. One of the significant benefits of a box is the real estate on which we can share information. This contrasts with a wine label, where information must be limited. We used an entire panel to summarize the key benefits of the BIB format from one of our blogs, effectively communicating with a consumer who might not know who we are or why our BIB wine is priced differently from the BIBs they are used to seeing.

Shape: RGBW noticed retailers placed their earlier boxed wine designs in, well, the boxed wine section. A $70 BIB targeting a premium consumer in a section where budget shoppers are looking at $15, $20, and $25 BIBs is not competitive. In response, their team designed a box the width of a burgundy bottle. That size allows them to fit alongside wines in bottles in the premium category where they belong. It also means it will be easier for consumers to identify high-quality wine in BIB.

Shipping: The benefits are not all for the wholesale market. Our early trials revealed an issue with shipping multiple BIBs. An initial three-box limit proved too many, as the boxes would crush each other en route to their location, arriving in a dismal state. We then limited purchases to two boxes, shoving craft paper all around them to protect them. The presentation was as hodge-podge as it sounds.

Jake and his team developed shipping boxes specifically for this BIB design. They have grids that hold each box in place for one-packs, two-packs, and three-packs. Thanks to this change, we can now increase our limit back to three BIBs per customer!

Perception: We knew our original design was not a long-term solution. Premium wine in a box should feel premium, and this new box does. It is sturdy, has a clean design, and communicates our message of sustainability. We chose black ink on cardstock (similar to our case boxes) to ensure the recyclability of the packaging. This package will stand out on retail shelves and look nice in the fridge.

We plan to release about 950 boxes of the 2023 Patelin de Tablas Rosé in its newest package (Check those emails) and around 800 to retailers in California and a few other hand-selected states soon. These retailers (many of whom commented on our social media posts or responded to our emails to express interest), represent a test that, if successful, could lead to us rolling these boxes out more broadly around the country in 2025. We don't want to be the only ones talking about the benefits in sustainability, shelf-life, and space that boxes offer, and this gives us a chance to activate the network of cool independent retailers and hopefully even a few restaurants!

That national program will launch later this month, so feel free to contact us if you hope to find the boxes near you.

It only makes sense for me to conclude this blog post by thanking the team that made it all possible. The resources given freely by Jake and Michelle at Really Good Boxed Wine are on a level indicative of the most hospitable of the wine industry. With a rising tide lifts all ships mentality, they are to be admired. I strongly encourage you to find their wines near you or order online. Oh yeah, and the wine is Really Good.

The quest for sustainability: wine's "yes, and" moment

In improv comedy, there's an important concept called "yes, and". In essence, it means that you're taking what your team has done previously and building on it. This is important in improv because it's unscripted: you don't know what's going to come before, but it's your job to keep up and build the momentum. The website of the famous Chicago-based comedy group Second City has a great summary of its importance in the improv world:

A large part of improv is that you are always there for your scene partner or partners, and, in turn, they are always there for you. This is the goal of “Yes, And”! By saying yes to your scene partner, you create something much more entertaining. If you start a scene by saying that you are an alien, and your scene partner completely commits to also being an alien, being abducted by an alien, etc., both of you know you can count on the other person. On the other hand, if you start by saying you are a puppy, but your scene partner says “Wait, I thought you were a cat!”, the scene is compromised. Not only do you feel less confident, but also the audience is less entertained.

As the same page points out, "yes, and" has applications in real life as well, to the point that it's become a business school staple. I was reminded of the concept's relevance twice recently. The first time was when I shared on my various social channels my excitement at the news of Karen MacNeil's announcement that she was no longer going to accept wine packaged in heavy bottles for review. The responses fell along the lines that you would probably predict. The significant majority (about 80%, by my rough count) cheered the decision as an important step for a writer using her platform to nudge a tradition-loving industry in a positive direction. I got a few responses from the right wing fringe (maybe 5%) complaining that this was nothing more than virtue signaling and that things like carbon footprint and climate change were a hoax. But I also got some responses that while this was positive, it was of secondary importance to other environmental issues in grapegrowing, winemaking, or wine marketing. A few of the issues mentioned in these comments were pesticide use, the carbon footprint of wine tourism, and the prevalence of single-use packaging.

Now it's possible that these weren't good-faith comments in the first place. Deflections to other problems have become a favorite tactic of the anti-environmental lobby in recent years, with the goal of muddying the discussion of any particular solution and forcing proponents to defend their proposals against one idea after another. But these responses got me thinking. 

The second occasion recently where I was reminded of the importance of "yes, and" was at last week's Tasting Climate Change Conference in Montreal. The event was inspiring. We heard from experts in viticulture, resource use, and the soil microbiome; discussed the changes that wine regions have already observed and the best projections for what things will look like in another generation; and debated the best way forward for packaging, certifications, appellations, and grape varieties. I sat on a panel with a local importer and a representative from the SAQ (the province-wide monopoly on wine and liquor sales) to discuss the role that producers, importers, and retailers can play in moving the wine community toward a more sustainable future. A core piece of what I discussed was our experiment in recent years in releasing a high-end boxed wine due in large part to its more-than-80% reduction in the carbon footprint of the package compared to four glass bottles and the capsules, corks, and labels they require.

To begin my presentation, I wanted to establish that this experiment was not done in isolation, but instead part of a fundamental approach to how we conduct our business. Across our departments, we focus on making choices that have the fewest possible negative repercussions and the greatest possible positive impacts on our people, our land, our community, and the broader environment. I've written about most of these initiatives here on the blog, including: our longstanding commitment to organic and biodynamic farming; our move to lightweight glass; our embrace of kegs in our wholesale sales and our tasting room; our replacement of plastic water bottles with reusable canteens; our reduction in tillage; our move toward dry farming; the growth of our composting and biochar programs; and the installation of a wetland to treat our winery wastewater. One of the reasons we love the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) program is because it's both rigorous and comprehensive, with meaningful requirements in soil health, biodiversity, resource use, animal welfare, and farmworker fairness. I fielded as many questions about our farming approach, or our commitment to our people, as I did our packaging.

That's why, to me, the deflections about there being other pressing issues in the world of wine beyond carbon footprint ring hollow. Addressing one issue doesn't mean not addressing another. Should you be using lighter bottles? Absolutely. Your customers will appreciate it, you'll save your winery significant money, and you'll reduce your overall carbon footprint by between 10% and 20% depending on the bottle you were using previously. But should you also move from conventional to organic farming, or from organic to biodynamic or regenerative farming? Also yes. You'll feel better about not exposing your land, your people, and your neighbors to chemicals. You'll improve your soil's resilience and its ability to withstand extreme rain events, heat spikes, and drought. And you'll almost certainly make better wine. How about coming up with new ways of connecting with your customers that don't require you to fly all over the country or them to fly out to see you? Also also yes. You'll save money and realize that the initiatives that you came up with allow you to reach a much higher percentage of your current (let alone potential) customers than you were able to before. I could go on.

If you don't believe that carbon footprint matters or that businesses have a responsibility for the carryon effects of their choices, I'm not sure that any of this will matter to you. But for the rest of us, this isn't a time to think of these challenges as either-or choices. Adopt a more comprehensive approach. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get started, and adjust as you learn more.

Yes, and.

What's the most useless glass bottle? One that never leaves the winery.

Last week, I walked out of my office on my way to the mezzanine level of our cellar, on which we keep a few cases of each of our bottled-but-not-yet-released wines. I was looking for samples of our 2022 Patelin de Tablas Rosé, 2022 Dianthus, and 2022 Vermentino, to write tasting notes for our website in anticipation of the wines' release announcements. 

[Pause for a moment. Hooray for new wines! We've never been as scarce on wine as these past couple of months. I am always excited for the release of our rosés, but it's all the more exciting this year. If you've been looking disconsolately at our online shop as I have, wishing most of the wines didn't say "sold out", the cavalry is, at long last, on its way.]

I got about halfway to the mezzanine before I realized I didn't have to open a bottle. I took a right turn into our tasting room, walked up to the new tap system we installed last month, and poured myself tastes of each of the three wines out of keg. No bottle necessary.

We're long-time advocates for wine in keg. I wrote back in 2010 on the blog about how much potential the format had, but how frustrating it was that the industry hadn't settled on a standard for keg size and connection yet. By 2013 things had evolved enough that I could celebrate the launch of a national keg program for our Patelin de Tablas, Patelin de Tablas Blanc, and Patelin de Tablas Rosé. And in 2020 we expanded that with small batches of kegs of some of the wines normally only available in our tasting room. Why we're excited boils down to three main reasons:

• Freshness: The wine that is poured out of a keg is replaced by an inert gas, which means that what remains in the keg isn't exposed to oxygen. A bottle, on the other hand, starts oxidizing as soon as it is opened. Roughly half the glasses of wine I order at restaurants show some signs of oxidation... but not if they're served from keg.
• Less Waste: Restaurants expect to dump out the unused ends of most opened bottles at the end of each night, and the rest of any bottle that's been open multiple days. This adds up; restaurants I've spoken to estimate they may waste 25% or more of their glass pours this way. Keg wines are good down to their last pour.
• Sustainability: The bottles, capsules, corks and labels that help preserve, identify and market a wine between barrel and glass are temporary enclosures, that will be discarded when the bottle is consumed. That's a lot of resources tied up in something whose only purpose is to be used and (hopefully) recycled or (more often) thrown away. Kegs eliminate all this wasted packaging. When they're empty, they get returned to be washed and reused. Free Flow Wines, our partner in our national kegging program, recently shared the results of a study showing that reusable stainless steel kegs offer a 76% savings in carbon footprint vs. packaging the same wine in bottles. 

In 2022, our distributors sold roughly 640 of our kegs to restaurants and wine bars around the country. Earlier this week we shared a photo of our new tap handles on social media, and got a lot of excited customer responses and a few inquiries from accounts interested in pouring the wines on tap. Perfect.

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If you're a regular reader of the blog, you will know that we've been working to be more selective about our use of glass wine bottles. If not, you might be wondering why we're looking for alternatives, given that it's a package with thousands of years of history, made from a product that should be endlessly recyclable, and still the best vessel for long-term aging. Here's a quick summary. Because glass is energy-intensive to mine and mold -- and heavy and fragile to ship -- it accounts for more than half the carbon footprint of the average California winery. It's also bulky. You can reduce glass's packaging footprint by about 20% by moving to lightweight glass, which we did in 2010, but that's still 350% of the footprint of a lighter-weight package like bag-in-box. We've been experimenting with that, and while I think it's a step in the right direction for some wines, it's still a single-use package, requires the creation of some plastic, and isn't great for storage much longer than six months. The glass bottle would be less problematic if it were recycled reliably (it's not; the glass recycling rate in the United States is a dismal 31%) and could become a preferred solution again if we could figure out some sort of wash-and-reuse system along the lines of what soda producers do in Latin America. There are smart people working on this, but the logistical hurdles are daunting and it still seems a long way off. So while we don't expect to move our ageworthy wines out of glass bottle, we've been looking for ways to help at the margins.  

Kegs, filled through our partnership with Free Flow, accounted for 12% of the total volume of wine that we sold wholesale last year, and meant that more than 16,000 wine bottles, capsules, and corks/capsules/screwcaps, plus the cardboard needed for more than 1,300 cases, never needed to be created. That's not negligible. But what about our tasting room? We welcomed more than 28,000 guests for tastings last year, and we sell about the same amount of wine there as we do in wholesale. Those guests got six or seven tastes of wine each. Do the math on that and that's a bottle of wine for every four tasting room guests, or enough wine just for guest samples to fill 7,000 bottles. Add in that we taste each bottle when we open it to make sure it's sound, that we use the same bottles to pour by-the-glass wines in our tasting room, that we often discard the ends of bottles rather than hold them overnight for the next day, and that, to ensure that guests get only fresh wine, rarely-poured wines get sent home with our tasting room team after a few days even if they're mostly full, and you end up with a significantly larger number: the nearly 13,000 bottles that we signed out of inventory as tasting room samples in 2022.

Let that sink in a bit. We used more than 1,000 cases of wine just to pour tasting room samples. Some of those pours were of older wines, where their time in bottle would make a difference in how they showed, but nearly 70% of what we sampled out was used within a year of when it was bottled. That's ~9,000 bottles that were sourced, shipped to us, filled, closed, labeled, opened, poured, and recycled within a year. 

So I'm pleased to announce that we've sourced kegs, filling and cleaning machines for the cellar, and a modular dispensing system for the tasting room. At each bottling, we'll be setting aside a portion of each wine, putting it in keg. Last week's batch:

The initial reviews we've been getting from our tasting room guests have been enthusiastic. So, when you next come to taste with us, know that many of the samples we'll share with you will come out of our own kegs. As each keg is emptied, we'll wash and sterilize it, and then reuse it for a future wine. A photo of the setup, in use this morning:

We're not expecting to ever get to 100% wine service from keg in our tasting room, and that's fine. We always want to be able to offer wines with bottle age for tasting and sale, and while kegs are outstanding at preserving wine, after a year or so we would expect that the wine from keg would taste different than the same wine from bottle. We'll be trying some small-scale experiments this year to confirm or modify those assumptions. But if we can shift two-thirds or more of our tasting room sampling and glass pours from glass to reusable keg, that's a win. A win for our guests, who don't have to worry about oxidation in their samples. A win for us, since we're estimating we'll go through something like one-third less wine, and we don't have to worry about those pours coming from corked, oxidized, or otherwise flawed wines. And a win for the planet, as thousands of glass bottles and all the associated packaging no longer have a reason to be created.

After all, if glass is a problematic container for the industry at large (don't just take my word for it; the mainstream press has noticed) it seems downright crazy to use it for such temporary storage.

What we've learned about making box wine, six months and three colors later

Back in February, I published a blog that created a bit of a stir. In it, I made the case that boxes of wine (the cardboard kind normally found on grocery store shelves, not the wooden kind found in fancy cellars) deserved another look from higher-end producers. It had become stigmatized in the market, the container for what people assumed would be cheap plonk. But I asserted that there were compelling reasons to shift certain wines into boxes, most notably that it offered advantages in preservation (it can last weeks in your fridge after being opened), storage space (glass bottles are bulky, and the packaging needed to cushion them takes up yet more space), and portability (a full 3L bag-in-box weighs seven pounds while the same volume in bottles weighs eleven). Plus, and probably most importantly, because glass bottles are heavy and require lots of energy to melt and mold, a 3L wine bag-in-box offers an 84% carbon footprint reduction vs. the four glass bottles that would contain the same wine.

The blog got 54 comments, more than any other we've ever published. It spurred stories in Wine Searcher, Forbes, and even the Robb Report. I was invited to speak about the decision at the WiVi tradeshow and on the XChateau Podcast. More recently, the New York Times published an article in which wine columnist Eric Asimov pointed to our experiments with the wine boxes as a productive step forward for wine producers grappling with the environmental impact of our default package. The initial batch of 324 boxes of our Patelin de Tablas Rosé sold out four hours after we announced their release in an email to our wine club and mailing list. We made more (522 boxes) of the Patelin de Tablas Blanc in June, and despite releasing them in a much less shipping-friendly season sold them out in less than a month. This week, we put our first red into box, the 2021 Patelin de Tablas. We're planning to release it soon, and I expect it to go fast.

The response from our customers has been amazing. I was hoping that we'd sell out of the Patelin Rosé boxes in a month, so being out in four hours was definitely above my wildest aspirations. And the feedback we've seen from customers either directly or online has been terrific. But I've been most gratified to hear from so many other producers who are also looking to explore this lower-carbon package and want to know what we've learned. A few have even jumped in and done it, including Kobayashi Winery, who released their high-end Roussanne/Marsanne blend in a $195 box.

In the spirit of using the blog to answer the questions I get every day, here's a quick summary of what we've learned after six months:

• The public is more open than they've ever been to alternative packaging. This first hurdle, which I assumed would be the biggest one, turned out to be no big deal. Granted, we have a direct relationship with the customers on our mailing list and in our wine club. But so do other wineries. And based on the number of people who let me know that this was their first-ever purchase of a boxed wine, we weren't dealing with people who were already converts to the package. That's amazing. And it's not just boxes. Writers as on platforms as diverse and distinguished as JancisRobinson.com, SommTV, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wine Enthusiast have recently published pieces in support of lighter-weight, lower-waste wine containers like boxes, cans, kegs, and bottles made from paper, resin, and plastic. 
• The wholesale market is likely to be slower to adjust. When I published that February blog, I heard from a few independent retailers around the country asking if they could buy some of these boxes. We didn't make enough this first go-around to sell them in the wholesale market, but I put out some feelers with our wholesalers for next year. Although there were a few exceptions, the responses I got were not generally enthusiastic. Most boiled down to some version of, "You want people to spend how much for your box of wine? That won't work with our current box wine outlets." And I get this. A quick search on the shelves at our local Albertsons revealed a decent array of box wines... all selling for between $20 and $35. Doing the math, that translates to between $5 and $8.75 per 750ml. Our Patelin boxes, priced at $95, work out to $23.75 per 750ml bottle. I submit that this is still a great value -- bottles of Patelin sell for $28, after all -- but I could easily imagine the sticker shock of a grocery store customer wondering what this outlier was doing on a shelf at triple the price of the next-most-expensive box. If someone knows and trusts Tablas Creek already, great. That's easy to overcome. But are those people looking in the box wine section of their local retail store? Perhaps not. However, I still think that there is a market for high-end box wines in wholesale. It's just not at the traditional grocery and retail chain outlets. The sweet spot, I think, would be to market this to smaller, independent retailers who talk to their customers and would be excited to share the advantages of boxes. And to hip restaurants who don't have keg systems to pour wine by the glass. After all, the preservation and waste-reduction advantages offered by boxes could prove incredibly valuable at a restaurant level. No more pouring out the oxidized ends of bottles after two days. No more bins full of empty glass.    
• The infrastructure to support small producers packaging in bag-in-box has a long way to come... but it could happen fast. There is a supply network that allows small- to medium-size wineries to operate with reasonable economies of scale. These include brokers who consolidate the offerings of vendors of bottles, capsules, labels and corks; mobile bottling lines that allow a winery to bottle a few weeks a year without having to invest in a line that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; and warehouses who ship wine for hundreds of wineries and can negotiate on reasonable footing with common carriers like UPS and FedEx. All those pieces still need to be developed for boxes of wine. We had one off-the-shelf option (thank you AstraPouch!) on the open market for sourcing our boxes and the bags that go inside. That's fine; you don't need to make millions of boxes to contract with a printer to make your own. We're leaning toward doing so for future runs. But if you were wondering why for this year we used the plain craft cardboard box with our label stuck onto it, well, that was the only option available. For the filling, we had a similarly restricted set of options. There are no mobile boxing lines in California. There is one in Oregon, but the minimum commitment to have them drive all the way down here was in the tens of thousands of boxes. There is a custom boxing line in the Central Valley at which you can rent space if you can bring your wine and materials to them, but their minimums were similarly high. So we were left with renting (and eventually buying) a semi-automated bag filler from Torr Industries and building all the boxes ourselves. That's time consuming (see below) and not very scalable. Finally, on the shipping end, we work with the largest fulfillment house in California to ship our wine to our consumers. They didn't have a package for boxes because they'd never done it before. We had to do a bunch of trial and error, and still aren't 100% satisfied with where we ended up. What's more, neither FedEx nor UPS have approved shipping boxes for wine in box, which means they won't take any responsibility that the product arrives intact.
• It's time consuming doing the box construction and filling yourself. As I mentioned in the last point, because of the lack of availability and prohibitively high minimum quantities for automated box-filling lines, we had to set up a little assembly line and do it ourselves. You can see the process in the pictures at the beginning of the piece. Someone has to attach the bag to the filler, start the fill, then when it's done detach it and repeat. Meanwhile, someone else has to be assembling and taping the top of the boxes, while yet another person puts a bag into that half-assembled box and then closes and tapes up the bottom. Finally, someone has to carefully stick on the label, then put the box into its "master" case box that holds six of the finished 3L packages. Each stage takes time, on average 30 seconds to fill, 20 seconds to assemble the top of the box, 24 seconds to put the bag into the box and tape up the bottom, and 16 seconds to stick on each label. That's 90 seconds per box of labor. To make 400 boxes, as we did Monday, it takes 10 hours of work time, not counting the time it takes to set up and calibrate the machine, unpack the shipments of materials, or close up finished master cases and prepare them for transport. For our cellar team of four, making 400 3L boxes was an afternoon's work. That's a lot slower than bottling using a mobile bottling line. How much slower? We normally can bottle 2000 cases in a full day of work. The 400 3L boxes is equivalent to 133 9L cases. So if we'd done a full day, we might have finished the equivalent of 275 cases... less than 15% of the volume we could have put into bottles in that same time. That's a huge disincentive to scale up a boxed wine program.
• The package itself is even better than we'd thought. For all the challenges, we're believers in the package. We're now roughly six months out from our first batch of boxes, and the wine is still showing beautifully when we open a new box, indistinguishable from a newly-opened screwcapped bottle. We've tried the wine after having it be open two months and four months in a fridge, and it showed fresh and pure. We'll keep testing and will know more after a year, but as far as the integrity of the wine in the box, we've been happy.

So, where does this leave us? Not all that far from where we began. We think the package is good for the wine and now have confirmation that consumers are willing to give it a try even at a higher price. We have learned that the infrastructure to support smaller producers who want to move to bag-in-box is limited. We have learned that there are lots of other wineries out there who are interested, but that many are stymied by the lack of infrastructure. And we know that the wine press is focused like never before on bigger picture questions on the sustainability of wine and the containers it comes in.

All this together seems to me like it will result in changes coming sooner than later that will make it accessible for smaller wineries to offer boxes of their wine to customers. After all, it's a business opportunity, as well as a chance to help move the wine world to a lower-carbon future. Now we wait.

Why is Glass Recycling in the United States So Dismal?

Glass is a product with clear advantages. It's made from a readily-available and non-toxic source (sand). It's exceptionally stable and nonreactive, and so provides a terrific vessel for containing products like wine that you might want to store for decades. And it can be melted down and reused without any degradation of its quality, so it's a perfect product for recycling. And yet, in the United States, it's recycled less than a third of the time. This fact is one of the main reasons we've been exploring alternative packaging like the bag-in-box that we debuted for our Patelin de Tablas Rosé earlier this year. But it doesn't have to be this way. Other countries recycle a much higher percentage of their glass than we do here. I found our depressingly low rate of glass recycling eye-opening enough that I have spent a fair amount of time over the last few months researching why. The conclusions say a lot about what our society and industry values right now. I'm guessing and hoping that this information might be eye-opening for you as well.

Before we start investigating why, a quick review of the facts. According to the EPA, in the United States our glass recycling percentage is 31%, and non-recycled glass represents about 5% of the waste that goes into American landfills each year: 7.6 million tons of glass annually. Our recycling rate is less than half of that in Europe (74% overall) and one-third of the best-performing countries like Sweden, Belgium, and Slovenia (all over 95%). And it's actually worse than those numbers appear, since a significant percentage of the glass that is collected and classified as "recycled" in the United States is in fact crushed up and used for road base rather than melted down and used to make new glass.

The stakes are significant. Recycling glass has positive impacts not just on the waste stream, but on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Glass Packaging Institute, making new glass containers from recycled glass saves between 20% and 30% of the energy, roughly 50% of CO2 emissions, and offsets a greater-than 100% requirement for inputs, compared to working from raw materials. What's more, according to a 2017 survey by the Glass Recycling Coalition, 96% of Americans want and expect that glass be included in their recycling options.

So why, if waste glass is a usable commodity, if consumers expect to recycle it, and if doing so saves on cost compared to working from raw materials, isn't the picture here better? The consensus among experts is that it boils down to three main factors.

• The most widely adopted recycling system in the United States is problematic for glass. Single-stream recycling, in which glass, plastic, and paper are co-mingled in a single bin for pickup and transport to a materials recovery facility (MRF), is overwhelmingly the most common community-sponsored recycling system in America. It is convenient for households, who can toss all their recyclables in one place, and for solid waste companies, who can pick them up with one truck. However, while plastic and paper are unlikely to be damaged in the collection process, glass is fragile and often shatters in the collection process, becoming difficult to sort and also contaminating the other recyclables. Plus, single-stream recycling systems encourage “wish-cycling” where consumers throw nonrecyclable products like light bulbs, plastic bags, soiled cardboard, and Styrofoam into their bins figuring that it’s better to over-recycle than to throw away something that’s recyclable. Doing so adds cost to the recycler and sometimes leads to it being less expensive to send loads to the landfill than pay the cleaning and sorting costs. By contrast, multi-stream recycling systems, in which glass, paper/cardboard, and plastic are placed in different receptacles and collected separately, bypass the MRF entirely and can usually go straight to a processing facility. The downside of these systems is that they cost more for the municipality and solid waste companies, and there is often not the political will to pass along these costs to taxpayers. But the difference is outcomes is stark: just 40% of the glass that goes into single-stream recycling systems ends up getting recycled, compared to 90% from multi-stream recycling systems.

• The United States is big. There are roughly 400 MRF facilities around the country. But there are many fewer glass processing facilities, which turn recycled glass containers into cullet, or usable fragments often sorted by color: just 63 nation-wide, in 30 states. There are even fewer glass manufacturing facilities: just 44, in 21 states. Processing facilities are often far away from population centers where glass is collected and MRFs built. Glass is heavy and bulky, which means that the transportation costs from MRF to processing facility can, absent other incentives, raise the price of the cullet that results high enough to outweigh the savings from using recycled glass.
• Transparency is low, both pre- and post-consumer. First, from the post-consumer end. Most people don’t know what happens to their recyclables once they’ve been collected. Consumer surveys show that residents overwhelmingly want their communities to recycle, and reasonably assume that if they do their part their municipality will take care of the rest. But municipalities have little incentive to report on what happens after the recycling is collected. Do you know where your town’s recyclables are sorted? Or what percentage is sent to the landfill? Do you know whether the process makes or loses money for the community? I didn’t. And communities, which have largely chosen a recycling system that gives consumers a false sense of effectiveness, don’t have the incentives to make this information easy to find. Second, from the pre-consumer end. Have you ever seen a wine label display the recycled content of their glass? I don’t think I have. That’s an indication that wineries don’t think that their customers care about this information, or at least don’t care enough to displace other content in what is valuable and scarce label real estate. And bottle suppliers don’t seem to think that wineries care about this information. We pushed our glass supplier TricorBraun to get us bottles with the highest-possible percentage of recycled glass. Our antique green bottles are made with between 60% and 70% recycled material, and our flint (clear) bottles made with 35-50% recycled material. That’s the most that’s available for domestically-produced wine bottles. But that information isn’t easy to find. If you look at TricorBraun's selection of Burgundy-shaped bottles, each listing includes information about their weight, base diameter, color, neck size, height, punt height, mold number, capacity, finish, and style. But there’s no information on the bottle’s recycled content. That’s surely an indication that bottle suppliers either don’t see this as a point of differentiation or don’t have recycled content widely enough available for the resulting information to be worth sharing. And wine isn’t unique. Glass containers, whether for beverages, food, or household products, don’t typically disclose the amount of recycled content. All this makes it difficult for a consumer to make informed purchasing decisions. 

So what’s the way forward here, for consumers and wineries? I see a few possible avenues that could help.

• Wineries: ask your bottle brokers and manufacturers about the recycled content of the bottles you buy, and demand bottles with as high a recycled content as possible. It’s clear to me that bottle producers and brokers are not sufficiently focused on increasing the recycled content of their products. If that’s the case, it’s because it isn’t being asked of them by their customers. Wineries of all sizes, but particularly larger ones, have significant market power. We’re not a large winery, but we will still buy something like 350,000 bottles this year. The larger the winery, the more power you have to move the needle. And for wineries who are a part of organizations like International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA) and committed to achieving meaningful carbon footprint reductions by 2030, increasing the recycled content of your glass bottles should be a piece of the solution you’re pursuing, along with reducing the weight of those bottles and exploring alternate packaging. Because the glass bottle accounts for more than half the carbon footprint of the average California winery, it also offers the most important target for improvement. 
• Sustainability certifiers: Add a recycled glass component to your winery metrics if you haven’t already. Most California wineries are a part of a sustainability program. But at least our local program (SIP Certified) doesn’t appear to have any mention of using recycled glass in your bottles in its protocols. I have my issues with sustainability programs, which I’ve shared at length here and elsewhere, but they remain a powerful tool in incentivizing the high percentage of wineries who participate in them to make incremental positive changes. (And wineries, if you’re a part of a sustainability program that doesn’t include anything about this, ask them why.)
• Consumers: Ask the wineries that you patronize about the recycled content of their bottles. If you have a direct relationship with any wineries, reach out to them directly. Wineries are unusual consumer products in that most do have direct relationships with many of their customers. But if you don’t, ask your local retailer. If they don’t know, they can ask the distributor. The more people along the supply chain who are inquiring about this information, the more pressure there will be on bottle suppliers to use more recycled content, the more market there will be for recycled glass, which will make it more attractive for communities to recycle their waste glass rather than sending it to the landfill.
• Everyone: Push your communities to be more transparent about the outcomes of their recycling programs. This is particularly important if you’re a part of a single-stream recycling system. If the recyclables are being sorted and used at a high rate, that’s great. But it’s likely not. If not, push for multi-stream recycling, or at least better education on why materials aren’t being used. Is it because of contamination? If so, encourage your community to share information about the costs of “wish-cycling”. Is it a cost decision? Find out what it would take to implement a multi-stream recycling program. There are real challenges here, particularly with the market for recycled commodities still developing. But the status quo, where local governments are quietly misleading their citizens about the efficiency of their recycling programs, isn’t viable.

We know that we can do better, because European countries have shown the way, typically with a combination of multi-stream recycling (to produce good supply) and industry mandates for recycled content (to ensure that there is demand). Neither of those are impossible here; they're just a question of focus and political will. Yes, distances are shorter in Europe; the more densely populated continent means that the shipping costs between consumer collection and glass processing are less. But that’s an incremental difference. If there were more demand from consumers and beverage producers, there would be more recycled glass products available. And that would create a positive feedback loop that would encourage better recycling decisions at the community level.

Photo modified from the original on Wikimedia Commons by user Ecovidrio

We can do the same, or something similar, here. Let’s get to work.

Why we believe the time is right for a $95 box of wine

Last summer, I wrote a blog I called A Winery Carbon Footprint Self-Assessment: Why I Can't Give Us an "A" Despite All Our Progress in which I broke down how we stacked up against the baseline California winery across all the components that make up our carbon footprint, from vineyard to winery to packaging and transport of finished wine. Overall, we look good against the baseline, thanks to the combination of organic farming with minimal outside inputs, solar power, and the lightweight glass that we use for all our bottles. My rough estimate is that we have about 60% of the carbon footprint of the baseline.

One of the things that was really driven home to me as I did this research was the importance of the packaging in wine's overall environmental footprint. According to the assessment of California Wine's Carbon Footprint published by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance (CSWA) in 2011, which is what I used as my baseline, more than half of California wine's impact is due to the packaging in glass bottles. And that's not surprising; glass is energy-intensive to make and transport, as it requires high temperatures to melt and mold and is heavy to transport. Moving to lightweight glass reduces a winery's footprint by 10%, while using heavy bottles adds 10% to that tally, according to the CSWA's report:

In the piece, I did mark us down a bit for not using the 3L bag-in-box, which is by far the most effective package for reducing wine's carbon footprint. But I admit that I didn't take it particularly seriously, as the market for the 3L wine boxes is still (at least in the United States) almost entirely a bottom shelf one, with boxes topping out around $30 retail. Given that our least expensive wine at the time was $25, and the box contains four bottles, I didn't think it was an option for us.

After I published this piece, I got a number of interesting comments that made me rethink that position. A great example is one on my personal Facebook page from friend and former wine blogger Jason Mancebo:

Really great effort here, Jason. Tons of respect for your efforts and transparency in that effort! One thing that rubs me a bit wrong is: ...."we don't use the bag-in-box 3 liter package (the best available package, in terms of CO2 footprint) at all, and likely won't as long as it still carries the stigma of grocery store generic."

 

Leadership requires risk and without risk, this (stigma) won't ever change. A winery of your size and your commitment to environmental issues is a perfect "Poster Child" to change the stigma. As a consumer I wish I had more choice on quality wine than the 750 glass bottle. Cans are great, but limited selection and volume requirements = lower quality. the 3L would be great, especially to ship for @home consumption. Go for it! Be the change!!

Since then, I've found my own feelings around the 3L bag-in-box evolving. And Jason was right; the issues with the format -- at least for wine made for short-term consumption -- are almost entirely about consumer perception. After all, think of the advantages:

• Preservation. When you open a bottle of wine, the liquid inside is exposed to oxygen, and starts the clock ticking on the destructive effects of oxidation. If you're careful, and re-cork or re-cap the wine promptly and put it back in the fridge, you can get a week or so of life. If you forget and leave the half-empty bottle on your dinner table, it's likely to be compromised by morning. But not in a bag-in-box. Because the bag containing the wine deflates inside the box as you pour wine out of its spigot, oxygen never comes into contact with what remains inside, and you can keep an open box in good shape for weeks or a few months in your fridge.
• Storage space. It's amazing how much space and weight are taken up by the bottles and the fact that because they're round and breakable they can't even sit snugly next to each other. When we got a look at our first 3L boxes they looked so small that we thought the vendor had sent us 1.5L boxes. It wasn't until we measured out three liters of water and filled one up that we realized that it was three liters after all. That saved space is extra room in your fridge and in our winery and warehouse.
• Portability. Liquid is heavy, but wine bottles are too. The 470 gram (1 lb.) bottles that we use are among the lightest on the market. Even so, they end up making up nearly 40% of the finished 1,220 gram (2.7 lbs.) weight of a filled bottle. Four full bottles together weigh nearly 11 pounds. The full 3L bag-in-box weighs less than seven. That's easier to lift and take with you, sure, but it's also cheaper to truck and ship. Plus... glass is breakable. Liquid in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box? Not so much.
• Footprint. The CSWA chart that I shared above makes the case clearly. Compared to the packaging required to put that same wine in 750ml glass bottles, the carbon footprint of the bag-in-box package is 84% less, and the carbon footprint of distributing this lighter, more compact package is 60% less. The CSWA study didn't specifically look at the footprint of delivering direct-to-consumer (DTC) wines, but I'm sure the savings of moving to bag-in-box is similar if not greater than the savings via distribution, given all the packaging that's required to ship glass bottles safely via companies like UPS and FedEx and the greater per-bottle transportation footprint of air shipping compared to palletized wholesale transport by truck or rail.

Of course, there are unknowns about this package too. Is it good for long-term aging of wine? I'd doubt it. Is the package recyclable? The boxes are, although the plastic pouches inside are not in most places. (Of course, in America our glass recycling percentage is a disheartening 31%, so this still means a lot less trash headed to the landfill on average). And will people buy it at a price that allows higher-end wineries to adopt the package? I floated on Twitter that we were thinking about trying it with our new vintage of Patelin Rosé and got a heartwarmingly enthusiastic set of responses.

A timely piece on boxed wine by @dmwine. At @TablasCreek we're tentatively planning on putting a small portion of our 2021 Patelin de Tablas Rosé in 3L bag-in-box to test the waters. There are huge environmental and carbon footprint rewards if it works. https://t.co/lZR4rwe7aP

— Jason Haas (@jasonchaas) December 17, 2021

It seems like it's time to find out the answer to the question "will people buy a high-end wine in a box". To that end, we've decided to dip our toe into this water by diverting 100 cases of the 2021 Patelin de Tablas Rosé into 300 3L bag-in-box packages. The Patelin Rose seems like a great place to start, since it's a wine that we suggest that people drink in the near-term anyway. A few photos of the process. First, Austin at the filling machine (left) and Chelsea building boxes (right):

Then Gustavo putting on labels (left) and the finished box (right)!

Since we're paying less for the packaging, we'll be passing along that savings to customers, pricing each box at $95 instead of the $112 that the four bottles would cost. Because it takes up less space and weighs less, we can pass on shipping savings too, counting each box as two bottles for shipping rather than four.  

Will that be enough to tempt people who might not have dreamed of buying a box of wine? I hope so. For this batch, we're only making it available for sale direct, i.e. on our website and in our tasting room, so we can explain directly to the customers who might be interested why we've made this choice. If it works, we'll do it with some additional wines going forward. If it really works, we might even make enough next year to sell some wholesale. After all, there was a time when screwcaps were considered appropriate only for cheap wines. And when wine in keg, to be ordered by the carafe or glass, was unheard of. But in both cases we decided that we trusted our followers enough to try, because we thought that the decisions were the right ones for the wines. In this case, we think it's an important approach to try both for the wine, and for the planet.

No time like the present to find out if we're right. If you're on our mailing list, look for an email next week announcing its release.

Introducing a New Idea: Seasonal Pour Wine Kegs

Readers of this blog know that I'm a fan of offering wine in keg. There are lots of reasons. It's great for the customer because every one of the roughly 130 glasses in a 19.5L keg is as fresh as the first (unlike wines served by-the-glass from bottle, where the last pours are often oxidized). It's great for the restaurant and wine bars that serve it because there's no wasted wine from ends of bottles, and no empty bottles to deal with. It's great for wineries because they're not paying for the bottles, capsules, corks, and labels. And it's great for the environment because the packaging that would otherwise be created for short-term storage of wine, and then (ideally) recycled never gets created in the first place. We were proud indeed in 2018 to get a "Keggy" Award from our kegging partner Free Flow Wines for having kegged enough wine over the years to eliminate 100,000 bottles from being created, shipped, and destroyed again: 

Yes, that mini-keg is the Keggy award. No, there was never any wine in it.

For the last decade, we've had the same lineup of wines available in keg, and we've worked hard to keep these wines -- our Patelin de Tablas red, white, and rosé -- in stock year-round. As those three wines form the core of what of ours gets poured by the glass in restaurants around the country, that makes sense to us. And the growth has been impressive, from just a few hundred kegs (still replacing thousands of bottles) in the early years to the roughly 1000 kegs we sold in 2019. We're planning to continue that program, and look forward to seeing it grow.

At the same time, we felt that we could be doing more with our keg program. While the majority of accounts still are using keg wines as their principal by-the-glass options, by-the-glass programs themselves have changed over the last decade. Printing costs used to be higher, reprinting wine lists used to be rarer, and accounts prioritized wines that they knew would still be available in three, six, or nine months. While there are still plenty of restaurants who value stability, more and more treat their by-the-glass lists as a treasure hunt, reprinting on an office laserwriter whenever necessary, or (more and more) just erasing a chalkboard and writing in something new. Far from it being a disincentive that only a few cases of something cool are available, it's become a selling point in many restaurants and wine bars.

The same impetus has spilled over into the world of keg wines. Accounts looking to change up their lists regularly have been reaching out to us and other wineries asking if we'd do custom kegging for them, small-production things that aren't available elsewhere. That's not really feasible for anything other than local accounts, and it's not ideal for the wines, as a single barrel produces roughly twelve kegs, most accounts don't want twelve kegs for programs like this, and what to do with remnant wine at less-than-barrel quantities is a real challenge. We don't just have wine sitting around waiting for someone to ask us to keg it up. Some wineries do, I know, but that's not us. But we have a new idea we're excited about. We've decided to do three small-batch keggings this year, each in 45-65 keg quantities. These will go up to the warehouse we share with our national marketing partners Vineyard Brands, and be available for any of our distributors to order. When they run out, we'll be ready with something else.

What, you ask, will we start with? Vermentino! Vermentino has always been a grape that we've felt would do well in keg because of its freshness and how well it drinks young. We actually did a custom Vermentino kegging several years ago, and it was delicious and well-received (at least until the restaurant we did it for changed wine directors, the new director took the program in a totally different direction, and we had to scramble to find new homes for the kegs we made). We kept 250 gallons out of our recent Vermentino bottling, and sent it up to our partners at Free Flow, who filled 47 kegs. The first 25 kegs are in stock in California, with the balance waiting to go out to some other key markets.

What's coming next? Counoise, we think. Of all our reds, Counoise seems best suited to kegging because of its light body and refreshingly bright flavors. We only had 250 gallons of Counoise after blending the 2018 vintage, and we're planning to put it all in keg sometime in May.

After that, we'll see. We need to get through blending this year before we know what will suggest itself. But I'd love to do another obscure white in early fall, maybe something like Clairette Blanche or Picardan.

We're excited about this new program. If you run a wine-on-tap program and are interested, grab them while they exist. And if you see one in your favorite restaurant or wine bar, order a glass and let us know what you think. Just don't get mad at us if the next time you go back, something else is available. After all, when they're gone, they're gone. And that's a big part of the fun.