Taos News

Can it

BY LYNNE ROBINSON

CANNED WINE IS GAINING in popularity and could help in reducing significant emissions from the industry. That’s the word on the street, and Thijs Hoek, Sommelier and wine buyer at The Cellar agrees.

“It’s also a way to take the elitist label off of wine drinking, and court a new demographic,” he suggests.

Apparently, along with Britain’s monarchy and obsolete statuary, cancel culture has arrived at the bottle.

The Guardian recently reported that “for the past few years, a quiet revolution has been taking place in the wine industry. Cans are cool and bag-in-box is chic, and not just according to Vogue. The stigma of alternative wine containers, from kegs to cartons, has drained away. Perfectly portable, often beautifully designed cylindrical vessels are demystifying the rarefied world of wine. Cans are shaping up to be one of the most promising sustainable interventions in the industry.”

I had tried the cans when The Cellar first opened, and I noticed they carried them. I was told they were still selling well, so with the Taos Winter Wine Festival on the horizon, I thought I’d take a deeper dive into the world of canned wine.

I discovered, unsurprisingly, that Francis Ford Coppola’s eponymous winery was quite early in the game with its 2004 canned tribute to his daughter, Sofia Blanc de Blancs. Nearly two decades later, there are more canned wines to choose from than I can report on here, including bubbles that make the cut.

For centuries, the glass bottle has been presumably the best container for wine. but glass bottles are responsible for the largest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions from the wine industry.

In recent years, the culture of wine drinking has seen a waning interest among younger consumers who are more into drinking other beverages from cans; hard seltzers, hard kombucha, ales, beer, you name it. Cans are easier to carry and the small opening means they’re practically spill-proof. Plus, they chill quickly. The research done in an attempt to introduce wine to a new cohort of drinkers shows younger people are also increasingly conscientious about how much they drink and don’t always want to buy a full bottle.

Cans are popping up in unlikely establishments, including upscale restaurants, further challenging the idea of wine as something complicated, and actually, it turns out that some wines even benefit from being in cans; Vinho Verde, for instance, with its light spritz, meant to be served cold, is arguably better from a can as I discovered one hot summer’s day when I took one to the pool for an after swim picnic with a friend.

But all this aside, the main reason to consider canned wine is clear. As early as 2014, a study by the Wine Institute, an industry association of California wineries, found that glass bottles accounted for 29 percent of the carbon footprint of wine, not to mention the production of glass bottles is majorly energy-intensive. We think of glass as recyclable, but in the U.S., only about 30 percent of glass is recycled, compared with 50 percent of aluminum cans. For wine drinkers who care about the planet, considering alternative containers is essential.

Another study done around the same time shows that switching to aluminum cans cuts 75 percent of carbon emissions produced by traditional packaging, plus aluminum is infinitely recyclable; almost 75 percent of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today.

There are health concerns about cooking in aluminum, but Hoek explains that “apparently, when the metal is unheated, it is no longer a question, and the environmental impact outweighs the stigma of consuming wine in a can.”

Enough said.

TEMPO

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2023-01-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://taosnews.pressreader.com/article/282286734397705

Santa Fe New Mexican