Australians love wine. We drink it out of bottles, we drink it out of decanters, in fact, sometimes we even drink it out of large sacks when we are teenagers in a park and one of your friends has a fake ID that they bought off Gumtree for $12.50 that is printed in Russian but fortunately, the bloke at the Bottle-O didn't care enough to look at it properly. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
However, there's one big issue with all of these aforementioned forms of packaging: they can lead to a tremendous amount of waste. Have you ever wondered what happens to those glass bottles or sacks of goon when you throw them away? Us neither. But now you don't have to worry if they're ending up in a landfill or on that giant island of rubbish somewhere out there in the Pacific.
That's because a new eco-friendly wine bottle is about to arrive in Australia. Instead of glass, these new bottles are made from recycled PET plastic, which means you can enjoy a glass of white wine with your seafood comfortable in the knowledge that the bottle you drank it from isn't going to end up in the ocean and entrap the family of the squid you're currently eating in your marinara.
The chief executive and founder of the company Packamama that developed the bottle, Santiago Navarro, reckons it will be a game-changer for Australian wine producers and retailers. "Australia is globally recognised as a leader in wine packaging thanks to break-through innovations, including bag-in-box casks and screwtop caps for wines," he told Australia's Wine Business Magazine. This is very true, though it is worth noting that 'bag-in-box casks' is a much fancier way of saying 'goon'.
The bottles are also cleverly designed to be flat and lighter than glass bottles, which means that twice as many can be stored when being transported to further reduce emissions when they are being lugged across the country and the world. Doing so will hopefully reduce transport costs as well, which could, in turn, make the bottles of wine cheaper. Considering everything is becoming more expensive right now, that would be a welcome change of pace for Australian consumers.
It's also worth noting that PET bottles are much less likely to break than glass bottles, so they're a lot safer to take out on a picnic. If only my younger self had these bottles available all those years ago, we might not have left such a mess at our local park. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
