A quick reminder that I will not be bringing you the news next week because I will be sitting for my Master of Wine exam. Next newscast will be 14 or 15 June
Australian wine in ferment
Two weeks ago, on 17 May, I told you that Accolade Wines, recently acquired by Australian Wine Holdco, was in talks to acquire Pernod Ricard’s Australian wine interests and were simultaneously in talks with Australian Vintage to possibly acquire them, which would mean they would overtake Treasury as the largest Australian wine company by a large margin. There has been nothing further on Pernod Ricard, but on 27 May the Australian Financial Review reported that Accolade had ended merger talks with Australian Vintage. AV immediately requested a suspension of their shares on the Australian Stock Exchange because they expect their debt to be more than 50% higher than previously estimated by end of June. Trading has been halted until 11 June.
This announcement came after, and is thought to have been precipitated by, news on 22 May that the CCW Co-operative of Riverland Wine Growers – which accounts for the production of 10% of Australia’s wine and has sold their entire production to Accolade for 25 years – rejected Accolade’s offer to buy out grower contracts on red grapes and shrink production by 20%. Accolade had previously said that this was the, and I quote, ‘only option that allows CCW’s growers and Accolade to remain viable.’
So right now, you have AV stocks suspended, Accolade on the fritz, I told you previously that Treasury is attempting to sell their entry-level brands, and the Australian Federal Government’s most recent budget, announced two weeks ago, includes no aid for the wine industry despite requests. It remains incredibly unclear what will happen.
Bottle weight and bottle reuse
Yesterday the UK’s largest supermarket, Tesco, which commands more than a quarter of the UK grocery market, announced that they had joined the Sustainable Wine Roundtable (SWR) and simultaneously committed to the organisation’s Bottle Weight Accord – an agreement to lower the average bottle weight of their wine range to below 420 g per 750-ml bottle by 2026. The current industry average is 550 g.
This is important because glass packaging accounts for approximately one-third of total carbon emissions per bottle of wine. The Bottle Weight Accord has proved incredibly valuable in uniting large retailers like Laithwaites, Lidl GB, Naked Wines, Systembolaget, The Wine Society, Virgin Wines, Waitrose and Whole Foods to drive down glass weights.
This is an excellent start to reducing wine’s carbon footprint. However, by far the most sustainable option would be – and will be – to reuse glass bottles. The reason behind this is because while recycling glass is great, melting the glass requires temperatures of around 1,565 °C (or 2,850 °F) for 24 hours. The furnaces required for this have to run 24 hours a day 365 days a year or the glass will harden and break the furnace. In contrast, with reuse you wash bottles for around 30 minutes at a temperature of 80 °C (176 °F). If a bottle is reused 20 times it cuts the carbon emissions of the bottle by 80%. But reuse is really only viable if we use a small range of standardised bottle types – otherwise sorting becomes impossible, and you can’t run a bottling line without standardised bottles.
Right now, in Oregon we have what I view as the first viable, scalable, wine-bottle reuse company in the Americas. There have been plenty of attempts that have paved the way for this to succeed but Revino has done a few things differently. Firstly, they partnered with glass manufacturing company O-I to create a standardised bottle – it looks like a regular burgundy bottle, but it says ‘refillable’ on the bottom and has a crest at the top. Secondly, they collaborated with wineries to create the mould so that 70 producers in Oregon have already agreed to use this bottle. The company is now receiving requests from out of state and they’re soliciting West Coast wineries’ input for the creation of a bordeaux-bottle mould. They expect to create a flint-glass mould for 2025. Third, they’ve partnered with Oregon Redemption Centers so that you can return bottles there as well as to the wineries the wine came from and certain retailers.
In the next couple weeks residents in Oregon will start to see these bottles on shelves. Please return them! This is going to be a long process and is going to require changes in the current infrastructure to allow consumers to easily return bottles across the US.
Other places in the world are doing similar things but many are having to operate independently – a Belgian negociant, Grafé Lecocq, has recollected and reused since their founding in 1879; French négociant Oé has been at it since 2017. Some exceptions to functioning alone are Sustainable Wine Solutions in the UK and the state of Styria in southern Austria which has managed to pull together 190 local wineries to recollect and reuse wine bottles since 2011.
As awesome as all these folks are, they cannot do it alone. This requires the entire industry and consumer to buy in to the fact that sustainability is more important than how cool a wine bottle looks.
Oregon wildfire lawsuits
I told you about this case back on 9 January but allow me a quick recap – in 2020, fires on the west coast of the US cost the wine industry $3.7 billion, with the majority of that damage in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. [See Smoke taint – the view from Oregon.]
In late 2022 the US Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry finished investigations into the origin of the fires and announced that the majority of fires were caused by downed electricity lines maintained by Pacific Power. They found that not only had the company not maintained the vegetation around those power lines in accordance with regulations, but also had not moved to shut off power after fire officials advised of high winds. Last June, Portland news station KGW8 reported that Pacific Power had destroyed internal evidence and communications around the downed power lines; the only messages found were Skype communications found in a folder labelled ‘purges’.
In June 2023, at the conclusion of a class action lawsuit, PacifiCorp, the parent company of Pacific Power, was found guilty of negligence and since then they have paid out millions in damages. Last week wineries and vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley collectively filed a lawsuit against PacifiCorp for $100 million in damages due to smoked wine. I wish them all the luck in the coming months.
This is a transcript of our weekly five-minute news broadcast, which you can watch below. You can also listen to it on The Wine News in 5 Podcast. If you have breaking news in your area, please email news@jancisrobinson.com. And if you enjoy this content and would like to see more like it, please subscribe to our site and our weekly newsletter.
