Over the years Champagne has had some poor publicity as regards environmentally friendly practices, or rather the lack of them, but all that is changing rapidly.
Apart from the growing number of champagne producers who use organic, or bio-dynamic methods, there are many other initiatives in place to go easy on our planet and the latest concerns the weight of champagne bottles....
Let’s set the scene with a few facts and figures – better take a note of these; they are sure to come up in trivia quizzes before too long.
Everyone will have noticed how much heavier champagne bottles are than other wine bottles. This is because the bottles have to be thicker, and therefore heavier, to withstand the pressure inside. All that’s fairly clear and obvious but here are a few things you probably don’t know
An ordinary still wine bottle weighs between 450 – 500 grams (1 – 1.1 lbs) compared with 900 grams (2lbs) for a bottle of champagne – almost twice as much. Back at the start of the 20th century champagne bottles weighed even more at massive 1.2 kilograms (2.5 lbs)
Here’s another amazing fact; the packaging used in the champagne industry accounts for a whopping 30% of all the carbon dioxide emissions of the entire Champagne region; half of this is down to the bottles alone.
Anyone who is concerned with green issues will be pleased to hear that a new and lighter version of the traditional champagne bottle has just been approved for use. In fact a few houses, Veuve Clicquot and Mumm being the biggest two, have already decided to use the lighter bottles this year meaning that they’ll be hitting the market in about three years time after ageing in the cellars.
The new bottles weigh 840 grams and whilst that’s only 60 grams lighter than the normal bottles, the cumulative effect is huge. Veuve Cliquot reckons that their overall CO2 emissions will be cut by 450 tons per year, that’s equivalent to pulling 140 vehicles off the road.
They also calculate that they’ll need 48 fewer delivery lorries as well because you can pack 24 pallettes of the lighter bottles on a lorry instead of only 22 at the moment.
For the time being however you won’t be able to see any difference. For a start the bottles won’t be on the market at all for a few years, for another thing champagne houses are not obliged to use them, so I suppose that some will and some won’t and even if they do you may be hard pressed to spot the difference since it’s only 60 grams
Apart from the growing number of champagne producers who use organic, or bio-dynamic methods, there are many other initiatives in place to go easy on our planet and the latest concerns the weight of champagne bottles....
Let’s set the scene with a few facts and figures – better take a note of these; they are sure to come up in trivia quizzes before too long.
Everyone will have noticed how much heavier champagne bottles are than other wine bottles. This is because the bottles have to be thicker, and therefore heavier, to withstand the pressure inside. All that’s fairly clear and obvious but here are a few things you probably don’t know
An ordinary still wine bottle weighs between 450 – 500 grams (1 – 1.1 lbs) compared with 900 grams (2lbs) for a bottle of champagne – almost twice as much. Back at the start of the 20th century champagne bottles weighed even more at massive 1.2 kilograms (2.5 lbs)
Here’s another amazing fact; the packaging used in the champagne industry accounts for a whopping 30% of all the carbon dioxide emissions of the entire Champagne region; half of this is down to the bottles alone.
Anyone who is concerned with green issues will be pleased to hear that a new and lighter version of the traditional champagne bottle has just been approved for use. In fact a few houses, Veuve Clicquot and Mumm being the biggest two, have already decided to use the lighter bottles this year meaning that they’ll be hitting the market in about three years time after ageing in the cellars.
The new bottles weigh 840 grams and whilst that’s only 60 grams lighter than the normal bottles, the cumulative effect is huge. Veuve Cliquot reckons that their overall CO2 emissions will be cut by 450 tons per year, that’s equivalent to pulling 140 vehicles off the road.
They also calculate that they’ll need 48 fewer delivery lorries as well because you can pack 24 pallettes of the lighter bottles on a lorry instead of only 22 at the moment.
Still, I imagine that, in time, the lighter bottles will entirely replace the current version and just think what an impact that will have.
There are roughly 1 billion bottles of champagne in the cellars at any one time; that's going to reduce the CO2 by a lot but I'll leave it to you to calculate exactly how much!
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