Fosters goes green with Wolf Blass plastic bottles

FOSTERS is going green and is shunning convention by bottling two wines from its Wolf Blass brand wine in plastic.

The first wine in 750ml recyclable plastic (PET) bottles goes on sale across Australia next Monday.

Branded as Wolf Blass, the wines will sell for $17 a bottle.

The wines -- a crisp dry white blend and a shiraz cabernet sauvignon -- will be called Green Label.

They will have a 12-month shelf life and are in a price category likely to attract environmentally-conscious consumers, Fosters says.

Fosters has set a $1 million budget for a three-month marketing campaign for the new brand which is aimed at educating consumers about the environmental benefits of the wine in plastic bottles.

Fosters says the wines will produce 29 per cent less greenhouse gas emissions than wine packaged in traditional glass.

Fosters also says that laboratory trials and taste tests have shown no taste difference.

Several Australian wine companies produce wines in 187ml PET bottles. In Canada, wine is sold in 750ml and 1 litre plastic bottles.

But large size PETs have never been sold in Australia.

Oliver Horn, global brand director of Wolf Blass wines, said research showed more than 90 per cent of consumers wanted brands that enabled them to make "greener" choices.

Mr Horn said that apart from the recyclable PET bottles, the use of 100 per cent recycled and recyclable packaging materials and alcohol-free printing, had led to major emissions savings.

The main saving resulted from the filled plastic bottles being 36 per cent lighter than filled glass bottles. Unfilled bottles, which weigh 51 grams, were 90 per cent lighter than glass bottles.

"You save on a six-pack about 2.5 kg of weight," Mr Horn said.

"It's significantly easier to carry, the bottles are easier to pour and can be taken to places where glass (usually) can't because it doesn't shatter."

He said the taste of the wine had undergone rigorous testing for several years both in the laboratory and at wine tastings plus had been tested every month for the past 12 months.

Oxygen scavenging technology was incorporated in the PET manufacturing process.

"There's no difference between the glass product and the PET bottle," Mr Horn said.

Mr Horn said a Wolf Blass PET trial into Canada in 2006 had failed but claimed it was because the environmental benefits could not at the time be substantiated.

He said the wines had also met with consumer resistance at the time because the bottles were shorter.

The problem had been overcome by newer bottles produced by VIP Packaging in consultation with Uno Packaging, an Australian environmental packaging concept company.