Slow start to plastic bottles

Bottling wine in plastic bottles is becoming common around the world, but there is still only one winery doing so in Marlborough, bottlers say.

The Pet (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are 100 per cent recyclable and lighter to transport than glass.

French-based wine conglomerate Boisset Family Estates sells its California Fog Mountain Merlot and its Yellow Jersey wines in Pet bottles in North America, but had less luck with its beaujolais nouveau of Burgundy, France.

The Bordeaux-based Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences has raised concerns about quality after a preliminary report last year suggested white wine in plastic bottles stayed fresh for six months.

Marc Kaufman, of EnVino, the maker of Pet bottles for Boisset, said plastic bottles were not for expensive wines that needed cellaring.

Yealands Estate Full Circle is the only Marlborough wine bottled with Pet. Sales and marketing manager Michael Wentworth said the company saw plastic as a positive step.

"It's 89 per cent lighter than glass, so you're reducing your carbon footprint there, as well as any time you ship it."

The plastic bottles have not changed the taste of the Full Circle sauvignon blanc and merlot, which had done well in blind tasting wine competitions, he said.

WineWorks Marlborough bottles the Yealands Estate Full Circle wine in Pet. WineWorks Marlborough plant manager Darell O'Brien said Full Circle was the only Marlborough wine it bottled, however, the Hawke's Bay bottling plant had done some runs of Pet for other customers.

The plastic bottles used for Full Circle were made by Australasian company VIP Packaging and the shelf life was much longer, some 1000 days.

The main benefit of plastic was lowering the carbon footprint, he said. It was cheaper to freight, but he believed it would take some time for Pet bottled wine to catch on.

"I'm sure that when more people start to bottle [in plastic] and the sales come in it will start to catch on."

Wine Bottlers Marlborough chief executive Lance McMillan said his company had the ability to bottle in plastic, however it was yet to use it for a major bottling.

Two clients would probably go ahead with plastic runs in the next few months, but they were still checking the viability, he said.

There was not much difference to bottle with plastic instead of glass and the same plant was used for both.

There were a lot of chemicals that went into making Pet bottles and he would like to see more proof of the environmental effects of making them, he said.

"Plastic probably isn't as environmentally sound as people believe."

Most Pet bottles had a limited shelf life of between six months and one year, after which it begins to affect the wine, he said.

That meant companies had to be sure the wine would get to store shelves as quickly as possible, he said.