The mass-produced Almaden and Inglenook wines will switch from the familiar three- and four-liter glass jugs to lightweight Bag-in-Box (BIB) packaging.
The Wine Group said Wednesday that swapping the glass jugs for BIB packaging would reduce the brands’ carbon footprint by 60 percent and avoid some 11 million pounds of packaging waste.
The company bills itself as “the world’s most cost and carbon efficient vintner” for its use of BIB packaging, which it claims has less than half the carbon footprint of bottled wine in terms of energy needed for glass production and transportation.
“The positive impact to the environment from making the shift to BIB packages will be huge, simply because the volume of these two brands combined account for 10 million cases of production," David Kent, The Wine Group’s CEO, said in a statement.
The company, which recently launched a marketing campaign extolling the environmental benefits of BIB packaging, said switching all bottled wine sold in the U.S. to BIB packaging would save about 941 million tons of glass packaging annually. Glass, however, can be recycled endlessly but is much heavier and expensive to transport.
The Wine Group already produces the boxed wine Franzia, as well as other budget wines such as Concannon, Glen Ellen and Big House. It bought Almaden and Inglenook from Constellation Wines in February, and is now the second largest wine producer by volume.