The odd couple helping us to get our fill

The alliance between Borough Wines and Damien Barton-sartorius is unexpected, to say the least. The former started up 20 years ago as an indie retailer in London’s Borough Market, decanting wine straight out of the barrel into refillable bottles to sell to environmentally minded turn-ofthe-millennium hipsters. The energetic Barton-sartorius is the scion of one of Bordeaux’s most illustrious wine families, which owns the Saint-julien classed growths Château Léoville Barton and Château Langoa Barton. While you can click and collect a bottle of the Borough Wines house red (refill only) for £6.50, you’ll need to go to a fine-wine broker for a case of 2016 Ch Léoville Barton and it will set you back around £1,000 – plus duty and VAT.

Yet the two have come together to launch a bottle-return scheme for trade customers, enabling each (normal) wine bottle to be reused up to 30 times, with the aim of reducing its carbon footprint by up to 95 per cent.

The impetus came from Barton-sartorius. At a tasting in the bar of the Royal Court Theatre in London, he explained the genesis of the idea. ‘It’s 200 years that we’ve been owning Château Langoa – and the only way to see another 200 years after me is to make sure the environment is in good condition. So in 2019 I came to a sustainable-wine conference in London.’

The discussions there got him thinking. The Barton family ‘never went for the 800g bottle which was quite a trend in Bordeaux’ and has reduced the weight of the glass bottles for its classed growths from 600g down to a very modest 460g.

Returnable bottles aren’t appropriate for wines, like those of Châteaux Léoville and Langoa Barton, that are intended to be aged in the bottle for two or three decades. But, he thought, perhaps he could help to facilitate a project selling Bordeaux that spends rather less time in the bottle? He got in touch with Muriel Chatel, a Frenchwoman from a Bergerac winemaking family who founded Borough Wines and also Sustainablewinesolutions, and set out his idea for a bottle-return scheme. At first Chatel wasn’t keen: ‘I didn’t want to go back to something that was done in the past and people had stopped doing for good reason.’ But the more she thought about it, the more she realised the plan could work, if she could build up a big enough range of wines to streamline the logistics.

That is what happened. There are now 35 wines in the Sustainablewinesolutions bottle-return list, which Chatel sells to just over 20 restaurants at the moment. The wine comes into the country in flexi tanks, it is bottled here, and when the crates with bottles full of wine are delivered to the restaurants, the driver picks up the empties (dirty) to return them for processing at HQ.

I tasted the range and found the quality very mixed. Hits include the 225 Bordeaux red and white, which are sourced by Barton-sartorius, a Fleurie from Château Les Moriers, a Côtes du Rhône from Vincent Rochette, Folc rosé from Kent and a Portuguese touriga naciona (all stocked by Borough Wines). But this is very much a work in progress. It’s particularly interesting to see the involvement of Barton-sartorius who, coming from arguably one of the world’s most traditional wine regions, is nonetheless keen to implement change. And, as he says, it isn’t easy: ‘I’m very happy to have Langoa and Léoville Barton next to this because I’m not generating any money out of it at all. All this takes some time.’

Bottles can be reused 30 times, reducing their carbon footprint by 95 per cent