Red, white – or green?

There’s more to drinking responsibly than just a dry January, says Jonathan Ray, with sustainability no longer about the length of time you can stand at the bar

I DON’T know about you, but I still blush to remember the walk of shame to the bottle bank at the end of our road in early January. Just when I thought I’d got rid of the last mementos of yet another New Year’s Eve of bad judgement and questionable behaviour, I found a further box of empties lurking under the stairs and one on the back step, too. Oh, and my missus had sweetly stashed some in the boot of the car as well.

Getting rid of the bacchanalian evidence took all morning and I could hear the tuttutting and see the curtains twitching the length of the street. Not that the neighbours should be so bloody censorious, given that most of them were here, chez nous, on NYE contributing to the carnage. Heck, they’re all just a bunch of lushes.

We are going to have to get used to seeing more of our wine sold in cans and bags-in-boxes

As for the bottles themselves, well, they’ll be recycled and turned into new bottles, our livers will have regenerated after January’s spell on the water wagon (we hope) and we’ll all crack on as normal, buying our bottles of wine, emptying them in a trice, recycling them and so on and so on.

But just how sustainable is all this? And I’m not talking about my liver, which, despite the aforementioned month off, has surely been shot irredeemably to pieces. No, what I mean is, how sustainable is the wine industry and – in the light of the fact that such treats as hopping on an aeroplane to Paris or NYC for the weekend are fast becoming as much of a no-no as smoking – what can we drinkers expect and what is being done by wine producers to make our beloved vino more sustainable?

Well, we’re going to have to reconsider what receptacles our wine comes in for a start. Shipping wine by bulk and bottling it in the UK is going to become de rigueur. It’s far more environmentally friendly to send wine in tank by ship from New Zealand and then bottle it here than it is to send a pallet-load of heavy Burgundy bottles by fuel-guzzling truck from Beaune.

Hitherto it has only been the cheap stuff that has been thus imported but steel yourself to discover that one day soon your favourite single vineyard Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc or cru classé claret will have arrived on these shores in some vast rubber bladder prior to being bottled in a massive warehouse in Bristol. Mise en bouteille au château might become a thing of the past.

And we’re going to have to get used to seeing more of our wine being sold in cans and bags-in-boxes. Oh come on, don’t be so snooty. Pol Roger Champagne’s UK operation recently released a very tasty organic Spanish rosé in a 250ml can and it went down a storm. It was a jolly tasty wine in the first place, not some crappy vinous bubblegum, and it made a pretty fine accessory to a summer picnic: compact, stylish, easily chilled and opened, and fully recyclable. The youngsters loved it, not least because the cans could be taken to festivals without being confiscated at the gate like any glass bottle would have been.

And maybe we British topers can take a leaf out of the French wine-lovers’ book. It’s always been acceptable across the Channel to go down to the local vigneron with a jug or demi-john to fill up with the local vin ordinaire for that night’s supper.

One or two stockists in the UK are now doing this, too, and why not? After all, it’s not dissimilar to those pubs of yore – like my local, when I was a student – that had a saloon bar, a public bar and – sandwiched in between – a jug bar with a serving hatch where one went with a couple of water jugs to be filled with mild and bitter whilst waiting to pick up one’s Chinese takeaway.

And we drinkers are going to have to become more au fait with the terminology and eagle-eyed as to what our favourite wine producers are up to. After all, sustainability is not just about organic or biodynamic winemaking practices. Your favourite organic producer might still be pottering about in a fume-belching tractor and the sales force in ancient diesel cars.

No, sustainability is about immaculate winemaking for sure but it’s also about recycling paper and water, turning off the lights in the winery, capturing CO2 produced at fermentation, using predators instead of pesticides and ‘precision viticulture’ (buzz word of the moment), whereby, for example, drones are used to pinpoint where sick vines are located rather than simply blitzing whole vineyards with chemicals, and monitors are used to spot those vines that need water rather than drenching every single one.

Sustainability is about looking after the land and ensuring it’s there for future generations. Oh, and, crucially, guaranteeing that there’s still plenty of wine to go round.