Turning the Wine World on its (Rabbit) Ear

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The world of wine is in an interesting place, from an environmental standpoint. It is perched between several contradictions: it's perceived as a luxury item that many shoppers won't pay a premium for (viz. the rise of Trader Joes' Charles "Two Buck Chuck" Shaw label); it's an organic product that benefits and suffers from the same high-tech agricultural methods as conventional produce; and it's produced by people who as a rule are a profoundly tradition-minded group but wedded to those same methods.

Like every industry, the wine business is feeling its way forward on addressing its own environmental impact, even as it faces one of the largest challenges of any industry: as the climate changes, a winery can't simply uproot and move to a new location where it can grow its traditional varieties of grapes.

What the wine business can and can't do about the larger concern of climate change is a story in and of itself, but at our Greener By Design conference in Virginia last month, one of our panelists discussed exactly what his wineries are doing to shrink its environmental footprint.

Boisset's Yellow Jersey Wine, packaged in a PET bottle.

The Boisset Family Estates, a nearly 50-year-old family-owned winemaker, based in France but spreading worldwide, has taken on a handful of innovations in its business practices that are designed to benefit the environment, its customers and the company's own bottom line.

In addition to CSR practices including partnerships with Surfriders and the Forest Association, the Boisset Family Estates have incorporated some significant changes to the customer-facing elements of its business.

Boisset's Yellow Jersey label looks very much like a traditional bottle of wine, but the bottle itself is made of PET plastic; and its French Rabbit label travels even further afield: comes in a distinct TetraPak box and includes two "ears" (hence the name) that allow customers to tie off the box and save the wine for several days on end.

These innovations and others are designed to sidestep the traditional practices of the wine world, which as often as not are counterproductive from a cost and environmental perspective. The vast majority of wines are drank within 3 hours of purchase, and although they are often aged for several years, that can happen just as well in TetraPak as in glass. Glass is possibly the least efficient of all possible packages for wine: heavy and very fragile, it adds significantly to shipping and breakage costs.

But customers -- and more importantly, wine retailers -- are resistant to change from the traditional packaging, although Jean Charles Boisset, the vice president of Boisset Family Estates, ticks off no shortage of benefits to alternative wine packaging, including the ability to sell more wine for the same cost by saving on shipping, increased recyclability, decreased resource use in production and recycling, and better methods of keeping wine fresh once opened.

In a wide-ranging interview at the conference, I spoke with Boisset about some of its innovations, the challenges they've faced in bringing the product to market, and how to create change in a tradition-minded industry like wineries. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Matthew Wheeland: With regards to making change in an industry as rooted in history and in place as the wine industry -- or the wine world as you called it earlier -- what are some of the biggest obstacles that you've faced so far?

Jean Charles Boisset: Well, the usual resistance is tradition. Tradition. I've been doing that for two centuries -- why should I change? This is lovely. This is attractive. This is emotional. The values are well established. Why should I change?

So the biggest resistance comes from the people within the trade. I realize everywhere I go around the world it's not necessarily the consumers. The consumers most of the time are ready to give it a try.

The consumer is clever. He or she gets it, if it's properly explained to them. And they come back to it. The key is the hurdle of opening that door and being allowed within the club. We are in the club because we obviously produce a lot of fine wines. I don't have a problem getting an appointment. Where I have a problem sometimes is to manage, as I said today at the panel, is rejection. I've had so many you cannot imagine.