Paper bottles all-set to take the wine world by storm

t the end of 2020, a survey of 1,741 wine drinkers across the UK found that almost two-thirds were willing to buy wine in paper ‘Frugal’ bottles. The innovative packaging, which weighs just 83g – five times less than a glass bottle – has a carbon footprint up to six times lower, is made without chemicals from recycled cardboard and can be taken apart entirely for recycling.

It took five years of research and development to get to this stage. “We have been on a journey to find the right solution, starting with pulped paper”, says Malcolm Waugh, CEO of Frugalpac, the company behind the innovation. “We found the energy to produce the bottle too high, the coatings or liquid barriers not easily recyclable and the decoration of the package restricted along with the cost to manufacture a large format package”.

The Frugal Bottle has been in the launch and marketing phase for two years. Its benefits have already convinced Ceri Parke, owner of Cantina Goccia in Umbria: “We had made a lot of progress in the vineyard to reduce our carbon footprint, but the packaging was still the weak link”, she says. The Italian winery, which was involved in the prototype phase, launched its first Frugal bottles in June 2020. “Northern European countries are particularly receptive to the bottles, as are Japan and Canada, economies with very specific targets for packaging recycling”.

The only concerns, which have proved to be minor, relate to the bottle filling process: “The bottle cannot tolerate liquid on the outside. Apart from that, we clean them with a sterile air wash before filling. We use a nitrogen blanket for the whites and rosés before capping. There are no significant differences to what we would normally do. In fact, we treat the bottles like bag-in-boxes”.