The Sustainable Wine Roundtable (SWR) is pleased to announce the forthcoming creation of a new accord covering sparkling wine bottles. Following the very positive uptake globally for its still wine Bottle Weight Accord, launched in November 2023, the SWR recognised the opportunity to tackle excess bottle weights in sparkling wines and Champagnes.
SWR’s Research and Standards Director, Dr Peter Stanbury says:
“We now have more than 20 member signatories to our Bottle Weight Accord, who between them account for over 2 billion bottles of still wine produced and sold globally. The sparkling wine category is a more complex one, as glass safety is a key consideration where liquids are under pressure. However, we are confident we can recommend targets across different sparkling wine styles which can benefit producers, traders, retailers and others, not just in reducing their carbon emissions, but also in their bottom line. Heavier glass costs more to produce, more to ship, and with taxes such as the UK government’s EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility), more to bring to market. Where producers are using bottles heavier than our ‘safe’ recommendations, unnecessary EPR fees are potentially being incurred. By way of comparison, in its first year of operation, the still wine BWA removed nearly 120,000 tonnes of glass from the wine supply chain. Had that all been charged at the UK EPR rate of £240/tonne for glass, that would equate to over £28m in EPR fees.”
Working on a relative ‘blank canvas’, as there is much less research into the topic of sparkling wine bottle weights compared to those of still wines, the SWR has identified 4 key segments of the sparkling market: lightly sparkling wines, tank fermented and carbonated wines, Champagnes, and other sparkling wines where the secondary fermentation takes place in the bottle.
Attention in the latter categories is needed due the additional complexity of how maturing bottles are turned (riddling) and stored, sometimes over many years, on their sides, which places additional stress on the pressurised bottles.
Timeline for the new accord
SWR plans to share the research and the various target weights which it has identified at the end of July 2025 and will then invite sparkling wine producers, importers and retailers to sign up for these. As Peter Stanbury says, “once we identify examples of where lighter-weight bottles are, and have been safely used, by sparkling wine producers at scale and over a period of time, we can confidently set these weights as a realistic target.”
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From Still to Sparkling: What’s Next for the Bottle Weight Accord - Wine Industry Advisor
