Lightweight bottles are starting to appear even among prestige wines. This is good. Consumers will realise that it is not just cheap wines that come in light bottles. On our recent New Zealand tour, we visited the Felton Road Winery in Central Otago.
Felton Road works organically and is now also introducing so-called regenerative viticulture, a sort of subdivision of organic agriculture that, among other things, emphasises the importance of cover crops and ensuring that the soil is never bare. In other words, ploughing must be done as sparingly as possible. Other environmental aspects are also considered.
The bottles for all the estate’s wines weigh only 417 grams. In other words, they meet the Swedish monopoly’s limit for lightweight bottles, which is 420 grams. “The aim for Felton Road is to get down to 390 grams,” Felton Road owner and New Zealand legend Nigel Greening told us. “But that’s probably the limit.”
Travel: Come on a wine tour to New Zealand with BKWine.
See: See pictures and videos from New Zealand 2024 in the wine tour’s Facebook group.
