Blogs & Ecology

The Whole Foods website is all gaga over today's launch of this year's "green" Beaujolais Nouveau.

Whole Foods Market is proud to present the first ever bottling of Nouveau in plastic bottles! This lowers the carbon footprint of getting this wine to your table. Just think, less guilt while enjoying wine with friends! And it lowers the cost for you to get it to the table too. Just imagine sitting on a fatter wallet while you’re enjoying the same exact delicious wine with friends! It’s more than delicious. It’s a new way to enjoy this traditional regional wine.

I have been convinced of the environmental benefits of bag-in-box wines, as they carry more wine in less packaging than any other form. (glass is heavy and is usually down-cycled, tetra-paks are light but not very green). Unfortunately, the selection is limited, the packaging is cheezy and the contents are a blend of who knows what. One Australian reader says they are known locally as "goon bags. You can get 4L of truly awful wine for about eight bucks thanks to these things."

Gustorganic before the bar, courtesy of Keetsa

photo:Yellow + Blue

Yellow + Blue is expanding its use of sustainable Tetra Pak(R) cartons to include its Torrontes varietal. After the success of its Malbec in the Tetra Pak packaging, the brand of organically grown Argentinian wines has decided to wrap up another varietal. Read on to find out about why Tetra Pak is so sustainable....

:: Toast to a sustainable future using our How to Go Green: Wine and Buy Green: Organic Cabernet Sauvignon guides.

:: It's not too late! Get old school this Halloween with these three crafty ideas.

Pinot Grigio, shiraz, merlot and more, are carefully paired with the ingredients, and they end up succeeding in providing a great, and very different, taste. ... The second was that as opposed to many jarred puttanesca sauces, which are ridiculously spiced, the heat of this one was slight and subtle. ... I realized later that the added spice was provided from the wine, like a good Pinot Grigio would, as opposed to hot pepper flakes.

Though Amy Winehouse, the pop singer I erroneously reported would open Holland's "sustainable" WATT dance clublast week was nowhere near Rotterdam (Iggy Pop & The Stooges were the opening act), there were revelers enough to light up the dance floors and gaze upon the gray water toilet flushing system in ...

Image source: Getty Images

How many plastic water bottles would you think are disposed of at wine festivals? Couple thousand? (Event that seems like a ton of plastic for just one event). Well, three events - the Winter Wineland, Barrel Tasting, and A Wine and Food Affair - (incorporating almost 150 wineries in the Russian River in California) accumulate over 100,000 plastic water bottles and over 80,000 paper invites. Yuck! Well, starting with A Wine and Food Affair this November, that number will be reduced to zero!

TreeHugger spares no expense or our livers in our search to find the greenest packaging for wine. After reading Ruben Anderson's article in Tyee, where he said "Do you really want to try to look your children in the eye and explain that they have to eat jellyfish gumbo because you couldn't resist that lovely imported shiraz?" I started looking for a greener, local alternative.

Fun on the Farm Down Home in Long Island City "P.S. 1, in Long Island City, Queens, has been hosting its weekly summer dance-party series, Warm Up Saturdays, for 10 years. This year, instead of the usual urban beach-themed décor, the courtyard has been transformed into an urban farm: 260 cardboard cylinders, from waist-height to towering, that sprout 51 plant varieties, like Swiss chard, dill, strawberries and tomatoes." ::New York Times

Typical green imagery for tetra pak wine

In Ontario, Canada, the government-owned Liquor stores have been pushing Tetra Paks as eco-packaging, claiming a much lower carbon footprint in manufacture and transport than the traditional glass bottle. They even claim that they are recycled, although I suspect they are just going through the motions; you don't get much value out of pulping seven layers of plastic and paper. I called it greenwash, but after Jenna found a life-cycle analysis showing that tetra-paks were better than new glass, I thought the issue was settled.

That is the question that Fetzer will be putting to the world as they attempt to take sustainability one-step further.

Images courtesy of author.

This article is continued from yesterday looking at how Bonterra winery is the leader in organic grape growing, and just how do they keep their plants healthy and the bugs away without the help of pesticides.