About half of the wine consumed in Australia reaches our dinner tables via a plastic container – the flexible bladder crammed inside chateau cardboard. But will we embrace the polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottle so readily?

Not since the cask appeared more than thirty years ago have we embraced any non-glass packaging so enthusiastically.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the four-litre cask (known more aptly in other markets as bag-in-box) drove the humble two-litre glass flagon from our shelves. Today only cheap fortified wines come in flagons, although the diminutive ‘goon’ lives on as the twenty-something’s jargon for cheap wine.

Various cheap, strong, light and appealing alternatives to glass and casks have enjoyed niche but not mainstream success.

In the eighties we saw wine coolers packed in lunchbox-sized tetra packs boycotted by sections of the trade. Some retailers feared that the fruit-juice-like appearance might appeal to underage drinkers, or that children might even confuse it for juice.

We’ve since seen some attempts at packing wine in one-litre tetra packs. And several makers have enjoyed success with wine in cans – most notably Italy’s Rich Prosecco, touted by Paris Hilton.

But the successes are isolated and to date haven’t appealed to mainstream wine drinkers. However, environmental concerns about glass – particularly regarding its weight, high handling and transport costs and safety – mean that alternatives have to found.

As environmental concerns, backed by public policy, now dovetail with commercial cost-cutting needs, the number of alternatives is sure to grow. And PET plastic looks to be a strong favourite.

Like glass it’s strong, can be moulded into bottle shape, enjoys a long history as a drink container and is recyclable.

Unlike glass it’s comparatively light and won’t break into dangerous shards – which is good – but it’s not completely airtight, which is not so good.

Lightness is it’s overwhelming advantage over glass. Troy Hey of Foster’s says that a 750ml PET bottle weighs around 54 grams, compared to a glass bottle’s 400–700 grams.

That means a significant energy saving for every inch of a wine’s journey. The forklift carries 266–496 kilograms less in every pallet; each 1000-case shipping container weighs 4.1–7.7 tonnes less; and your car carries 4.1–7.7 kilograms less weight for every case taken home.

And the bottle even looks less bulky. On a visit to Foster’s Wolf Blass Barossa Winery in April, PET bottles on display looked small – 500ml I wondered? But no, said winemaker Chris Hatcher, these were 750ml bottles currently being exported to Canada.

At this stage, he said, they were being used for early-drinking wines only as slight air permeability meant a shorter shelf life than for the same wine in glass. Since most wine is drunk shortly after purchase, this perhaps makes the majority of wine a candidate for a PET bottle.

And will we wine drinkers accept the new packaging? A fair bit of evidence says that we will.

Indirectly, we’ve seen the dramatic take up of screw caps in the past decade. This can be viewed largely as a triumph of convenience over tradition – even if winemakers originally drove the change on quality grounds. The screw cap acceptance suggests that wine drinkers are not all that conservative.

More directly this decade PET bottles have rapidly replaced glass in the fast-growing single-serve market, dominated by those little 187ml bottles we drink on aircraft.

These have been particularly successful in the US where they were introduced under Fetzer’s Valley Oaks brand early in 2005 and followed in August the same year by Foster’s California based Stone Cellars by Beringer brand.

At the Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference early this month, Jamie O’Dell, Foster’s Managing Director Australia, Asia and Pacific, announced plans to launch the Wolf Blass Green Label wine range in PET bottles in the UK this month.

O’Dell said that the launch follows development work in Canada and that the key advantages of the bottles were lightness and quietness in transport, reduced potential to break and their safety for outside events.

Consumer research, he reported, suggests that people find the environmental message relevant (provided it’s backed by useful facts) and that they like the look of the packaging.

On a more practical level, Foster’s offered its popular Seppelt Fleur de Lys bubbly in PET bottles at Flemington during last year’s spring carnival. Its success means that punters at this year’s carnival will be offered Wolf Blass reds and whites from PET bottles.

While it’s a long shot to project retail success from crowd behaviour at the races, the forces driving the move to lighter, stronger packaging won’t go away. If anything, they’ll intensify.

If the PET bottle’s not much in our minds at present – nor even on retail shelves – my bet is that it’s poised to take a good slice of the market from glass bottles.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

We’ve all heard of Seppelt, Penfolds, Saltram, Yalumba and Orlando – great and enduring Barossa names. But what do we know of Tuesner, Tscharke, Lienert, Hentley Farm, Clos Otto, Gibson, Schild, Jenke, Haan, Kabinye, Langmeil, The Willows, Whistler, Kaesler, Kalleske, Torbreck, Three Rivers, Rockford, Veritas, Turkey Flat, Greenock Creek and Murray Street Vineyards? – to name just a few of the Valley’s smaller winemakers, many of them comparative newcomers.

There’s a revolution in the valley – perhaps insurrection is a better term – that’s at least as significant as the ‘Rhône ranger’ outbreak of the 1980s. Remember them?

As the industry expanded and consolidated in the mid to late eighties, the Barossa became increasingly a source of anonymous blending material for mass commercial brands – many of them owned by the large, old Barossa firms.

A group of Barossa winemakers, including Charlie Melton (Charles Melton Wines), Robert O’Callaghan (Rockford Wines) and Bob McLean (St Hallett) rebelled against creeping homogeneity and put the Barossa’s best foot forward.

They saw the long-term value of the region’s tried, proven and mature vineyard resources – particularly of the red Rhône Valley varieties shiraz, grenache and mourvedre (hence the sobriquet).

As the larger companies moved away from their regional roots, these small producers embraced regional specialisation and created wine-lover Barossa icons like Charles Melton Nine Popes, Rockford Basket Press Shiraz and St Hallett Old Block Shiraz. These appealed not just to local drinkers but excited a few commentators in export markets as well.

For the Rhône rangers and the others that followed, the Barossa provided rich pickings with its unique vineyard resource spread over a large and climatically and topographically diverse area.

The significant spread from north to south, the varying aspects along the eastern and western slopes and valley floor and varied soils mean significant variation in grape flavours – and hence the styles of wine produced.

These, of course, can never be expressed in multi-region blends. But this vineyard-by-vineyard flavour expression is the international language of fine wine. It’s the foundation of France’s wine appellation (name) system that grew, not from legislation describing wine regions, but from distinct wine styles defining regions.

The Barossa’s pattern of land settlement unquestionably aided the Rhône rangers back in the eighties and seems to be an important factor in the rise of a new band of Barossa sub-regional and single-vineyard specialists.

How can history affect today’s wines? Well, it can. And it’s illuminating to quote from a little booklet that I worked on last year with Phil Laffer, head of Orlando winemaking and viticulture.

In the book (The View From Our Place, Simon and Schuster, UK, 2006), Phil writes of the Barossa, ‘More than any other part of Australia that I can think of, the Barossa retained its ethnic identity for a very long time. This predominantly German influence continues to give us a unique food culture.

‘From the time the pioneering Germans arrived here in the 1840s until the 1970s, these communities tended to occupy mixed farms, with comparatively low incomes and a culture of growing and preserving much of their own food. They didn’t have any money to move away if they wanted to, so they stayed a very tight-knit community’.

From a modern winemaking viewpoint, the crux of this is that many of those mixed farms included grapes as part of the mix, creating an extraordinary scattering of small to medium holdings across the length and breadth of the Valley.

Many of these are extant today, some in the hands of the fifth and sixth generation of the founding family. Of course, there have been consolidations, grubbings and significant broad-acre plantings over the past decade.

But what the new wave of mostly young winemakers are doing – many without wineries or vineyards of their own – is finding those old, scattered vineyard plots and making small batches of the most extraordinary wine.

They’re mostly of old Barossa families, well qualified, and often have amazing insights into what even very small plots of old vines might deliver.

These are adding to the richness and colour of the other small and medium estate-based operations. And, ultimately, their growing success will probably create a Burgundy-like Barossa – not in wine-style, but in a growing appreciation of sub-regional and individual-vineyard differences expressed in wine.

Our bid to build on the success of ‘brand Australia’ in export markets will rely increasingly on exactly this sort of regional specialisation, where it’s warranted.

And it’s certainly happening in this valley that spreads twenty kilometres from north to south, widens from about 500 metres in the south to ten kilometres in the north, has gentle hills on the western boundary; the higher, cooler Eden Valley rising out of the eastern slopes; and whose south-eastern corner abuts the much cooler Adelaide Hills.

This column will look at some of the new-wave Barossa makers in the months ahead.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007