France makes world's lightest champagne bottle

Champagne Telmont Winery has partnered with French glass container manufacturer Verallia to complete testing of an 800g champagne bottle. Both companies say their development is the lightest bottle of its type in the world, 35g lighter than a standard bottle.

The glass from which bottles are made is one of the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions in the wine industry. Telmont estimates that around a quarter of their emissions come from bottles. Lighter bottles use less glass, which means less emissions during the production process, by about 4% per bottle.

In addition, lighter bottles require less fuel to transport both from the glassmaker to the winery and from the winery to stores, further reducing emissions.

Visually, the bottles are practically the same, except for a slightly thinner neck - consumers are unlikely to notice the difference.

In recent years, the weight of a champagne bottle has dropped from 900g to 835g. The process of lightening champagne bottles is especially difficult because the bottle must withstand the pressure inside - twice as much as the pressure in a car tire.

Champagne Telmont is using a trial batch of 3,000 bottles to bottle Réserve de la Terre organic champagne, which will go on sale in 2026.

Champagne Telmont, whose investors include Leonardo DiCaprio, wants to be the first champagne house to achieve carbon negativity by 2050. To do this, in addition to lightening the bottles, the winery revised the packaging, abandoning gift boxes, and also began to use sea transportation instead of air transportation.

Source: wine market portal profibeer