YOUNTVILLE, Calif. – The next big thing for the wine industry could be small, screw-capped and shatterproof.
Single-serve plastic bottles are starting to show up on supermarket shelves in a bid to win new customers by moving wine beyond posh white-tablecloth dinners to the picnic bench.
Drop one of these green bottles, and no problem.
“There’s a more active lifestyle people are living. They’d like wine to be a part of it, and it just was not convenient in the 750-milliliter typical wine glass bottle where you have to bring corkscrews, glasses, etc.,” says Tom Slone, brand manager for Stone Cellars by Beringer, which has been selling four-packs of wine in unbreakable, single-serve bottles since summer.
The new, 187 mL (6 fluid-ounce) bottles are part of a larger trend in the industry that includes boxed wine, cans and carton-type packages.
“People, I think, are now into casual enjoyment of fine products,” says Wilfred Wong, cellar master for Beverages &More, who sees the move toward unconventional containers starting with the success of premium boxed products such as Black Box Wines.
There isn’t much sales data available yet on the plastic bottles, but the category in general, which includes glass bottles already offered on airplanes and in delis and supermarkets, has been doing well. Sales of wine in 187 mL containers – mostly glass – totaled nearly $68 million for the 52 weeks ending Oct. 22, up about 22 percent from the year before, according to supermarket sales data from ACNielsen.
Overall, domestic wine sales were up about 9 percent to $3.9 billion – good news for the industry, which has battled a grape glut in recent years.
The Stone Cellars minibottles are made of a durable plastic designed to be tasteless and odorless. They look like regular bottles in miniature, right down to the little indentation on the bottom known as a punt, and they are filled with the same varietals – chardonnay, pinot grigio, merlot and cabernet sauvignon – that Stone Cellars puts in its full-sized glass bottles. The four-packs cost about $8.
“The consumer research that we did indicated that even though people were looking at a smaller size, they wanted a package that looked sophisticated,” Slone said. “We didn’t do anything trendy or quirky.”
That won over people such as David Joachim of the American Tailgaters Association, who likes not having to worry about broken glass but isn’t ready to give up tradition entirely.
“The wine bottle itself is so iconic that when you put wine in something else, it ruins the experience for some reason,” he said.
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