Happy Earth Day! Last year on this day, I focused on the need for wineries to adopt lighter-weight bottles. After grumbling about heavy bottles for years, at the start of 2021, I bought a kitchen scale and began including empty bottle weights in my wine tasting notes. I feel it’s important for everyone to do what they can to help the environment and slow climate change.

It’s easy to take action today by purchasing lighter-weight bottles of wine. Somewhere along the way, wine drinkers began to believe that the heavier a bottle, the higher quality the wine inside. This is simply not true and is one of those chicken and egg situations… Consumers may have started believing this idea all on their own or wineries may have perpetuated the rumor. Regardless of how it began, the sad truth is that it exists at all.

Needlessly heavy bottles:

• Increase a winery’s carbon footprint

• Cost more to buy (wineries pass that cost down to consumers)

• Cost more to ship

• Weigh more (resulting in countless injuries from winery workers to distributors and grocery store staff)

It’s also important to note that sparkling wine is under immense pressure and does require heavier stronger glass. Weaker bottles literally explode under the pressure!

I go into much more detail on the subject in last year’s article. (Click here if you want to read the entire post.)

Since I began weighing empty wine bottles, I also created a spreadsheet to track average bottle weights over vintages. I was hoping to figure out if wineries were in fact choosing to bottle their wines in lighter-weight glass. Mind you, Winerabble’s focus is primarily Northwest wines and thus limited to a smaller pool of wine producers. I crunched some numbers and, as of April 19, 2022, found some insights on wine bottle weights I want to share with you.

We posted 5 wines from this vintage, with the lightest bottle weighing just 467 grams and the heaviest being 668.

We posted 16 wines from this vintage, with the lightest bottle weighing just 467 grams and the heaviest being 710.

We posted 27 wines from this vintage, with the lightest bottle weighing just 458 grams and the heaviest being 903.

Surprisingly, we posted 27 wines from this vintage as well, with the lightest bottle weighing just 406 grams and the heaviest being 720.

We posted 23 wines from this vintage, with the lightest bottle weighing just 413 grams and the heaviest being 831.

🏆 Italian wine: 2019 Cameron Hughes Lot 752 Gavi, weighing in at just 406 grams! 🏆

Since many of the sparkling wines were nonvintage (NV), I decided to combine them into their own category. The lightest bottle was 759 grams and the heaviest weighed 925 grams.

🍾 It’s worth noting that a Washington winery used the lightest weight bottle and the 2 heaviest came from California. 🍾

Because we didn’t taste any wines from the 2015 vintage and only 2 from 2014, I kept them in the spreadsheet but excluded them from my vintage averages. 

Overall, except for an uptick in 2018, empty bottles weights of the wines Winerabble tasted are trending lighter!

I encourage you to start a conversation with your favorite wineries about their glass choices. Reward those who are bottling in lighter-weight glass by purchasing more wine! And for those who haven’t yet made the change, ask what’s stopping them. If wine lovers vote for lighter weigh bottles with their dollars, wineries will surely take notice and ditch those heavy bottles that serve no purpose.

Below is the spreadsheet I created. I hope it will help you find wineries that are opting for lighter-weight glass in which to bottle their juice. I plan to periodically update it (updated June 26, 2022) so that it will continue to be a useful resource.

Not only can you search for your favorite producer, but also sort by vintage, alphabetically by winery name, and by bottle weight from lightest the heaviest, or heaviest to lightest.