Find out how much wine bottles from your favorite winery weigh

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.