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Hey folks,

This month’s newsletter explores the tension between sustainability and marketability. It turns over a question that we’ve long struggled with: what to do about the weight of our glass bottles?

How can we make a sustainable product within the parameters of common market aesthetics? Is it possible to produce a sustainable bottle of vermouth? What kind of sustainability are we actually selling?

These questions and more. Read on to hear them.

Should we Put It in a Box?

Andrew and I are standing on the long side of our little kitchen table. On the other, there are three members of our wine distribution team, here to tour the winery and sample our wares. Most wineries would use their tasting room or a nice portico for such a visit, but we have neither. It’s either the kitchen, the winery (which is technically a garage stuffed to the gills with wine tanks), or I suppose the field where we grow our botanicals (as an obligatory third option).

I chose the kitchen to be our all-purpose business and entertainment center. We’ll have a cursory visit to the winery later, where we can relish in its rusticity for exactly the appropriate amount of time.

Visits from distributors to wineries are standard in this industry. It’s a way for the distributor to more deeply learn a winery’s story, taste the upcoming vintage, or visit library bottlings (if available). In a word, it shows goodwill. This is just one of many ways in which distributors and winemakers build trust with each other: an essential thing in a sometimes volatile industry.

There are two men, one tall, one average, and one short woman. The three of them listen with an acute, receptive intent that I know very well. Before I made vermouth, I worked in sales with a different distributor, and pouring samples for prospective buyers was part of my pitch. I met with restaurant sommeliers, wine shop owners, boutique foodstuff purchasers… you name it.

Whether winery-distributor or distributor-purchaser, both dynamics are an exercise in trust. A tasting doesn’t just showcase the flavor profile of the wine. It’s an atmosphere of human connection. A handshake, if you will. I’ve done this thousands of times. The difference, in this case, is that it was always someone else’s wine, someone else’s story. Now, the wine is my own. We are the story.

Andrew stands at my side as I pour small sips of plum vermouth into their waiting glasses. The bottle is heavy enough that I have to pour it with both hands, a minor industry faux pas. There’s about a half-inch of solid glass at its base. It’s functionally useless but aesthetically indicating. High-end products have more glass. That’s what the market dictates. That’s what the consumer understands. More glass means better flavor, higher prestige… all the trappings and associations with value that are inexorably woven into our cultural identity.

I think it’s silly. But it does make an impression.

The distribution team swirls, smells, holds their glasses to the light. I dictate the barest synopsis of last year’s vintage. Then I wait. If I learned anything selling wine, it’s that the open space of silence allows for far more discovery than an overabundance of verbiage. Learning how to wait was the hardest part of the job. I still don’t like it.

A portfolio of my work stands in a neat line on the table between us, a rainbow of brightly colored aperitifs. I designed the inside, Andrew drafted the labels. In the slanting light of our kitchen window, they glow like fae potions from another time.

We work our way down the line, visiting each bottle in turn. Pour, speak, wait, repeat. All the while, I find myself chewing on a question, but I just can’t bring myself to ask it. Vulnerability is a tricky thing in this industry. It’s a hyper-competitive, highly social arena populated almost exclusively by empaths. Reveal too much, and you might find yourself ostracized.

But… I can’t help myself.

I take a slow breath as I cork the last bottle, angling it towards our guests.

“What do you think about a lower-glass bottle shape? There’s a lot of unused glass here,” I say, tapping my finger against the heavy glass foot. “We’re considering the idea of a more eco-friendly bottle.”

The tall man shrugs and nods at the same time, betraying multiple, conflicting answers. “We always support a more sustainable direction,” he begins, “but… these look nice.” At this, he gestures to my vermouth. “The heavy bottle imparts a certain sense of value.”

I give my own nod. The bottles do look nice, but they come with a cost. Their price tag is not insignificant, but more importantly, they’re expensive ecologically.

The Price of Beauty

More than half of an average winery’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the shipping and manufacture of glass bottles. Producing glass bottles is a heat-intensive process, generating around 86 million metric tons of CO₂ annually worldwide.

Between production, packaging, and transport, glass packaging alone comprises 30–50% of the wine industry’s total carbon footprint. An average bottle weighs 500–600 grams, while premium bottles can reach nearly two pounds. Multiply that by a few million, and you can imagine the fuel required just to get it from the factory to our winery.

The glass itself is (theoretically) infinitely recyclable, but therein lies a second problem. The U.S. population recycles only about 33% of glass produced, either through lack of intention or improper sorting. That translates into billions of wine bottles lost to landfills each year.

There is a very big problem with glass.

…but this is all ancillary to the moment. Well, it isn’t, but it feels far enough away not to collapse under. We wrap up the tasting, shake hands, say our farewells. Andrew and I began tidying up the glassware and bottles.

The air feels deflated, like a bow string undone. I can guess why. Sustainability has its guardrails. I find myself thinking of a conversation I had with a winemaker I apprenticed with many years ago in rural New Hampshire. He told me that “everything you do in this life will be a sale.” I hated the sentiment at the time. Now… I’m not so sure that I disagree.

I lean back against the kitchen table, bracing myself on the palms of my hands. “Do you think we could put our vermouth in boxes?” I want to swallow the question back; it sounds so definitively unsellable.

Andrew is elbow-deep in suds, washing the glassware from the tasting. He doesn’t respond right away, but unconsciously starts shaking his head.

“You know…” I continue aimlessly, “Those sustainable wine boxes that are super light to ship and fully recyclable? They even make them in bottle shapes.” I dangle that last detail like it somehow makes this idea more digestible. Ex-sales indeed.

Andrew sighs. “I mean…” he trails off. The ridiculousness of my suggestion is so obvious that he’s at a loss for words. He sighs again. “No one would buy it. I like the idea. Of course, I want us to use less glass. Of course, I want to reduce the fuel and materials it takes to make our bottles, to make our work better for the planet… but, no one would buy it.” Suds fly as he gestures in frustration. “If people don’t buy it, we don’t stay in business.”

I know he’s right. The bottles have to look good, in the most classical sense of the word. The sales part of me understands this. But, the rest of me doesn’t want to. If the environment forever comes second to marketability, then we’ve already lost this game. The very word “sustainability” can’t be trusted. There’s no legal definition, and we need it that way just to make ends meet. Sustainability means “you’ll have to trust that we’re doing the best that we can.”

But surely, you say, there must be visually appealing, sustainable glass bottles? There certainly are… and they cost a fortune. Even if (if!) we could afford the per-bottle price, the purchase minimums are prohibitively high: many pallets more than we could ever need or store. It’s not approachable on a small scale like ours.

In the end, Andrew and I will find a compromise on the bottle: still glass, still conventional, but with less of a foot at its base and thinner walls. An airy silhouette with a lighter ecological footprint that maintains all the aesthetic principles of proper modern marketing. A happy ending, for all intents and purposes.

Our first product to use the lower glass bottle is our plum vermouth: Solstice. This vintage is quite delayed, but it’s finally back, with a second (very large!) bottling en route this summer.

There will be no boxed vermouth or compressed cellulose bottles. No recycled plastic pull tabs or aluminum screw caps.

It will be glass, because glass is nice and feels old, and real, and substantial, and even these lighter bottles have a psychological weight that somehow tethers their purchaser to another (possibly imaginary) time in which everything mundane felt true and whole.

A time that, in a word, felt safe.

This is a story about glass, but it’s also a story about what sustainability really means.

Simple and Tangible

You might say that sustainability in sales is less ecological and more psychological. The target is the customer’s value system. The message: your beliefs are correct, and because they are correct, you are safe within the social hierarchy. For only a few rare people is true ecological sustainability a mean driver of purchasing habits.

But, is that so bad? Is marketing psychological safety inherently disingenuous? Is its pursuit unjustified?

I don’t know. I just make wine.

What I do know is if that bucolic past did exist, where life was uncomplicated and tangible in a way that didn’t feel like a crumpled old newspaper, I want people to know a piece of that. We have our glass-bottled vermouth and our old-time waxed vegetable boxes, and these notes that I keep writing to whoever will read them… all smatterings of palpability in what feels to me like a humanity with its heart hollowed out and dropped somewhere forgettable.

There’s a problem with glass. More glass isn’t going to fix it. Less isn’t going to, either. What’s inside the glass is almost inconsequential. Or, is it everything entirely?

The problem with glass is that its psychological imprint isn’t deep enough. Like all good branding, it communicates something essential, but the message is incomplete. It’s too brief, a sentence, half-finished. It feels like safety and promise, and then culture steps in to fill in the gaps with how nice it is.

Maybe if there are enough bottles, they’ll fill in the gaps themselves, crowd out culture’s insistent message to accumulate, dominate. Maybe a sufficient pockmarking of genuine beauty will tip the scales, and we can meet where unsullied “sales” was always meant to help us meet: as one and another, sharing something lifegiving in a primeval and fathomless world.

Maybe with enough glass, we can finally go there together. When we arrive, we’ll keep the glass or leave it. It will be both beautiful and incidental. Then, the real conversation will begin.

…and with that, I’ll say: our vermouth drops soon. I hope you like the bottles.

Until next time,

Kelly

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