Flat Wine Bottles Are in Your Future

July 17, 2020 — Wine has graced glass bottles, plastic bottles, boxes, cans, and Tetra Pak but a significant advancement is on the horizon with the introduction of the Flat Wine Bottle brought to you by Garçon Wines of the U.K.

The saying that “necessity is the mother of invention” couldn’t be truer in this case.

In the U.K., the post office delivers wine which is very civilized (and which has been proposed for the U.S. post office) but a wine bottle won’t fit through a mail slot and the cost of failed deliveries run to £1.6 billion a year.  The founder of Garçon Wines, Santiago Navarro had an Aha moment when he flattened the bottle while retaining the historic idea and familiarity of a wine bottle.  The letterbox wine bottle was born or as we’d say on this side of the Pond, the mail slot wine bottle.

Timing couldn’t be better with our current lifestyle of sheltering in place and ordering on line.  Plus the flat wine bottle offers all kinds of sustainability and storage advantages. 

The company claims their PET bottle (polyethylene terephthalate for anyone who wants to know) is 87% lighter than an average glass wine bottle saving CO2 across the supply chain. Plus because Garçon uses 100% recycled PET their energy savings are even greater.  Besides being infinitely recyclable, PET is lightweight, shatterproof, resealable and reusable. The screwcaps and labels are plastic too, which means no fuss recycling.

Because the bottles are flat, they can be stacked like books and are 40% spatially smaller than a round bottle enabling producers to slash logistics costs as well as the carbon footprint.  Home and apartment dwellers will love the space advantages too.  So will many businesses where space and/or weight are at a premium.

And a really nice feature is the flat Bordeaux-style bottle looks like a traditional wine bottle when viewed from the front and is elegant enough to place on a dining table.

Garçon Wines has flourished in the U.K. and Europe and now is poised to find a home in the United States through their affiliation with Amcor, a global packaging company.  A final thought from its founder, Santiago Navarro:  “At Garçon Wines, we’re bringing about the most significant advancement to wine bottles in the last two centuries. We’re doing this to prioritize sustainability, for the health of our planet, the wealth of our industry, and the happiness of consumers.”

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