First came the shame. As fellow customers of my smart local Brooklyn wine shop perused the shelves with studious looks, I slithered over to the register. “I’m embarrassed to ask, but you don’t have any wine in cans, do you?” The clerk gestured to a small fridge right beneath my nose. Yes, they had loads of cans. Yes, they were proving super popular. No, he hadn’t tried the one with the fun vintage circus illustration on the label.
The art on the 187ml can spoke to me, so I took it home, along with four others. Together, they cost around the same amount as the last bottle I’d bought. They tasted even better.
For the past few years, a quiet revolution has been taking place in the wine industry. Cans are cool and bag-in-box is chic, and not just according to Vogue. The stigma of alternative wine containers, from kegs to cartons, has drained away. Perfectly portable, often beautifully designed cylindrical vessels are demystifying the rarefied world of wine. Cans are shaping up to be one of the most promising sustainable interventions in the industry.
Francis Ford Coppola’s eponymous winery was among those leading the aluminium charge, with its 2004 canned tribute to his daughter, Sofia Blanc de Blancs. Nearly two decades later, there are plenty of canned wines to choose from: an unfussy pinot noir from the Washington winery Underwood, a juicy Love Red from California’s Broc Cellars or Bridge Lane’s Bubbles, a fizzy blend of whites that slips down with disconcerting ease. The business of canned wine is growing rapidly, making up $235.7m of the global wine market in 2021, and estimated to surpass $570m by 2028. (It’s a fraction of 2021’s $424.99bn wine market, but a fast-blooming one nonetheless.)
For centuries, the 750ml glass bottle proved itself the best container for wine: humble, graceful and inert, and thus ideal for ageing. But glass bottles are responsible for the largest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions from the wine industry. A 2014 report by the Wine Institute, an industry association of California wineries, found that glass bottles accounted for 29% of the carbon footprint of wine – and that’s not including transport, during which the vessels’ heavy weight pushes emissions up further. To top it all off, the creation of glass bottles in white-hot furnaces is hugely energy-intensive. We think of glass as recyclable, which technically it is – but in the US, only 31% of glass is recycled, compared with 50% of aluminium cans. For wine drinkers who care about the planet, considering alternative containers is essential.
Switching to cans is an environmental no-brainer for Philip Marthinsen, who has a background running a sustainability-focused creative agency and who co-founded the Stockholm-based canned wine brand Djuce in 2022. “Aluminium gets recycled, glass doesn’t,” he says.
His company’s speciality is wine from prestige vintners like Meinklang in Austria and French legend Dominique Piron. Djuce’s selections come in design-led cans whose out-there illustrations call to mind fashion show invites (limited-edition prints of the artworks are also available for sale).
The folks at Djuce like to cite a SystemBolaget study that shows that switching to three 250ml aluminium cans (which together contain as much wine as a bottle) cuts 79% of carbon emissions produced by traditional packaging. What’s more, aluminium is infinitely recyclable; almost 75% of the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.
Marthinsen and his co-founders saw cans as a way to shift the culture of wine-drinking – and, as the industry wrings its hands over a waning interest in wine among millennials and zoomers, to introduce wine to a cohort of younger drinkers. After all, young people drink plenty of other things out of cans – hard seltzers, mixed cocktails, hard kombucha, beer, you name it. Cans are easy to carry around, they’re quick to cool, and the smallness of their opening means you’re less likely to spill all over yourself when dancing – itself revolutionary for those accustomed to having a glass of merlot sloshing about in their hand. Younger people are also increasingly conscientious about how much they drink, and don’t always want to buy a full bottle.
Cans are cropping up in happening restaurants, too. Miguel de Leon, a writer and sommelier at Pinch in New York City, almost always recommends wine in cans, and not only because they challenge the idea of wine as something highbrow or elite. “They’re a very quick gateway to the joy of wine, rather than the minutiae of the academics or the dragon-chasing of something that’s special,” he says. Some wines even benefit from being in cans, he adds: a vinho verde, for instance, or a txakolina, both of which have a light spritz and are meant to be served cold. De Leon recommends Old Westminster’s Seed & Skins pinot gris, which “tastes just like the most uncomplicated yet savoury version of fruit punch”, or Leitz OUT, a prickly off-dry riesling.
Glass bottles are unbeatable for ageing wine, he grants, but for the majority of wines, which are meant to be consumed within the first five years of being produced, De Leon doesn’t see why cans aren’t the go-to. “I feel like the environmental impacts really outweigh what the stigma is of consuming wine in a can,” De Leon says.
Others, however, remain sceptical. Cans are fine “if you were solely interested in wine for reasons of sustainability, but presumably you’re drinking wine because you like how wine tastes”, says Lettie Teague, the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist. When sampling widely for a column, she found some canned offerings “pleasant”, particularly fresh and fizzy ones, like a Frico lambrusco by Scarpetta, “but I’ve not stocked up on cans since then”. Teague says that drinking wine straight from the can could diminish the joy of the wine-drinking experience. “Because your first experience of the wine is: ‘Oh, tin!’” The aroma of wine, from which much of its pleasure is derived, is unlikely to escape a can’s tiny opening. But mostly, Teague is unconvinced by the quality of wines put into cans. “The big question is, how good is that wine?” she says.
Questionable canned wine was Marthinsen’s initial experience with the category, too, when establishing Djuce. “We agreed, it was really bad wine,” he says. “It had nothing to do actually with the can, it was just a bad wine that was put into the can.” He and his partners determined to approach only top-notch winemakers. Marthinsen expected some resistance, but found many were excited about the sustainability argument for canning wine. “They are farmers,” he says. “They see in real time the effect of climate change.”
While reusable kegs and bag-in-box have a minor leg-up on cans in terms of sustainability, the stylish, super-recyclable can stands a chance of being the container that catches on. Wines in glass bottles aren’t going anywhere, but embracing something as unserious as a can could have a serious effect on the planet.
