UNCONTAINED: Plastic gets non from wine institute

The very first item of any kind I ever wrote about packaging was on a wine cork made from plastic. It was a good introduction to the idiosyncrasies of the wine world. More...

The very first item of any kind I ever wrote for a packaging magazine was about a wine cork made from plastic. It was designed to bypass the problems of natural cork, which can include cracking and mold, while satisfying traditionalists who just couldn’t reconcile themselves to screw tops.

I can’t recall whether that cork made it. (The magazine didn’t.) But it was a good introduction, not just to commercial packaging in general, but to the idiosyncrasies of the wine world.

I thought of those plastic corks when I read about this study from something called the Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences in Bordeaux, France. Basically, it said that after six months, wine bottled in plastic had messed-up levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, giving it a taste of “rotted fruit.”

That doesn’t sound good. Glass dominates wine packaging to a degree unequalled among major beverages (almost 90% market share), and if this study is accurate, it’s not hard to see why.

On the other hand, someone who buys a bottle of wine and doesn’t drink it for six months is either a serious oenophile or a wannabe wine snob. I doubt that such people would buy plastic bottles in the first place.