WTAF - Wine's Alt Format Warriors Battle Climate Change

'Nobody thinks of wine as the villain in the climate story. But in fact we are.' So says When In Rome's Rob Malin, who spoke at COP26 about how shipping wine around the world in glass bottles leads to significant carbon emissions.

'We have to take this seriously because if we don’t do something about climate change, you can forget a lot of your nice wine producing regions,' says Oli Purnell of canned wine startup The Copper Crew.

WTAF stands, in this case, for Wine Traders for Alternative Formats (things like bag-in-box, pouches, bagnums, cans, kegs and plastic bottles). In this episode, we hear their impassioned case for building a more sustainable future for wine, citing figures showing glass bottles have nearly ten times worse carbon footprint than bag-in-box. Their secret weapon? Quality wines and new technology meaning no scrimping on drinking pleasure - while presenting a strong case for sustainability. 

We also get a sense of the overview from packaging experts WRAP. And along the way, we talk about featuring climate impact on labels, new ways to recycle plastic, cost savings of alt format wines, wastage, carbon tax...and Nero d'Avola on cornflakes.

Featured in this episode are:

- Rob Malin, When in Rome
- Ollie Lea, The BIB Wine Company
- Rich Hamblin, More Wine
- Nik Darlington, Graft Wine
- Oli Purnell, The Copper Crew
- Adam Herriott, WRAP

As ever, show notes for this episode (including our 'alt format' wine recommendations) are on our website. 

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