Joy Marketing, Bottle Light-Weighting and Eating Your Packaging (Literally)

RISE Day 5: Supply Chain & Waste Prevention

HI!

Welcome back to the cold shower of hodgepodge notes I scribbled down at the Napa RISE Climate & Wine Symposium! I started this project (letting you copy my SIX DAYS of notes) with the proclamation that attending RISE should be “required reading” for anyone/everyone working in the wine industry… and honestly for all consumers living in 2025, period. But, precisely because we’re all consumers living in 2025, ain’t nobody got time for that shit. You probably don’t have time to break for lunch, much less 6 hours x 6 days of sustainability programming. So I’ll cut to the chase!

Here’s some of what I took away and you might care about from Day 5: Supply Chain & Waste Prevention…

If you think this kind of content is valuable for our industry (or for human consumers alive in 2025!), and if you believe in an inclusive, positive, pragmatic future for wine, consider becoming a paid subscriber and sharing this post so we can keep the progress going. THANK YOU FOR READING!

THE TLDR: OVERVIEW OF THE DAY (keep reading below, if you wish, for more detail):

1. **I biked 20 miles north from Napa town proper up to Charles Krug in St. Helena to get here today!! It was way harder than I thought/planned. Woof. I also biked in reverse those 20 miles back home! And that is my very proud carbon emission-reducing act for the day.**

2. I was grateful to sit, not peddling, and listen to wonderful updates from Revino’s bottle washing program, which I wrote about a few months back. I also got to listen to friends from the Wine Industry Zero Waste Collective (whose website I do copywriting for and whom I’ve also already written about!) and all the waste diversion happening in Napa and beyond. I asked Megan from RISE to eat a piece of a fully biodegradable corn-based foam wine shipper because the guy said it was so compostable it was actually edible, and she did it.

3. Clif Family Winery won the leadership award for ditching foils, screw caps and metal bike cogs on their premium bottles, reducing the weight of 1 case by almost 8 lbs plus reducing packaging materials’ waste created. Brilliant.

4. Cathy Corison and her daughter Grace reaffirmed my belief that they should pretty much be the poster children for Napa Valley. Is there a poster maker we can recruit? Let’s do this. They spoke about the evolution of farming in Napa Valley, organic certifications, succession planning, and consistency of values within an evolving brand.

5. Finally, the Critical Questions Forum asked: Do Consumers Care About Sustainability & Climate Action? The short answer: yes, in theory, but not really, in practice… but they might if we stopped making them feel so depressed and guilty about it.

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MORE DETAILED NOTES:

Workshop I: Reuse Reality & Upcycling: Building Circular Solutions with Revino and the Zero Waste Collective

Contacts: Adam Rack, Co-Founder Of Revino LLC; Keenan O’Hern, CEO and Sustainability Steward, Revino; Stephanie Barger, Director True Zero Waste, Market Transformation and Business Development at U.S. Green Building Council; Megan Hernandez, Co-Chair of the Wine Industry Zero Waste Collective

• For a background on Revino and the bottle return/wash program, read here. Basically, recycling bottles is inefficient, expensive, and doesn’t work super well. Returning and washing bottles to re-use them is way better, but the logistics are hard.

  • Ideal for Tasting Rooms because the bottle stays on-site!

• Washable labels are crucial to this model, but we have limited access to them here in the US because of limited demand. To get more, we need to ask for them from the printers. Also get used to not having them stay on bottles in ice buckets for 7 hours!

• In Napa, target date for pilot programs is about 4-6 months out (so start having conversations with printers now!); wash facility is likely 18-24 months out for Napa

• The Wine Industry Zero Waste Collective is a [great!] thing!

  • Goal is to create a circular economy in wine countries, and to set up a template for other wine regions to copy off of, for us to lend them support

• Focus on the zero waste hierarchy: 1st redesigning our systems and materials, then reducing and reusing, the composting and recycling at the very end

• Wine industry is an ideal place to go zero waste because we’re geographically dense—even though we make different wines, we’re all working with the same materials so have all the same challenges… and opportunities

• The WIZWC alone has, to date, pulled 120,000lbs of PET and stretch film out of waste system

• You—YES, YOU!—can get involved and start diverting waste from your home or business right this minute. Read up on the WIZWC resources and join the party.

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Workshop II: Engaging the Supply Chain: From Packaging to Partnerships

Contacts: Molly Sheppard, Global Sales & Environmental Manager at Spottswoode Estate Vineyard & Winery; Michael Garretson, Manager, Recycling and Circular Solutions at UPM Raflatac; Curtis Strohl, B Cellars General Manager

• This workshop focused on how to speak with suppliers to ask for solutions so we can reduce carbon emissions and waste. You have to establish a relationship with your suppliers, ask questions, and know the right questions to ask.

• Molly showed how they go about that at Spottswoode by tracking emissions in-house. I didn’t know the difference between Scopes of emissions, so here you go:

  • Scope 1 emissions (per the Greenhouse Gas Protocol) = direct emissions that originate from sources owned or controlled by that organization (i.e. emissions from combustion in your own boilers, furnaces, vehicles, etc.)

  • Scope 2 emissions = indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling consumed by the reporting company. These emissions occur at the facility where electricity is generated, not at the point of consumption by the reporting company.

  • Scope 3 emissions = all other indirect emissions that occur in an organization’s value chain. They happen because of a company’s activities but at sources not owned or controlled by the company.

    • Through their data, Spottswoode knew that Scope 3 was their largest driver of emissions: employee commutes, packaging, business travel, and product transport (which was the biggest at 44%!)

      • Knowing that, they were able to focus on bottle light-weighting and have now achieved a 17% reduction of packaging emissions!

      • From 2019 to 2022 they reduced glass weight by 303g/bottle or 38% over 4 years!

        • There’s been no notable breakage increase, and there’s been LOTS of thanks from consumers for their efforts

• ASK your suppliers: What are the current carbon emissions associated with your manufacturing, and how do you measure them?

• From Molly: “Wine is a conduit to talk about things that matter to you. Look at this as an opportunity to engage with your consumer about things that matter.”

• UPM Raflatac is a manufacturer of labels; among others, they make films and papers specifically for the wine industry

• Wine label backing is typically not recyclable through normal methods. So, Raflatac created the Rafcycle program (deets here!):

  • Rafcycle collects and turns backing into “fluff,” a raw polyester turned into carpeting.

  • They’re working with WIZWC and Wine Services Co-op to collect

    • Learn how to participate here!

  • 100 tonnes of PET waste creates benefits of 123 tonnes of CO2 emissions compared to landfill

• B Cellars is a 100% DTC winery so all their product gets shipped; in the past that was in Styrofoam; customers complained about pulp’s aesthetic and it getting squished in transit.

  • Did you know that Air Shipping has 9x more emissions than Ground?!

• B Cellars thought about engaging the consumer: We’re making a luxury product from Napa, so how to make customer happy with service and product and delivery? Framing the question that way opened up possibilities for us…

  • Corn-based foam: Joe Taber, who makes boxes, helped design a box that uses the green cell foam (dissolvable in water; you can eat it!)

  • Customers were really excited—it’s in their living room that we make our last word. In the past we put a lot of collateral in the boxes (recipes, gifts) and no one ever gave us positive feedback or thanked us for those. When we switched to this box customers gave us all sorts of unsolicited feedback saying they loved the new boxes.

    • Joe also designed little toppers (big picture with info on back, click on QR code—customers don’t actually really do this, but they tell us they love the photos).

    • It is expensive! This costs 2x Styrofoam, which is a big investment. BUT we framed this as part of our customer experience and thought about all the other things we spend $ on—like menus we print on, pens we give away, ways we try to make impressions. With this framing, it made sense and we could convince our board and have everyone be proud of it.

  • Shipping question: we self-fulfill; we want more people to ask this so the shipping warehouses will stock this. If more people pick this up, the cost goes down. If you’re a warehouse in Napa, this isn’t an option. But it could be! If you ask. If enough people ask.

• If you have customers that prioritize an outdated/unsustainable aesthetic, you have a responsibility to begin that conversation to change their minds

• Importance of bringing these conversations into your entire brand identity; we have such an opportunity to be leaders in this because of what we create (wine!); we have the means and the responsibility. The more we turn the conversation while still delivering a top-quality product, the more powerful we can be.

• Customers love to be engaged; they get a kick out of these behind-the-scenes conversations.

• Evyn Cameron of Une Femme Wines: We’re all trying to market to a younger generation, and they love kegs. Ours are flying out the door right now. We’re doing even more keg sales now than before, so in these times, they’re a beacon. Great option in terms of COGS and recyclability. Think about your brand and what that could look like; it might work for some SKUs and not others.

  • Evyn would like to call out Free Flow wines for being super helpful, on top of it, working on any challenges instantly and collaboratively.

  • Kegs = Great growth area for wines right now.

• 40-60% of winery emissions are from packaging and shipping alone. Chateau Montelena cut emissions and costs by 50% by switching from wooden cases to luxury cardboard for their premium bottles. NO ONE has given negative feedback as long as you explain what you’re doing and why.

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Marquee Keynote: Heritage & Horizon: A Mother-Daughter Vision for Wine’s Climate Future with Cathy Corison and Grace Corison Martin

• For anyone unfamiliar with Corison, Cathy arrived in Napa 50 years ago next month. She’d studied biology, took a wine class on a whim, and fell for it. As a biologist, wine fascinates her as it represents a series of living systems that conspire to deliver what’s in the glass. Cathy explains:

  • What’s striking is how different grape growing was in those early days. A “well-farmed” vineyard was a very clean vineyard. Grape growing was about pruning and picking, that’s it. There were incentives for getting sugar up because it was hard to get ripeness. First we killed everything in the soil before planting new. What sustainability means to us now has evolved so much over those 50 years.

  • I made wine for other people for a long time. In the late 80s while working at Chappelet, there was a wine in me that had to come out. It was 20 years before we had a vineyard and then another 5 before we had a winery. I didn’t think I’d ever have either, but our label was mature, we were selling what we were making, there was a downturn in economy, and my husband and I looked at each other: Is this a possible window to find a vineyard? The place on the highway had been for sale for 8 years; it was said to have AXR1 rootstock and the house was condemned. Well. That worked for us, so we put in an offer. It’s a miracle. While we were in escrow, we talked to the guy who’d planted in 1971 and built the house; he told us it was St. George rootstock… and my husband saw the house had good bones. It was more than salvageable.

• Grace explains how, growing up in St. Helena, she wanted to move away as far as possible. Studied theater in NYC, ended up working in hospitality, and saw a different side of the wine industry, realized what she grew up with:

  • In 2020 I decided to come back for a couple weeks, which became a year, and the more time I spent in the winery the more I fell in love with it. I saw what I could bring to the table, how my strong environmental values I grew up with could be applied. I had a different sense of what younger consumers and people in restaurants and retail were thinking and wanted. Greenwashing over social media was really frustrating; I wanted to follow through and get more support for all that we were truly doing.

• Grace oversaw the process of getting CCOF and Napa Green certified. Grace points out how helpful Napa Green was in providing support through this.

• Cathy has not missed a single pick in 38 years!!!!!!! Whoa.

• Notice how much farming changed from 1990s when producers would mimic Bordeaux versus 2022 when temps were over 115°F for better part of 10 days. Forced us to change how we farm.

  • Kronos Vineyard is 54 years old and mostly dry-farmed, organic for 28 years, moving to as much no-till as possible so we can keep them cool enough to stay alive and build the ecosystem there. It’s shocking the difference of temp between till and no-till, makes it a no-brainer.

  • Got a grant from Napa Green to begin sheep grazing. Sheep are great because they can get in to graze before tractors can, when it’s still wet, and get a jump start on weeds.

• Succession Planning: huge challenge around the country of getting young people excited to farm. Cathy had a hunch that it was important her kids not know how desperately she and her husband wanted them to come back. Dad started the conversation casually, explaining that they’d make certain business decisions differently if they were not going to come back…

  • Important to be very cognizant of the legal and business side of succession!

  • Grace now is technically the Assistant Winemaker, but they all are hybrids; she does some vineyard work, picked up the HR, helps with marketing, accounting, payroll. She also got her WSET level 3 and winemaking certification from UCD.

• Cultivate a good team by paying them, focus on education and building team knowledge, give everyone a bike to get around property, and offer paid time for volunteering so we’re all able to give back, show that we share their values.

• Question was asked: How do you see younger generations impacting the industry moving forward?

  • Younger drinkers really want to know:

    • what your practices are (and have you prove it with certification),

    • how you treat your employees,

    • how you’re giving back to the world,

    • what are you doing to help.

  • There’s never been quite so much of a platform to showcase these. People are willing to pay more for it. That will be a bigger impact naturally as more of us [younger generation] come into positions of leadership.

• Family farms can bring a level of excellence that’s really hard to achieve when you scale up too much. Grace said: We started to appreciate when we traveled to other places since there’s so much more generational precedence elsewhere. There’s a continuity that’s special and unique that you can’t “plug in” someone else to. Consistency of values.

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Asking the Critical Questions Forum: Do Consumers Care About Sustainability & Climate Action?

Contacts: Esther Mobley, Wine Critic at the San Francisco Chronicle; Randi Kronthal-Sacco, Member Board of Directors at Globescan and Senior Scholar at NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business; Dom De Ville, Director of Sustainability and Social Impact at The Wine Society; Christian Miller, Director of Research at The Wine Market Council

• Randi opened the conversation with some data to fuel our discussion. The Sustainable Market Share Index looks at actual sustainable product purchases. There’s been a dearth of data on this historically, and there are critical differences between what people say they’ll do in terms of sustainability and what they actually do once it comes down to the price on the shelf in real life.

  • Research has to be based on the actual packaging/labeling/marketing that objectively tells people “this is more sustainable than a conventional product”—so, labels are important and certifications matter here for data collection and measurement.

  • From 2013-2024: increase from 14.6 up to 23.8% market share of these types of branded-sustainable products. In last two years it’s +2.6 ppts. Sustainable products (that are marketed as such) are growing 2.3x faster than conventional products. Consumers are in fact paying the higher price.

  • Adding a message to your packaging about sustainability brings a 44% increase in sales.

• What should you say, exactly? Customers are super ego-centric and want to hear about themselves. Tell them how it benefits their own personal health, wealth or personal world. Appeals to “helping the planet” don’t make as much impact.

  • Messages about “local farmers” are a big driver. Talking about “Regenerative agriculture” did not make consumers care, but talking about local farmers who engage in regenerative ag DID.

  • Sustainable sourcing and locally produced is a BIG driver, especially this year with current administration.

• Where should your messaging be delivered? 1) In-store from the sales people (most effective); 2) on packaging; 3) on signage in-store.

  • nb: this explains why, when I was a retailer, I found that guests basically ALWAYS opted for the products I personally recommended when I talked about sustainability. My personal storytelling/recommendation was the most impactful and way more so than putting a sticker on the bottle. So, producers should continue to engage with their sales reps and tell them all they’re doing!

• Christian Miller of the Wine Market Council: WMC does consumer research including longest running study of US wine consumers. All data is accessible to members. Typical members include industry organizations and corporate clients:

  • Wine consumers as a whole “lean green”—more likely than general population to recycle, buy organic/sustainable food, highly concerned about climate change, chemicals in environment and safety of food supply, believe organic food is better for climate, environment, and is healthier

    • Only about 1/10 people buy organic or sustainably produced. Of these:

      • 41% say that’s because they rarely see these in the marketplace;

      • 32% of them don’t care if wines are made this way;

      • 24% say it’s too expensive;

      • 24% don’t know how they’re defined or why it matters;

      • 22% don’t drink enough to bother looking for them;

      • 14% think they don’t taste as good.

  • Older consumers fall into more of the first two reasons above; younger consumers fall more into the latter.

  • Why do they buy?

    • 66% want to support farmers/wineries that do that;

    • 53% believe these products are better for the earth;

    • 36% believe it’s better for their health;

    • 27% say it makes a statement about values;

    • 23-26% say it tastes better or they are influencing society or economy by purchasing these

  • 51% of consumers say they trust organic or sustainable claims more if the product is certified; just 10% disagree with this

  • 47% say they’d pay more for certified organic/sustainable

• Dom spoke next; he’s from The Wine Society, an online membership-only (?! this very much intrigued me…) retailer in the UK

  • The Wine Society has over 180,000 active members(!), who are increasingly fractured in what they care about and what they expect from TWS. Many factors drive their sales—emotions, thirst for experiences, personal values. Especially experiences!

• Do consumers care about sustainability? Not really. 84% of Wine Society members say they do, but less than 10% will go to any extra effort to buy sustainable products specifically. They essentially say, “I just want to buy what I want to buy; you guys take care of the rest for me.”

  • Dom says that doesn’t matter! Whether they care or not, we’re still going to do those things. It’s up to us to reframe our narrative and connect what we’re doing to what matters to them.

  • Because so many of their consumers are “thirsty for experience,” it brings up an opportunity for TWS to shift that narrative of sustainability from guilt to joy.

    • !!!

    • I LOVE THIS.

    • Dom says, don’t talk about buying sustainable as a sacrifice: “use less, pay more, feel bad.” Because, especially with wine, people don’t want to feel bad! Wine is about relaxing, celebrating, feeling good, being social. JOY drives behavior!

      • Customers do want reassurance that they’re buying from a retailer who has the right values.

    • Make it a perk, not a lecture: draw on our efforts and use it to enhance the experience. Have events that make it fun and highlight the joy. Tell stories with joy.

  • At TWS, in this last extremely trying, downturn year, the only two segments of their sales that grew were those marketed as sustainable and their private label/store brand

    • You don’t sell bag-in-box as “look at this sustainable product;” you sell it as “look how much FUN you can have with this!”

• Esther, who was moderating the conversation, asked “What role does government play in all of this?”

  • Randi: Government plays a huge role; we see that data of buying sustainably changes based on the policies of that government

  • 71% of consumers don’t want companies to rescind their climate policies

  • To get the best and brightest young hires, you have to have sustainability practices, or they won’t want to work for you.

• Someone suggested that we’ve failed as an industry to communicate our efforts enough. A tiny logo is not going to cut it. Visibility of credible, easy to understand sustainability claims is really important. Talk about it more, make it part of your brand’s messaging, do it with joy.

• People think that wine is more of a natural product than it actually is. People are starting to understand that more and want to know that the grapes have been less interfered with. The idea of farmers really being out there and working is resonating. Guests are engaged in that storytelling.

• Don’t get so caught up in the “alcohol as poison” narrative. The actual awareness of things like the World Health Organization’s claims is actually quite low amidst normal consumers. There IS, however, a collective low-grade awareness of wine’s healthfulness over other alcoholic or even sugary beverages. People aren’t fooled by RTDs, etc.

Wine is missing FUN, EXCITEMENT AND ENERGY. We, as insiders, know that wine has those. But we do a lousy job of telling that story. These are all things that could—and should—be wrapped up in a joyful package.

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EMOTIONS / KEY TAKEAWAYS / OVERARCHING FEELINGS:

1. Ummmm amen to “Joy Marketing” and can we say it again and again and again that we need to shift from a guilt narrative to one of joy, from an exclusive luxury narrative to one of fun and excitement? Shameless plug: if you need help telling these stories, CALL ME MAYBE!!!! In my day job, it’s basically all I do ;)

2. Packaging and product transport is the biggest driver of carbon emissions for most wine brands, so looking at engaging our suppliers to ask for more sustainable options is critical to saving our industry. We think/talk so very little about this as an industry, and it’s not super sexy, but it’s so important.

3. Younger drinkers (aka the future, aka the key to success) really want to know

   • what your practices are,

   • how you treat your employees,

   • how you’re giving back to the world,

   • what are you doing to help.

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PLEASE COMMENT! Did you attend Day 5 of Napa RISE?! What did you think? Do you have notes to add to mine (or more proper clarifications and fleshed out data)?

If you didn’t attend, any thoughts or comments back from my cold shower of notes above??

And how are you working on your own brand’s joy marketing narrative?