Is Oregon Wine Suffering From Glass Bottle Shortages?
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August 22, 2023"This makes the Pacific Northwest market the second largest producer of wine products in the United States. "
A recent article posted by Wine Magazine titled, For Winemakers, Glass Bottles Are the Latest Supply Chain Headache, looked at an issue plaguing the wine industry with seemingly no end in sight, the wine bottle supply chain crisis. Wine is one of the fastest-growing industries in Oregon showing a 9% growth rate year over year. Oregon and Washington are currently home to over 16% of all wine producers in the United States, equating to 1,695 wineries with a total annual net production of 230 million bottles. This makes the Pacific Northwest market the second largest producer of wine products in the United States.
Since the pandemic began, supply chain issues have impacted the availability of everything, for wineries, the current bottleneck is the bottles themselves. Several factors compounded to create this issue. More wineries are purchasing glass bottles and in larger amounts than before. They are buying them further in advance, too. While supply has not decreased per se, availability is constricted by international shipping delays. “Tariffs levied on Chinese glass by the Trump administration in 2018 continue to reverberate. When those tariffs escalated to 25% in 2019, some larger wineries that sourced glass from China subsequently switched to domestic glass. That muscled out smaller producers, some of whom subsequently switched to international glass.” (Sullivan, 2022) This issue became even more exacerbated by the supply chain crisis which choked the prices even higher between 2020 and 2022. As 2022 progresses we’re seeing higher inflation and continued shortages of all foreign supply but little domestic response.
68% of Wineries' Carbon Footprint Comes From Packaging and Transportation
There’s also the carbon footprint of transportation to take into account. While it would be difficult to estimate how much a wine bottle’s footprint has ballooned amid the logistical shipping chaos caused by the pandemic, even during normal times, about 68 percent of a wine’s carbon footprint comes from packaging and transportation, climate scientist Dr. Richard Smart has estimated. In addition, currently 4.8 billion bottles of wine are consumed in the US alone each year, 60% of which end up in landfills, numbering just about 2.88 billion bottles. Wineries are feeling the pressure to respond to this apparent climate issue to reduce their emissions but to also appeal to a new environmentally aware and purpose driven consumer. “Many winemakers and distributors have been trying to lower wine’s carbon footprint for years, but amid shortages, extreme weather, and ever-more dire predictions about climate change, many are tackling these issues with increasing urgency, in both large and small ways.”
Wineries across the country are looking at diverse solutions ranging from reducing the weight of their glass, setting up micro warehouse supply chains, moving to reusable glass bottles, reducing bottle shapes and colors to simply domestic ordering and many others. The difficulty will be in the sustainability of these changes and whether or not the industry can move as a whole. With low demand for wine in millennial and Gen Z markets the market is ripe to change but it is forced to make changes immediately for the climate issues and supply chain issues that plague the industry.
References
- Sullivan, S. P. (2022, February 8). For winemakers, glass bottles are the latest supply chain headache. Wine Enthusiast. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.winemag.com/2022/02/09/supply-chain-wine-bottles/
