Packaging matters, no matter what the industry.

Recently, in fact as recent as about five minutes before I started writing this, I received something about how wine packaging is undergoing change. South Africa has launched a new campaign about how their new light-weight bottles would help the economy, environment and the people of the world in general. The new bottles with screw-cap will weigh 350 grams, about 150 grams lighter than previous versions. Sure it doesn't sound as revolutionary and won't do for the wine industry what the bikini did to the gown-manufacturing industry, but every gram counts.

The idea of packaging change is not to make wine more attractive, but to reduce the carbon footprint of South African wine exports as a whole. I am glad to see that they have addressed an issue that is so pertinent (and yet so flagrantly disregarded) in the wine industry. People make bottles that weigh you down even before you have had a chance to sip them. The logic for this is simple: consumers are usually willing to pay more for a bottle that weighs more. Which then proves that wines may have been made in the West, but it was definitely some shrewd north Indian businessman who devised the bottles to sell them in.

But apart from this, there is another change in the whole way wine is being presented. For example, I have with me a plastic bottle of a Beaujolais-Villages called Picnic and I assure you the wine is sippable. But to think that it came out of a plastic bottle whose dual claim to fame is that it is recyclable and odour-free doesn't seem to sit right with wines.

So you have the ever-famous Bag-in-Box or BiB which is supposed to belong in shady college dorm-rooms where youngsters get drunk on the cheapest wine ever made and then record their resulting creativity in the form of embarrassing videos that make their way to some college-humour website and gets a million hits in a month, thereby guaranteeing them their promised 15-minutes. Yes, I know...digressing!!!

Back again, BiBs for long, were used to sell wine that was too shameful to be seen in public. But today people are realising just how advanced this vacuum packing system is compared to a bottle with a bark stuck in its neck. Today some very fine wine is packed in them and sold happily to people who are able to leave their inhibitions at home. In return they drink better wine at a lower price and for longer as it doesn't spoil so easily.

Come to think of it, I think it's how we package our brains, our thresholds and our reservations, that makes all the difference. Water is preferred in recyclable plastic bottles with screw caps. Medicines would never be bought if they came with a "could-have-gone-off" disclaimer. Spices are preferred vacuum packed and sealed, as also most foods and meats. Why then do we get so primitive with wine?

You tell me.