For New Wine, Vintage Bottles: Start-Up Cleans, Recycles Empties Once Discarded or Melted Down; an Environmental 'No-Brainer'

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The business plan of Wine Bottle Renew, a start-up in Napa, has its roots in milk deliveries that once were standard across the U.S.

The company wants to revive the practice of washing and refilling used glass wine bottles. Chief Executive Bruce Stephens said he hopes to persuade the country's wineries that adopting an old idea can be good forbusiness.

"You take a bottle and you empty the bottle, and my God, why would that only be a one-time bottle?" Mr. Stephens said. "We used to wash bottles all the time, whether it was wine bottles, beer bottles or Coke bottles."

Reusing a wine bottle emits 95% less carbon than recycling one, the company says, since recycled winebottles must be melted down and re-formed before they enter the market again. More than half of the carbon dioxide produced from locally made-and-consumed wine comes from manufacturing and transporting empty glass bottles, estimates Tyler Colman, an instructor at New York University and a wine writer.

A few California wineries are already trying to reduce their use of one-time bottles. Among them, Santa Cruz's Sones Cellars sells a petite syrah in reusable bottles, while the Natural Process Alliance winery in Santa Rosa distributes much of its wine in reusable stainless steel canteens.

But Wine Bottle Renew hopes to tap a broader market. About 150 wineries are using the service, which the company marketed to vintners before launching the bottle-washing operation in February, Mr. Stephens said. The company has washed and shipped more than one million bottles to wineries. The reused bottles typically cost 10% less than new ones.

Currently, the company collects most of its empties from winery tasting rooms. In the future, Mr. Stephens hopes to pick up used bottles from restaurants.

Most of the customers are smaller wineries, but a few bigger ones have taken note. Though they aren't using Wine Bottle Renew's washed bottles yet, both Kendall Jackson and Sutter Home have invested in the start-up.

"We're happy to support this project because it does have potential," said Robert Boller, Kendall Jackson's vice president of sustainability. While reusing wine bottles is much more common in Europe "it's worthwhile to see if we can't move the needle forward here," he said. He declined to say how much his company has invested in Wine Bottle Renew.

Wine Bottle Renew raised about $3.5 million this year, from wineries as well as companies that recycle and ship glass bottles, and hopes to raise $1.5 million more in the short term. Mr. Stephens declined to project how much revenue the company would generate this year, but said he hoped it would be profitable by year end.

The last decade has seen many California wineries move to reduce their environmental impact, according to the nonprofit California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. Many now use irrigation systems that save water, and there has been widespread implementation of natural pest-management practices that limit the use of pesticides, said CSWA Executive Director Allison Jordan.

Wine Bottle Renew says it operates the country's only wine bottle washing facility. In the 1990s, several California companies entered the business, but were plagued with technological problems.

Older mechanized bottle-washing systems had trouble removing wine labels, which are attached with a particularly strong adhesive to prevent them from peeling off in ice buckets. And with the emphasis on sterilization in the winemaking process, the fear of less-than-perfect bottles made producers wary.

John Giannini, a lecturer and winemaker at California State University, Fresno's Viticulture and Enology Department, said he supports the idea of washing and reusing bottles, but would like to know more about the sanitation process. "Until I see some research on it that says, 'Yes, OK, this glass is perfect,' I'm not going to use it" at Fresno State's vineyards, Mr. Giannini said.

Bottle-washing technology has improved in recent years, Mr. Stephens said, including computerized systems than can sort bottles by shape and size and machines that can de-label a bottle before it is washed. Mr. Stephens said the company's rewashed bottles often are cleaner than new bottles because they were santized more recently.

Still, persuading an industry to adopt a new method is difficult, said Bill Dodd, Wine Bottle Renew's president and a three-term Napa County supervisor. "Change does not come very easily in the wine business," Mr. Dodd said.

Michael Mondavi, son of famed Napa winemaker Robert Mondavi, said he remembers collecting used winebottles from tasting rooms as a teenager 40 years ago to ship to washing plants.

"It was great, and then we got in the 'use and abuse' era of our lives and those companies went out of business," Mr. Mondavi said. His Michael Mondavi Family Estates winery uses washed bottles from WineBottle Renew. The amount of energy saved by washing bottles instead of recycling them to be melted down, he said, makes reuse a "no brainer."