Plastic bottles reshaping the wine trade

How about a bottle of the '02 Chateau Plastique?

The ubiquitous 750-milliliter glass wine bottle is starting to get competition from a plastic upstart, both on retail shelves and at a few restaurants.

The bottles carry a "use by" date -- plastic doesn't provide quite the same seal as glass -- and as such aren't likely to find their way into the cellars of serious wine enthusiasts.

For those who aren't as picky, however, the wine is likely to cost less. And oenophiles say that for wine that hasn't, err, expired, the taste will be the same.

"The wine doesn't know what package it is in," said W.R. Tish, a wine educator who writes a blog called Wine Skewer. "It tastes the same whether it is in a plastic bottle, a plastic bladder inside a box, or a glass."

At AKA a Bistro in St. Helena, in California's Napa Valley wine country, owner Robert Simon will begin pouring a Cabernet Sauvignon out of plastic bottles this month for wine-by-the-glass customers.

Peralta Winery will sell him 1-liter plastic bottles for the same price as a 750-milliliter glass bottle. That means he can sell two extra glasses for about $7 to $8 each. And he won't have to worry about the help breaking bottles.

"My decision will be based on the same factor as any wine -- taste," said Simon, who also owns Bistro 45 in Pasadena. Simon plans to sell the wine there too. "Consumers only care about what's in the glass."

EnVino, a plastic wine bottle venture in Burlingame, Calif., notes that the containers weigh about one-eighth of a typical glass wine bottle and take up 20% less space. That enables winemakers to save fuel by shipping 30% more wine per truck, said Patrick Field, a partner in EnVino.

New Leaf Wine Co. in Napa is testing sales of wine packaged in the plastic EnVino bottles. A small test in Northern California's Nugget supermarket chain last year "did great," said Jason Taormino, president of New Leaf.

He would like to launch it in a broader selection of retailers and is looking for "a large distributor who is willing to work with us on this."

Fred Franzia, owner of Bronco Wine Co., isn't ready to go plastic just yet. He needs high-speed bottling for his $1.99 Charles Shaw wine -- also known as Two Buck Chuck -- and for now that means he needs heavier glass bottles.

"Plastic would just blow off the line. But it will come. They will figure it out," Franzia said.