Ontario vineyard offers wine in reused bottles cleaned by Kitchener company

A vineyard in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., has bottled a 2021 field blend wine in reused bottles for the first time.

Stratus Vineyards collaborated on the intiative with Circulr in Kitchener, Ont., a company that provides reusable packaging like jars for stores and other retailers.

Stratus gathered used wine bottles from customers and collected bottles from the winery's tasting room, then gave them to Circulr to figure out how to properly process them so they could be used again.

"This has never really been done before in Ontario," Circulr co-founder Tyler De Sousa said in an interview on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition.

"We had conversations, I think over two years ago now, about how we wanted to do this and it was something we wanted to pursue."

Stratus collected 50 cases of bottles for Circulr to test. They had to figure out what could be done with the screw caps, how to properly wash and sanitize the bottles and how to remove the labels.

"The labels that are on there ... they've sort of been built up over years and years to be bulletproof pretty much to make sure that they don't come off after a decade or two of aging. So it's a long process to get the labels off," he said.

"Once the label's off, the hard part is done."

WATCH | Ontario winery to resuse bottles:

Currently in Ontario wine bottles are recycled through blue bin systems or by people who return them to The Beer Store, which runs a recycling program.

The practice of reusing wine bottles is more popular in Europe. The group Zero Waste Europe reported in 2021 that as part of a reWINE case study, 82,239 glass bottles were reused by wineries, which saved an estimated 171,058 tonnes of CO2, which is the equivalent to the amount of emissions a car would produce while travelling 11 times around the world.

The case study was done in Spain by the company Rezero between 2016 and 2020 and involved 99 stakeholders, from wineries to stores and restaurants and municipal waste collection points.

Marta Beltran, project director at Rezero, said in the 2021 release about the case study that the project "clearly shows the positive impact of wine bottle reuse on climate change mitigation and is key for the transition of the sector towards zero waste."

But, Beltran added, in order to make wine bottle reuse successful there would need to be an investment in the tools to make it happen and government regulations would need to be in place.