The first wine I ever tasted came in a paper bag. A neighbor in a pickup truck was driving up the rutted dirt road where both our families lived, and I was walking in the other direction. He stopped his truck, leaned out the window, and asked if I would like a “swig of wine.”
Even though I was not quite a teenager, it was neighborly of him to want to share, and, besides, perhaps he was tired of drinking alone. When you’re a young kid in rural Appalachia in the 1950s, such experiences outside the ordinary came very infrequently and were to be seized.
I said, “Sure,” he gave me a mystery bottle wrapped in the brown paper with only its neck exposed, and the rest is history. I did not see the label, and I did not take notes. That would come later.
Now, here it is 2023. I have yet to drink wine or – as would probably be the case – pour wine from an actual 
paper bottle. But I expect that will come soon.
Shannon Valladarez also hopes so. Valladarez is an executive with the Monterey Wine Company at its King City facility in the Salinas Valley, and Monterey has signed an agreement with England’s Frugalpac to become the first contract winemaking producer to use the Frugalpac’s plastic wine and spirits bottles in the U.S.
“We will put in a new bottling line to handle the bottles without crushing them, which is quite difficult technically,” Valladarez says. “We are quite excited about it.” The Frugal bottles, as they are called, are made of 94% recycled paperboard wrapped around a food-grade pouch that contains the wine. The main advantage – which anyone who has wrestled with cases of wine in a retail shop or in a winery can attest – is a much lighter bottle. At only 3 ounces unfilled, it is several times lighter than glass bottles, especially those “serious wine” statement bottles.
There is also a marketing advantage to the Frugal bottle, as the entire outer part of the bottle is a customized, one-piece, wrap-around label that lends all sorts of design possibilities. “Producers will give their whole design concept to Frugalpac, which will then produce and ship the bottles,” Valladarez says. “They have the option of asking themselves, ‘Do we go crazy or traditional with design?’”
All very good so far, except that to use the Monterey plant, producers will have to have their wine made at the custom crush facility or have the finished wine made at their own wineries and then shipped to King City for final 
bottling. According to Frugalpac, traditional bottling lines cannot at present be easily adapted to handle the Frugal bottle, although that may come in time. According to a Frugalpac representative, only the Bordeaux-bottle shape is available, and the only closure available is screw cap.
As it now stands, the first filled Frugal bottles coming out of the Monterey bottling plant may contain that company’s own proprietary brand, Poppy.
For those who get off on the mathematics of carbon footprinting and other sustainability metrics, the Frugal bottle is a field day of figuring out just how good it is environmentally and how it will itself be recycled.
Frugalpac sent me some sample bottles to get an idea of their look and feel, but, alas, there was no wine in them. (I understand why, of course, but it is a bit like allowing an automotive editor to hop into the latest Porsche with no engine installed.)
So how do I feel about this development? Although I love the traditional glass bottle and cork – which will undoubtedly still be the primary way that wine is packaged and sold long after I’ve been cremated – I also can adapt to changes. Having myself graduated over the years from a portable typewriter to an IBM Selectric to a word processor to a Dell PC, I can’t pontificate too much against the onrush of technology.
But I do wish my long-ago neighbor, George, who died in the 1980s, were still living so that he could take a swig of wine with me from a paper bottle. Although George, in the ethos of hill culture, would still want to conceal it in a brown paper bag.
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