WINE
Welcome to our wine online store. We strive to be the most sustainable wine delivery Hong Kong service, but also the best curated. The Green Bottle Co team surveyed the organic wine Hong Kong scene and realised that whilst there were a lot of wine online Hong Kong stores â none were rewarding customers for making better choices.
Choosing organic wine online in Hong Kong is better for the planet and you can go one step further by selecting the Green Bottle Co as your wine online store. We are on a mission to help customers make better choices by providing transparency and education via our wine online store, helping to reduce your carbon footprint during and enjoy better, more sustainable products through our wine delivery.
Whatâs the difference between Organic & Natural Wine?
Natural Wine is the holy grail of modern organic winemaking and is sourced from sustainable, organic, or biodynamic vineyards. It is made with minimal intervention at both the growing and production phase. The "perfect" Natural Wine would be made with organically grown grapes and nothing else. Yeast needed for fermentation would be naturally occurring or "native" to the vines and not sourced from a commercial yeast producer.
Organic wine on the other hand is a label used to denote that the grapes have been organically grown â meaning the wine is free of chemical and pesticide residues â which is much kinder to the environment. You could say that Natural winemaking supports and enhances the biodiversity of the soil and the environment - a force for good. Organic wine is kinder to the environment by removing chemicals and pesticides from the process of winemaking - organic wine in Hong Kong does "less harm".
Did you know that there are more than 72 additives legally allowed in the winemaking process, used to control aroma, flavour and texture in modern viticulture? Conversely, natural wine contains no additives, except for a super small dose of sulfites, which are a by-product of fermentation and used as a preservative. Whilst all wine will contain sulfites, conventional wine (with all those additives) typically allows for up to 350 parts per million (in the U.S.) compared with about 20 parts per million in natural wine.
The Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association has provided the definition of "a spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, gardens, food production and nutrition." biodynamic wine requires farmers to treat the vineyard as a single organism. By taking chemical fertilisers and pesticides out of the equation, a vineyard is organic, but biodynamic wine goes a step further by incorporating the idea of a self-sustaining system, where each part of the vineyard contributes to the next. The system is based on the work of Rudolf Steinerer, an Austrian who explained that if there was disease in the plants or animals on a farm, it was a symptom of problems with the whole organism.
More characteristics of biodynamic farming include using only natural materials, soils, and composts to sustain the vineyard. Animals are essential within the system to live on the soil and help fertilise it. Most commonly horses, sheep and ducks are used â their manure creates a rich, fertile environment for the vines to grow. For certification farms most show proof of regeneration, sustainability is not enough. This means a lot if you are trying to shop for wine online in Hong Kong sustainably, because biodynamic farmers are leaving the land and the environment in better shape than they found it for future generations.
If you are just casually shopping for wine online in Hong Kong, it may sound a bit happy-clappy, but there the governing body (Demeter) that certifies wine as biodynamic is very comprehensive and organised. More and more research is being published to support the benefits of biodynamic winemaking and many of the world's top wine estates now follow biodynamic wine viticulture.
Wine delivery and wine online stores are so common these days, that even wineries are seeing a much larger portion of their sales coming through their own direct-to-consumer wine online store - winery revenue jumped to 16.2 percent in 2020, up from 8.6 percent in 2018. You may not be able to do much about the carbon footprint of the âfinal mileâ of your wine, i.e. from the wine online store to your door, but you can definitely think about the journey of the wine delivery before it gets to Hong Kong.
Sadly, there are no known vineyards in Hong Kong, which means we canât buy locally made organic wine in Hong Kong. However, there are thousands of vineyards in Australia and Asia, and guess what the carbon footprint of the wine delivery to Hong Kong from these vineyards is much less than the footprint of vineyards in Europe, North or South America. For example, a wine delivery from Bordeaux in France results in twice the carbon emissions than that of a wine delivery from Adelaide in Australia.
A 2016 study from UCLA published in the Journal of Wine Economics concluded that organic wine tastes better, as per the scores of leading wine critics. The authors analysed the scores and reviews of over 74,000 Californian wines (1998 to 2009 vintages) across three separate magazines: Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, and Wine Enthusiast. They concluded that âeco-certifiedâ or organic wines received higher scores than non-organic wines and that the vocabulary used in the reviews was more positive.
It is worth mentioning sulfites here. In simple terms, sulfites help preserve wine and slow down chemical reactions, which in turn slows down the process of a wine going âbadâ. Organic wine in the US is not allowed to contain sulfites. And along with the US, Australia requires sulfite content to be labeled on wine bottles. There is a workaround, which allows producers to label their wine as âmade with Organically grown grapes". This loophole allows sulfites to be added at the winery but prevents the wine from being labeled as fully organic.
As a consequence, true organic wine (without preservatives) has maybe earned a bad reputation over the years, as bottles may go bad quickly once opened or may go bad before opening if left for a long time. This is starting to change though as winemakers get more and more skilled at producing organic wine without sulfites.
After the wine delivery, if you store your organic wine carefully and consume it on the same day that it is opened, it should taste better than non-organic wine.
Green Bottle Coâs wine delivery Hong Kong service is unique in two ways. Firstly, the wine delivery will be packed in Flexi-HexÂź - a sustainable packaging solution for wine delivery that provides the same or better protection than traditional bottle packaging such as polyethylene or polystyrene and yet is paper-based, plastic free, biodegradable, recyclable and reusable.
Secondly, our wine online store will calculate the carbon emissions that will be generated by your wine delivery in Hong Kong, and Green Bottle Co will make it a Carbon Neutral transaction. Buying wine online in Hong Kong has never been more sustainable.
Eco-Packaging has only recently come into focus in the last ten or twenty years. Before that, there was no consideration wine producers, wine retailers or wine online stores about the type of packaging they used. People simply didnât think about whether the plastic materials or non-biodegradable materials were harmful to the environment. Thankfully education about climate change and research into ways to combat it have proliferated in recent years, and now we can apply that knowledge and those learnings to even wine online delivery in Hong Kong.
Flexi-Hex is from the UK, was founded by a group of surfers (believe it or not, there are surfers in the UK!) - and they wanted to be able to ship their surfboards (probably to warmer countries) without having any impact on the environment. One thing led to another, and a range of products was born, using patented technology to protect all sorts of items from surf boards to wine bottles.
Wine delivery is one of the most common deliveries seen around the world, with orders coming via wine online stores, but also a variety of channels, for example supermarket home wine delivery. The Flexi-Hex solution of plastic-free packaging is particularly smart, as it is a one-size fits all solution. It doesnât matter if the bottle is for, and it can be vodka or organic wine â Flexi Hex can protect the bottle.
Flexi-Hex sleevesâ unique honeycomb designs are made from more than 85% recycled paper pulp and are fully recyclable, compostable, and biodegradable. Not only that, but any adhesives are also PVA water-based, meaning no plastic in the glue or anywhere else. Flexi Hex is compact, did you know that amount of bubble wrap required for 9000 wine bottles, fits on 5 shipping pallets. Whilst just one pallet of Flexi-Hex sleeves can protect the same number of bottles. Surely the perfect solution for wine delivery in Hong Kong.