Revino Aims to Reduce Wine Industry’s Carbon Footprint

When someone buys a bottle of wine, they’re usually thinking about the liquid inside.

Keenan O’Hern and Adam Rack were thinking about the glass that makes the bottle. More specifically, why does the American wine industry treat a strong, reusable material like a single-use item?

“There are places all across Europe that are already using reusable bottles and have been for a long time,” O’Hern said. “Yet here, we’re still using single-use glass bottles and then tossing them into our glass recycling curbside bins. When we started asking around, there didn’t seem to be a reason why besides ‘this is the way we do it.’ So we decided to change that conversation.”

In 2020, O’Hern started working on a project he’d eventually call Revino. The idea was not only to create a sturdy, refillable glass wine bottle that was easy for wineries to adopt but also to provide the facilities, infrastructure, and operations to collect, clean, sanitize, and redistribute the bottles back into the ecosystem. Revino partners with wineries around the state (and plans to expand to more states) to collect used bottles, which repeat the process and head back to the market.

The goal was to reduce the number of glass bottles in the waste cycle—roughly 110 million bottles per day, according to the World Economic Forum, only about a third of which are recycled.

“That number is just so huge and obscure that I don’t think people can really fathom what that means,” O’Hern said. “If you lined up those bottles side by side, you could cross the entire United States daily.”

Co-founder Adam Rack was working for Coopers Hall Winery—a winery committed to kegging wine as an eco-friendly solution—as an assistant winemaker when, in 2022, he had O’Hern as a guest on the Coopers Hall Winery podcast, “Winesplained,” which explored sustainability in the wine industry.

During the conversation, Rack became interested in helping pursue the idea and would provide a connection to the wine industry.

“We weren’t coming up with a brand new idea,” O’Hern said. “We took what was the standard for decades—centuries—and brought it up to modern standards. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but modernizing the wheel.”

The Revino Bottle 750-milliliter bottle was developed with input from 75 wineries to fit a broad set of needs and requirements while also reducing potential breakpoints, leading to a bottle that can be refilled up to 50 times. This process of reuse over recycling (or throwing away) cuts carbon emissions up to 85% compared to single-use bottles. So far, 60 wineries have jumped on board to use Revino bottles.

“The largest contributor to the carbon footprint of wine is the production and transportation of glass bottles,” said Jessica Mozeico, co-founder of Et Fille Wines in Newberg. “The shift to reusable wine bottles is estimated to reduce carbon emissions by 85%, so trying it was a no-brainer.”

Et Fille Wines is a B-Corp, which requires a certain level of commitment to sustainability. For years, they used a locally produced eco-lightweight bottle to help reduce the shipping weight and carbon cost of shipping heavy glass bottles.

But in a closed ecosystem, reusing bottles would amplify their ecological efforts. Et Fille Wines was one of the first wineries to use Revino bottles, which they filled with their spring lineup—2023 Willamette Valley Chardonnay, Viognier, White Pinot, and Gamay.

“I’m so excited about what the Revino team has brought to life,” Mozeico said. “It’s a complex system to produce, collect empties, and sanitize bottles for reuse, and they are making it happen in a closed-loop system. We’re always looking for ways to minimize the carbon footprint of our activities, and this is one way that we can all make a difference.”

While Revino is headquartered in Newberg, its bottles have extended far beyond Yamhill County. Revino has wineries all across the Willamette Valley, from Portland to Eugene, east to Hood River and Bend, and as far south as the Applegate Valley in Southern Oregon.

“At the time, I was exploring the creation of a custom, ultra-lightweight bottle made in Oregon,” said Herb Quady of Quady North Winery in Jacksonville, Oregon. “When I learned about Revino, I thought it was a much better approach to reducing the carbon footprint than what I was looking at, so I learned more.”

Quady learned about Revino from co-founder Rack before Rack joined O’Hern at Revino when he was at Coopers Hall. Quady, a board member of the LIVE organization—a third-party sustainable winegrowing certification that ensures wineries are operating in a way that supports soil health, biodiversity, pesticide reduction, conservation, and workers’ rights—knew that the largest source of carbon emissions from wineries came from the glass bottles.

The Revino bottle, he said, was the only way he could significantly reduce the footprint associated with packaging.

“There are only so many ways that we can make a meaningful difference, and this is one of them,” Quady said. “I’m proud to be an early adopter, and I am working to spread the word as much as possible.”

Quady North also used Revino bottles in a recent production run, which Quady estimates to be about a third of the winery’s production—the first of which, a 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, is released this month.

Revino estimates 60,000 cases of wine will be bottled with Revino bottles by the end of the season in August. Reusing those bottles just three times (of the maximum 50) saves almost 2 million pounds of CO2; for scale, an adult tree absorbs 48 pounds of CO2 per year, according to the National Arbor Day Foundation.

The company is already working on more molds—a Bordeaux mold is well on its way for California and Washington wineries—and developing infrastructure plans to serve wineries outside of Oregon.

For winery owners like Quady and Mozeico, Revino’s founding was the first step in a larger chain of events to improve winery packaging sustainability. Next comes consumer education and understanding why supporting reusable glass matters. Retailers who support the mission by selling and highlighting wines sold in reusable glass. Government agencies incentivizing the use and return of reusable glass.

“Education is really this next big step,” O’Hern said. “We need everyone to do their part to participate and make this work. It’s reframing how we think about wine packaging, and that’s a hard thing, but a good—and kind of necessary—thing.”

Learn more about Revino’s mission at its website and stay up to date with wineries carrying Revino bottles on their social media pages.