Every few months another headline announces a wine or spirits brand “going sustainable” with a new bottle, and it’s genuinely hard to tell which of these are real commercial rollouts versus one-off marketing trials. Some materials are already on shelves at major retailers; others are still limited to a single bar in Edinburgh or a short trial in one supermarket chain.
This guide sorts the two apart. It covers the packaging materials that wine and spirits brands are actually using right now — paper-fiber bottles, lightweight and recycled glass, aluminum, flat recycled-PET bottles, and refillable glass systems — plus which named brands have shipped them, so you can tell a real material shift from a press release.
Quick Answer
The most commercially real options today are: paper/fiber composite bottles (Frugalpac’s Frugal Bottle, now sold at Target with Collective Good wine), lightweight and higher-recycled-content glass (used industry-wide, including by Aldi UK and premium bottle lines like Berlin Packaging’s Aurelia), flat recycled-PET bottles (Packamama, used by Aldi and The Wine Society), aluminum wine bottles (Aldi UK’s own-label line), and refillable glass programs (Revino in Oregon and Washington). Fully paper spirits bottles are further behind and still trial-stage: Absolut sold a 500ml paper-based bottle for a limited summer run at 22 Tesco stores in Greater Manchester, UK, while Diageo’s Johnnie Walker paper bottle has only been tested behind the bar at a single Edinburgh venue and isn’t for sale at all.
Materials Already on Shelves
Paper-fiber bottles are the furthest along for wine. Frugalpac’s Frugal Bottle is built from mostly recycled paperboard wrapped around a thin food-grade plastic liner, comes in at a fraction of the weight of a glass bottle, and is now produced in California by Monterey Wine Company. It debuted at Target with the Collective Good brand and has since been used by other labels, including Petalscape, with additional retail partners such as 7-Eleven, Whole Foods, and Total Wine reportedly carrying paper-bottled wines. This is the clearest example of a genuinely new packaging material moving from pilot to mainstream retail rather than staying a trade-show novelty.
Lightweight and recycled-content glass is the quieter, larger-scale shift. Glass still dominates wine and spirits packaging, but bottle weight has been trending down for years — Aldi UK, for example, has been steadily cutting the average weight of its glass wine bottles — and many premium glass suppliers now offer lines made with a meaningful share of recycled glass (cullet) and furnaces running on lower-carbon fuel sources like biomethane. If a brand hasn’t switched materials at all, lighter glass is usually the first, least disruptive change they make.
Aluminum is a newer entrant for still wine rather than just canned wine or spirits minis. Aldi UK launched what it billed as the UK’s first supermarket own-brand aluminum wine bottle, at a small fraction of standard glass bottle weight — aluminum recycles indefinitely without quality loss and is far cheaper to ship than glass.
Flat, recycled-PET bottles are a distinct approach from Packamama: a rectangular bottle molded from recycled PET that’s roughly seven times lighter than an average glass bottle and packs more densely on pallets and truck beds, cutting transport-related emissions. It’s already stocked by Aldi and The Wine Society in the UK, and Packamama has also been testing PEF (a plant-derived plastic alternative) as a next step beyond rPET.
Refill Systems, Closures, and What’s Still Just a Trial
Refillable glass is the highest-impact option where the infrastructure exists. Revino runs an end-to-end reusable bottle program in Oregon and Washington: standardized glass bottles are collected through Oregon’s existing BottleDrop deposit-return network, washed, and put back into circulation, with each bottle designed for dozens of reuse cycles before it’s finally recycled. It’s a strong model, but it only works where a collection network is already built — which today means the Pacific Northwest, not a national option.
On closures, natural cork remains a strong environmental choice because cork oak forests are long-lived and harvested without cutting the tree down, and recycling programs like ReCork (backed by Amorim) collect used corks from retail bins and grind them into material for flooring, footwear, and other products rather than sending them to landfill. Screw caps and synthetic closures are widely recyclable too, so the bigger sustainability lever for most brands is usually the bottle material and weight, not the closure alone.
Fully paper spirits bottles are the part of this space that’s easiest to overstate, and the two furthest-along examples show very different levels of commercial reality. Absolut, working with Paboco, sold a single-mould 500ml paper-based vodka bottle (about 57% paper, with the rest a plastic barrier layer) for a limited summer trial at 22 Tesco stores across Greater Manchester, UK — a real retail sale, but a short, geographically narrow one, not a national listing. Diageo’s Johnnie Walker paper bottle trial, by contrast, ran only behind the bar at a single venue, the Johnnie Walker Princes Street 1820 bar in Edinburgh, for about three weeks in autumn 2024, and the bottles were not sold to the public at all. Treat any spirits ‘paper bottle’ claim as a pilot until you see it for sale broadly, not just at one venue or one store cluster.
Tips / Common Mistakes
Don’t assume ‘paper bottle’ means plastic-free — nearly all current paper wine and spirits bottles use a thin plastic or bio-based film liner to hold liquid, so they’re a reduction in plastic and glass use, not an elimination of it. Check whether a material claim is a full commercial launch (Frugalpac/Target, Packamama/Aldi, Aldi’s aluminum line) or a time-boxed trial at one venue or a handful of stores (Absolut’s Tesco trial, Diageo’s Edinburgh bar test) — the distinction matters a lot for how confidently you can cite it. If you’re a brand evaluating options, weigh shipping weight and breakage risk (where paper, aluminum, and flat rPET bottles win) against consumer perception and shelf presence (where glass still often wins), and check whether a refill or take-back system is realistically available in your distribution region before promising one. Finally, avoid quoting single-source carbon-reduction percentages as universal facts — they usually apply to one specific bottle-to-bottle comparison run by the packaging maker, not the category as a whole.
Explore more: More sustainability coverage.
Sustainable Wine and Spirits Packaging FAQs
Are paper wine bottles actually recyclable?
Most current paper wine bottles, like Frugalpac’s Frugal Bottle, use a separable plastic liner inside a paperboard shell, so recyclability depends on local facilities being able to separate the two components — check your municipal program rather than assuming full curbside recyclability.
Is aluminum more sustainable than glass for wine?
Aluminum is significantly lighter to ship and recycles repeatedly without losing quality, which is why Aldi UK and others have launched aluminum wine bottles, but glass remains widely recyclable too — the biggest practical gain from aluminum is reduced transport weight and emissions, not a fundamentally different recycling story.
Can I buy spirits in a paper bottle yet?
Only in narrow windows so far. Absolut sold a paper-based vodka bottle for a limited summer trial at 22 Tesco stores in Greater Manchester, UK, and Diageo has tested a Johnnie Walker paper bottle behind the bar at one Edinburgh venue without offering it for sale — neither is a general retail product yet. Wine paper bottles like Frugalpac’s are further along commercially, with year-round listings at retailers such as Target.
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Photo by Luke Heibert on Unsplash.