Listening to the Maker wine team discuss the inefficiencies of bottled wine for many types of wine consumption made me curious about another wine format I’m starting to see more often: wine on tap or kegged wine. Just like with canned and boxed wine, there’s a stigma that wine in kegs must be lower quality. The good stuff should go in bottles. A little reading on the topic quickly shows that assumption is wrong, and now I’m wondering why all restaurants haven’t moved to primarily kegged wine.
Wine quality
The biggest benefit of serving wine from a keg is the freshness and low variability in quality. The wine has less opportunity to be exposed to air or varying temperatures while in transit from the winery to the restaurant. For wines-by-the-glass, kegs also eliminate the possibility that servers will accidentally serve a corked wine or serve from a bottle that’s been open for too long.
Kegs are appropriate for ready-to-drink wines, since the wine won’t age in the stainless steel container. So there’s a tiny percentage of wines intended to be bottle aged that don’t make sense for kegging, but for the 95% of wines that are either meant to be drunk fresh or receive any necessary aging in a barrel or tank before transit, kegs are a perfect option for restaurant sales.
Financial and environmental benefits
Kegged wines save the materials and expense of bottling, corking, and labeling the wine. They also save on shipping expense and emissions by moving wines in a much lighter and more space efficient format. There’s also much lower possibility of "shrinkage" - e.g., wines breaking or getting "lost" in transit. The restaurants save storage space, eliminate any wine wasted from unfinished bottles, and allow their servers to pour and serve wine more quickly. All of these savings can improve margins throughout the supply chain and offer higher quality wine to the consumer at a lower cost.
Kegged wine also gives restaurants the option of offering a taste to their consumers without opening a bottle, which could improve their wine sales and customer satisfaction overall.
Drawback - branding
The only downside of kegged wine is that the restaurant customer doesn’t get to enjoy the ceremony of serving the wine from a bottle or interact with the winery’s bottle and brand directly. Our guests have not emphasized restaurant exposure as a significant driver of their DTC businesses, but I'm sure this varies by brand/restaurant and might represent a real barrier for some wineries transitioning to keg distribution.
Conclusion
I expect to see kegged wines becoming the norm for restaurants over the next several years as people become open to alternative wine formats and restaurants & wineries seek higher margins. Some super-premium wines will likely always be served from a bottled because of their age-worthiness and the attachment to the branded bottle.
I also wonder whether kegged wine will become available to consumers with the same readiness that kegged beer is already. The huge variety in wine SKUs (relative to the market dominance of a few light beers) makes this a trickier proposition, but I would not be surprised if wineries at some point offer small kegs to their DTC customers at a bulk discount the same way that craft breweries currently offer growlers.
This is a fascinating post - I had not thought much about the concept of wines truly in keg-format. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the "wine on tap" phenomenon of having single-serve bottles hooked up into "tap-like" systems (any number of those bars have popped up in big cities, where you can sample a number of wines that are dispensed from tap-like mechanisms). While you make a compelling case for kegged wines, I think while consumers get used to the concept of not having a bottle opened in front of them (or the stigma of large-batch wines), the starting point might be the single-bottle-wine-on-tap systems that have started popping up. It might help consumers become more comfortable with the concept, allowing the restaurant/bar industry to shift more fully to keg-based wines.
ReplyDeleteI too am interested in alternative methods for storing and distributing wines. Glass seems to be used primarily because of tradition, but there are several financial and environmental detriments to using glass. That being said, there are few food inert materials that do not affect the subtleties of wine. I'm curious how the material of the keg effects the aroma and flavor of wine in the long term, and how the effect varies for bottle-aged and non-bottle-aged wines. I have been exploring a parallel space - storing wine in silicone vessels to improve the inefficiencies of bottling wines, specifically for restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc.
ReplyDelete