Margaret River winery Jilyara has recently made a series of changes to its bottles and packaging with a simple goal: to reduce its environmental impact without compromising quality or experience.
Glass bottles are one of the biggest contributors to wine’s environmental footprint. Making them lighter means using fewer raw materials, less energy, and producing fewer emissions, all before the wine even leaves the winery. It also reduces weight in transport, which compounds those benefits across the entire journey from vineyard to table.
For some of Jilyara’s wines, the change is almost invisible, the bottles are slightly slimmer or a touch shorter and still sit comfortably in the same cartons. Nothing about how you buy, carry, or store the wine changes, their lighter-weight bottles just quietly reduce the winery’s CO2 emissions.
For other wines, like their Heath Road Chardonnay, a new bottle shape meant rethinking the packaging suite, with new cartons rolling out from the 2025 vintage. It reflects a broader commitment to doing things better, not just differently.
What’s interesting is what didn’t change. Jilyara chose to keep a sturdier carton material, even though lighter, cheaper options were available. The reason is simple: reliability matters. Wine still needs to arrive in good condition, whether it’s headed to a local bottle shop or travelling further afield. Sustainability, in this case, isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about making considered decisions.
Packaging and transportation account for up to 74% of wine’s greenhouse gas emissions. Among potential solutions, transitioning to lightweight glass presents one of the fastest and most effective ways to reduce emissions (Hirlam, 2023). This relatively straightforward change can cut emissions by approximately 22%.
What Jilyara’s move shows is that meaningful change doesn’t always require a radical overhaul. Sometimes it’s a series of precise, thoughtful adjustments that add up to something significant.
For drinkers, it means you can keep choosing the wines you love, knowing that the industry is starting to rethink how those wines come to you. Not loudly, just better, step by step.
Visit Jilyara to discover more.
