The ones they order from Saverglass’ facility in Mexico are 600 grams. Revino’s will be 495 grams. They plan to start using Revino bottles for a few select wines they sell in the testing room, but hope to go big as Revino grows. “It would be our goal that 100% of our glass will be in refillable,” Sweat says. Pat Dudley at Bethel Heights Vineyard, who is a co-founder of the Oregon Oak Accord (her husband, Ted, founded the LIVE Certification), is also switching to Revino, at least for four wines the winery serves exclusively in the tasting room. She says the concept has been proposed in the Valley before but the hurdles have thus far been insurmountable. “I hate to say this, but I think one of the main holdups has been the attachment of winemakers to the bottle styles,” she says. The other challenge is re-collecting the bottles. Both of those would be solved by Revino. When Revino is up and running this spring, it’ll have regular collection routes through the Willamette Valley. The company, which already has its first van, will collect empty Revino bottles from tasting rooms and take them to a facility to wash them. (O’Hern and Rack will store the bottles at a warehouse until their wash facility is up and running.) Wineries would receive a credit on future glass purchases for each bottle returned through Revino’s pick-up route. The duo estimates that a case of Revino bottles will cost $12. O’Hern and Rack are also in discussions with OBRC to include Revino bottles in the OBRC return system. If that happens, then any consumer could return their Revino bottle to an OBRC redemption center, and OBRC would sort them out from other bottles. Revino would then pick up the bottles from OBRC and send them to their own facility for cleaning. The second hurdle—wine bottle style—is something that O’Hern and Rack are working on. They plan to have one style initially: an antique green Burgundy bottle (both cork and screw-cap finishes). But depending on interest from the Finger Lakes wine region and other areas they’re in talks with, they may do a Bordeaux-style bottle or a riesling bottle after that. A sparkling-wine bottle may even be on the horizon. “We’ll let the market and winery partners influence our decisions,” Rack says. Ultimately, if all goes well in Oregon, they hope to have multiple facilities across the country so that eventually wineries could use refillable Revino bottles even for their far-flung wine-club sales. Dudley thinks Oregon winemakers are finally ready to embrace this refillable program and notes that in Europe, these programs have been in place for a long time. “I think there has been enough push in that direction [sustainability] that winemakers are starting to feel obliged to give up that silliness about the bottle weight and the bottle shape,” Dudley says. “Let your label be your brand!” Many prestige Willamette Valley brands, in addition to Bethel Heights and Winderlea, have committed to ordering Revino bottles including Adelsheim, Brick House, Brooks, Cameron, Illahe, Walter Scott and Soter. So far 56 winemakers from up and down the Willamette Valley have signed on with 60+ more showing interest. O’Hern, whose mom is Dutch, grew up regularly visiting Holland, where no one thinks twice about bringing their reusable glass bottles back to the store. “It’s just a way of life over there. You put it back in the crate, bring it back to the shop and they wash it and reuse it,” says O’Hern, who got his MBA at George Fox University and has worked in digital marketing education and as a management consultant. Rack was the operations manager and assistant winemaker at Coopers Hall, an urban winery and wine bar that has exclusively put wine in kegs since it opened in 2014. (Thanks to Rack, it also joined the OBRC refillable program in 2019 with Coopers Hall wines.) With glass prices continuing to rise, using the same wine bottle over and over again also makes financial sense for wineries. “If you think about it, the glass wine bottle has value already,” says Rack. “We wash our glassware, we wash our wine glasses. We pay a lot of money for them. Pint glasses at a restaurant or wine glasses are used hundreds of times! These bottles that don’t break when you throw them in the trash because they’re so heavy and thick—we throw them away. And they’re gone. There’s value there!” Keenan O’Hern, left, and Adam Rack, the founders of Revino bottles, show prototype bottles at Coopers Hall in Southeast Portland. From left to right: The prototypes for Revino’s refillable screwcap and cork bottles; refillable (“multiuse”) bottle; and an OBRC BottleDrop refillable bottle 30
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