While stocking the house for an evening of board games, I hit up the wine aisle of our local grocery store and was intrigued by a wine display with an "Eco-Glass" label. What is this Eco-Glass?

The wine on display in the Eco-Glass boxes was Bay Bridge, which is pretty inexpensive and tastes pretty good for the price point. That made me even more curious, since cheap products usually don't go for something green unless it saves the company money to boot.

It turns out that Eco-Glass wine bottles are made using 25% less glass, which means fewer materials to make them and a lighter product that takes less energy to ship. Since most folks have a tough time finding local wine, there tends to be a pretty hefty carbon footprint associated with shipping those bottles all over the world. A 25% reduction in the bottle's weight is nothing to sneeze at when you consider how many wine bottles we ship each year. The lighter bottle probably saves the companies quite a bit in shipping costs, too.

But What About the Wine?

While Eco-Glass seems like a great step toward more sustainable wine, I do wonder how significant that lighter bottle is compared with the impact of producing the wine itself. Is wine in an eco bottle still green if it's tainted with pesticide residue? And what about the workers who are picking those grapes?

What do you guys think? Would you be more likely to buy wine in Eco-Glass, or are there other factors that go into your wine buying decisions?