An inconvenient truth? Chris Jordan’s photos and wine consumption statistics

We like drinking wine. We like drinking wine a lot. Of course we put all our empty bottles into our blue recycling bin, and assume that it gets carted off to a plant where the glass will be re-used in some form or another. But what about all those bottles that don’t get recycled? We have relatives who live in St. Louis, and they have to pay extra for curbside recycling, hiring a private contractor since the city doesn’t offer such services. Therefore, they don’t recycle. And they drink plenty of wine (and soda, and water).

Dr. Vino tried to address the issue of the carbon footprint of wine-drinking a little while back, by giving up drinking bottled water for a month. We applaud such efforts, and do our best to bring our own reusable 32 oz. water bottles to the gym (though we do fill these bottles from a 5 gallon Arrowhead dispenser rather than tap water). However, these efforts must surely amount to a tiny dent in what is a huge problem.

We don’t want to get too preachy here. But we did want to raise this issue, which we’ve been thinking about ever since looking at the new photographs from an artist we love, Chris Jordan. Chris’s images in the past have dealt with industrial American landscapes, mountains of discarded cell phones, heaps of broken glass, empty shipping containers. His newest series, called “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” takes this one step further, contextualizing these mounds of disposables with statistics that imbue the quite orderly and beautiful images with horrifying meaning.

Take a peek at this photograph, and then imagine what the pile filled with wine bottles rather than water and soda.

Plastic Bottles, 2007
60×120″
Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

Now, if the above looks a little bit too much like a blur, take a peek at a detail from the photo:

And let’s take it one step further:

Keep in mind, the above photograph is ten feet long. TEN feet. And that it represents 2 million bottles for every five minutes! This puts Dr. Vino’s experiment in a whole new context.

We don’t really know what to say, or what to do. Wine consumption in the US is rising, and that’s a good thing for our business, and a good thing for wine culture. in 2004, Americans were already consuming 3.25 billion bottles of wine a year; but still, only 1 in 7 adults drinks wine regularly, and therefore there remains tremendous room for growth. Our first instinct is to feel guilty, since we realize that our business basically amounts to proselytizing that people should drink more wine and therefore create more waste in the form of glass bottles.

But we’ve done the math, and the numbers are very much in wine’s favor. In 2004, if Americans drank 270 million cases of wine a year, they drank approximately 9 million bottles a day, 375,000 bottles an hour, or 6,250 bottles a minute. Compared to the 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes, wine clocks in at about 31,250 every five minutes. Even with growth in the double digits over the last few years, we’re still talking under 50,000 bottles every five minutes, or 2.5% of the plastic bottle photograph. Instead of being ten feet long, an equivalent wine bottle photograph would be merely 3 inches long.

So while we continue to worry and ponder what to do about the 2 million bottles discarded every five minutes, the fifteen million sheets of office paper used every five minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones that are retired every day, we think we’ve figured out the perfect thing to do to ease our stress: open a bottle of locally produced California wine (small carbon footprint!), drink a few glasses, and at least feel comfortable with the fact that we’re part of a community that, although growing, is not yet consuming at the alarming rate worthy of one of Chris Jordan’s masterful photographs.

And we think we’ll switch from that Arrowhead cooler to filtered tap water when filling our reusable water bottles. Please consider buying your own.

what's all this, then?

Domaine 547 is a community meant for people who want to come along with us on our journey, as we learn about the world of wine.

It’s a point of view, that says wine need not be put on a pedestal or saved for special occasions, but should instead be a part of everyday life—because life is just that much better with a glass of wine in your hand (unless, of course, you are an alcoholic or under the age of 21).

Domaine 547 is a virtual tour guide, a way for all of us to travel the globe, even when our wallets and schedules might not permit physically doing so.

Mostly, it’s a place without pretensions, where we can drink, learn, communicate, and probably drink some more. And of course, there is no snobbery or attitude allowed.

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