Winelab

WINELAB

Drinking Responsibly

WineLab operates an islandwide closed-loop recycling system for litres of wine and cocktails it distributes, reducing the carbon footprint of those products by 45 per cent

WineLab was founded in 2013 by Ronan Farrell, a graduate of the UC Davis Winemaking Certificate Programme with 15 years’ experience in the Irish wine trade and Richie Byrne, a draught technical services manager with over 20 years’ experience in Ireland.

WineLab’s wine-on-tap technology supplies hermetically sealed litres of wine (and increasingly, cocktails), which can be served by the glass from taps, to the bar and restaurant trade. The solution offers benefits both for those in the hospitality business, who can offer a greater selection of wines by the glass, or serve up quality pre-mixed cocktails quickly in a busy bar environment. Customers get to enjoy fresh wine that hasn’t been sitting oxidising in an open bottle, or heavily loaded with preservatives to keep it in a single serve bottle. The litres are fully recyclable, and in 2019 WineLab took things one step further by launching a closed-loop recycling system, meaning used litres are collected and shipped back to the manufacturer to make fresh ones.

“After two years of research, we settled on the key litre because of its recyclability. Over the years, we had become aware that the litres we were supplying into trade full of wine weren’t being recycled, despite being made of very high value products, such as high-quality clear PET that’s very valuable in a secondary market,” explains Farrell. “Because the litres are a complex Ronan Farrell, Co-founder, WineLab

product that has a few different elements to it, we found that processers here just weren’t recycling them and they were being sent for incineration, so we decided we would create our own closed loop recycling system.”

BENEFITS FOR ALL The system they devised doesn’t make any work for their customers; as they deliver litres to restaurants and bars, they collect the empties and bring them back to WineLab’s warehouse in Kildare, where they are manually separated, baled, of the smaller wineries they work with; the winemakers can easily fill them with no specialist equipment needed, and it saves them having to send wine out to a bottling plant when they do not have the facilities themselves on site. “We work with a lot of people who are interested making wines with a ‘hands off’ philosophy, trying to produce a very natural or organic wine.”

With 13 employees in the company and looking at figures approaching half a million litres of wine this year, the WineLab’s unique and sustainable

WE HAD BECOME AWARE THAT THE LITRES WE WERE SUPPLYING INTO TRADE FULL OF WINE WEREN’T BEING RECYCLED, DESPITE BEING MADE OF VERY HIGH VALUE PRODUCTS

and sent back to the manufacturer in the Netherlands. “They’re 81 per cent circular in design and 100 per cent recyclable, so 81 per cent of the litre is turned back into new litres and 19 per cent goes to be recycled into secondary use.”

WineLab send empty litres out to their wine suppliers across Europe and America to fill, which has been a boon for some solution is enjoying well-deserved success. Next, expect to see alcohol-free wines launching later this year, the result of four years of planning and testing to perfect the desired quality and taste. “We’ve achieved something premium, organic, with close to zero sugar as well—a high quality Albariño, sparkling wine and Cabernet.”