Fresh wine, on tap

Goodbye, bottle. Move over, magnum. A Sonoma County wine company has found an environmentally friendly way to tap into Americans' growing thirst for vino -- wine kegs.

Holding the equivalent of 20 bottles of wine, the stainless steel kegs sold by the Más Wine Co. are catching on, but not among the spring break crowd.

The 2-year-old Cloverdale startup is targeting its premium wine kegs at fine restaurants, hoping the humble keg can reduce waste and improve the way house wines are delivered to diners.

"I like to order wines by the glass, but it's just not that good when it's not fresh," says Andy Woehl, the company's founder and president.

Top-selling wines in busy restaurants don't have much problem staying fresh once opened because the bottles are quickly drained. But many restaurants go through slow periods, and it doesn't take long for wine to spoil once opened.

"It's a problem in every restaurant. Not everyone will admit it, though," said Kate Tweddale, vice president of marketing for Más Wine.

The problem used to drive Terri Heying nuts. The general manager of Mangiamo restaurant in Windsor cringed whenever she watched fine wines go bad from prolonged exposure to oxygen.

"After two or three days, if you don't sell that wine, you're dumping it or cooking with it," Heying said.

So the restaurant reduced the number of wines by the glass it offers and turned to Más Wine's keg system for its house pour, she said.

Now the restaurant never has to worry about oxidized wine, and its Más Wine carafes are very popular.

"It sells like crazy," said Heying. "I wish all wines came like that. You just pull down on the tap."

Mangiamo is one of about 150 restaurants in Northern California using Más Wine's keg system. The company makes two North Coast wines -- a cabernet sauvignon blend and a sauvignon blanc -- at Jepson Winery in Hopland.

A small amount goes into 750-milliliter bottles, but the majority makes its way into German-made 15-liter stainless steel "minitanks." The airtight vessels contain a special nitrogen chamber that presses down on the wine, preventing oxygen from entering and keeping the wine fresh. The company guarantees it'll keep for up to 60 days, but Woehl is convinced the wine stays drinkable for several months.

The company is far from the first to market wine in kegs.

It's common in Europe. Here in the United States, Anheuser-Busch tried wine kegs in the 1980s, with a "red burgundy" called Master Vintners. Inglenook still sells kegs for restaurants as large as 58 liters. They're even in use at the wine bar in the trendy new Oxbow Public Market in Napa, where proprietor Peter Granoff has two local wines on tap.

But Más Wine is different because its kegs are stand-alone units that don't need to be hooked up to anything. They also taste pretty good, too, says Ben Pearson, manager of Bottle Barn in Santa Rosa, which sells a limited number to the public for $165.

"It's not completely new, but these are the first quaffable wines that I've ever tasted out of a keg," Pearson said.

Woehl's outside-the-box thinking is rooted in insights gained from both the beer and wine industries.

While working for New Belgium Brewing Co., the Colorado-based maker of Fat Tire Amber Ale, he noticed that the company had higher profit margins on its keg business than the six-packs of microbrew it sold to retailers.

Later, as a plant engineer at Clos du Bois Winery in Geyserville, it was his job to make the winery's processes as efficient as possible. He saw how much wine was wasted when bottles broke in shipping accidents, whether in the warehouse or in transit, he said.

He first pitched his keg idea to the winery bosses, touting it as a super-efficient way to move wine. But they pointed out that big wine distributors such as Southern Wine & Spirits would never go for it.

That's when he realized that if his idea was ever going to work, he would need to start his own company that partnered with local beer distributors. Many were receptive to expanding into wine sales because the beer business has been stagnant while wine sales have surged, Woehl said.

Cost savings is a big part of the company's sales pitch, promising to save restaurants the equivalent of about $1.50 per bottle.

But the environmental benefit of the kegs is getting more and more traction with restaurant owners interested not just in saving money but in doing the right thing, Tweddale said.

"It seems to resonate a little more today than it did because people are becoming more green-aware," she said.

The kegs eliminate much of the waste associated with traditional wine bottles. Gone are the glass, paper labels, natural or synthetic corks, foil and cardboard boxes. Without the extra weight, transportation is also more efficient.

The company estimates that it takes eight truck trips to get a typical wine bottle made, delivered, sold and recycled, compared with just four trips for the keg -- winery to distributor to restaurant and back.

The downside is that unlike glass bottles, the kegs have to make a round trip to Hopland to be refilled. That could limit the company's range.

At the moment, the kegs are only available in Northern California, handled by a network of beer distributors. The company would like to venture farther afield but hasn't quite figured out how.

It's planning a Southern California launch later this year or early in 2009 but would need some kind of bottling station in the area to be efficient, Tweddale said.

"We're still running the numbers," she said.

Brewers such as Sierra Nevada are realizing that it's just not cost-effective to make beer in Chico and ship it to Florida. Woehl says he's spoken with two other wine companies planning to import bulk wines from Spain and Italy and bottle it in kegs on the East Coast because the cost savings are so big.

So it's clear to Woehl that his idea has potential for areas far from Wine Country.

"You can do things like this really efficiently, even on a national scale," he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.