Self-serve wine tanks may come to American supermarkets soon

Fill ‘er up: self-serve tanks bring wine to French supermarkets

Keg wine and wine vending machines just got supersized: 500 and one-thousand liter tanks have landed in French supermarkets.

Bring your own resealable bottles, Poland Spring containers, jerrycans, whatever. Or you can get one at the store. Select your grade (red, white, or rosé). Pump. Print receipt.

Astrid Terzian introduced this concept that hearkens back to a bygone era when wine would arrive in Paris shops in tonneaux and consumers would bring their own flagons to fill. But today, Terzian says, she started this scheme in fall 2008 to fill a niche, tapping into two key themes, environmental awareness and the economy. (She actually wanted to buy a wine property and run a B&B but it was too expensive. So she turned to what she says she knew how to do: sales.) The elimination of packaging mass means that the wine can be shipped much more efficiently from a cost and carbon perspective.

The cost-savings are passed on to the consumer in the form of low prices of 1.45 euros/liter (about $2/liter). She installed her first machine in June 2009 at the Cora supermarket in Dunkirk and now has them installed in eight supermarkets in France. The wines vary; one is a 2009 from the Rhone, technically a vin de pays méditerranée.

She has even more plans for her bulk self-serve tank business. She will be opening up the selling of olive oil in similar fashion to her wine business.

The supermarkets which set up the self-serve wine tanks reported "rapidly rising sales of bulk wine, plus it brought in lots of new customers who walked in to fill up their containers and bought other stuff. Some stores decided to provide cheap 2-liter plastic bottles (in addition to the 5-liter plastic jugs) for the customers who didn't bring their own."

American shoppers could be seeing 500 or 1,000 liter self-serve wine tanks at their grocery stores by next year.