In this article we'll tell you what the heck a buttload is and how we saved so much of them!

 A Short History of the Buttload Measurement

A “butt” or “buttload” is an actual unit of measurement. This was used in medieval Europe and some cultures still refer to some cask sizes as a “botte” or other variants.

A butt is a large cask used for storing wine or whiskey. A buttload of wine is equal to 126 US gallons (or 504 bottles of wine).

From Wikipedia – cask sizes

Why do we care about saving wine from spoiling?

Our mission is to reduce waste, starting with wine.

We believe every drop of wine should be enjoyed, not wasted. Wine waste is part of the 40% of food that is wasted in the United States every day. Our flagship product, the ArT Wine Preserver, prevents wine from spoiling using simple technology used by many wineries and food packagers to prevent oxygen damage. Our current estimate is that for every unit of ArT Wine Preserver 1.4 bottles of wine waste is avoided.

In 2019, we saved 22,176 bottles of wine. This is equivalent to 44.6 buttloads of wine.

Getting a buttload of data

We are a business and sell products to stay in business (Selfish Plug: if you drink wine, see how ArT Wine Preserver can keep yours fresh).

Our flagship product reduces the amount of wine that needs to be produced by decreasing the amount that goes down the drain.

Up until recently, we assumed we were reducing wine waste. Our carbon emission estimates used estimates for number of bottles of wine we preserve (estimated at one, our current estimates using data is 1.4 bottles saved). We were challenged by colleagues to verify this with actual data.

We recently completed a survey of our customers habits which determined how much wine they normally preserve with ArT Wine Preserver, how much of it would have gone down the drain if it was not preserved with ArT Wine Preserver. We determined (with 95% confidence). We prevented between 14.0 and 71.5 buttloads of wine being dumped down the drain in 2019. We had limited data (customers that responded to our survey) and convenience bias, leading to a large range in our initial data gathering.

How do we make sure we’re staying true to our mission? We measure.

A company mission is worthless unless you follow it. To ensure we’re staying true to our mission – we measure our waste streams and our customer’s product usage. These numbers turn into metrics we use to guide our business decisions to ensure we stay true to the mission. In order to do this we:

• Measure our solid waste streams {link to 2019 waste profile in progress}.
• Estimate our carbon footprint {link to estimate in progress}, and
• Verify how much we reduce wine waste through our customers.

Moving Forward

Our goals in 2020 are to improve our measurement accuracy with additional data.

Want to get involved or want to discuss sustainable product development? Please feel free to send us some ideas to ryan@artwinepreservation.com