France is a wine country. They adore wine, they worship it and drink it religiously. So if they don’t scorn at the idea of buying wine from a large vending machine inside a supermarket, neither should you. Even if it means bringing your own bottle or other wine compatible container, and pouring it from 500 and 1000 liter vending pumps that look suspiciously like an undersized gas pump.

As you’d expect, the price is much smaller than what you’d pay for even a bottle of very cheap wine, about $2 a liter, but with less need for years of preservation, the wine might be better and more natural. And when you take out the environmental cost of packaging materials and transporting said fragile packaging, your drinking habit suddenly has a smaller carbon footprint.

Dr. Vino, the guy who brought the idea to eight supermarkets in France, is planning on expanding into the states within the year. Some might point out that it’s just boxed wine for which you bring your own box, and that keeping this machine running cool carries its own carbon cost, but this is about a move towards fresh food, and how good wine could one day belong to that category.

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