Modern winemaking is largely industrialized, and many commonly accepted practices produce outsized impacts on the environment. As the world witnesses the effects of changing weather patterns, from droughts and heatwaves to sudden arctic blasts and prolonged, heavy rainfall, the topic of carbon emissions, environmental health, and sustainability has come into focus for industry around the world. For winemaking, the issue is even more urgent. Around the world, major winemaking regions are laser focused on sustainability — their survival depends on it.
Sustainability is a holistic approach that considers not only economic aspects of winemaking, but the environmental and social aspects as well. Stepping away from traditional profit-centered motives, winemakers seek a balance between economic viability, environmental preservation, and social benefit. Balancing these goals requires implementing effective water and energy conservation practices, safeguarding natural ecosystems, maintaining healthy soils, and engaging with the community. Businesses who follow a sustainable philosophy seek to leave both the environment and society better than it was.
Water and Energy Conservation
Water scarcity is a very real, emerging problem around the globe. While many parts of the world are plagued by drought, the problem goes deeper than that. Water scarcity describes the diminishing accessibility or availability of unpolluted, fresh (not ocean) water. It affects human populations, industry, and food production and has reached crisis proportions even in highly developed countries.
Wineries consume a large amount of water, not only in the vineyards, but in the winemaking process, and the wastewater itself is contaminated enough to cause severe damage if it’s released directly into the environment. To minimize water consumption and avoid environmental damage, wineries are exploring using drip irrigation, cover crops, and mulching in the vineyards, while reducing the amount of water used in washing and sterilizing materials and equipment during the bottling process. After reducing fresh water use as much as possible, winemakers must consider productive ways to treat and reuse, or eventually release water safely into the environment where it can support local ecosystems.
In seeking sustainable water use, wineries should consider the security of their water sources: municipal water, wells, surface water, harvested rainwater, and treated wastewater. Several of these sources could literally dry up in a severe drought or over a period of excessive use. In this case, rainwater harvesting, and effective wastewater treatment are both low impact means for supplying water for purposes ranging from irrigation to bottle washing.
Water use in wineries is typically focused on a myriad of cleaning activities, most of which is focused on cleaning and sanitation. It may not be apparent where and how these processes can be improved, but the use of water-efficient equipment and a careful analysis of workflows may suggest valuable opportunities. Practices which minimize the contamination load of wastewater also help substantially during treatment and reuse.
- Barrel cleaning and sanitation: Use final rinse water from one barrel to do initial cleaning of the next.
- Barrel hydration: practice sequential barrel hydration, using the same water for multiple barrels, one after another.
- Cleaning and sanitizing tanks, transfer lines, presses, etc: Adopt CIP (clean in place) practices whenever possible; use pigging for transfers and hose cleaning; capture and recirculate water and caustic to reduce both water and chemical use.
- Solids management: removing pomace and lees from the wastewater stream can reduce the strength of wastewater by 90%, allowing treatment systems to work more quickly and effectively
Some key points to remember when reducing water usage include:
- Tackle the source, not the symptoms
- It is always more cost effective to avoid generating waste than to spend energy removing it.
- Two-thirds of winery water use is for cleaning and sanitation - start here first.
- Reducing water use alone doesn’t improve the quality of the wastewater and may, in fact, degrade the quality by concentrating both organic and inorganic contaminants
- Focus on employing production practices that prevent solids and other contaminants from going down the drain and segregate wastes into similar strengths to minimize total treatment volumes.
Reducing Carbon Emissions
Emissions from bottle production and transportation of finished wines make up the bulk of a winery’s carbon footprint, but those are addressed elsewhere. In the winery itself, focus on opportunities for harnessing renewable energy to supply operational needs. Solar and wind power is an increasingly popular resource, and geothermal energy can be harnessed even without proximity to thermal vents or other high energy surface sources.
Search for other means to reduce energy consumption. Upgrade facilities to LED lighting, improve insulation, and employ high-efficiency refrigeration or similar equipment wherever possible.
Sustainable Packaging
Glass bottles for wine are heavy, difficult to package efficiently, and expensive to transport. Not only do the venerated traditions of wine bottles contribute to rising wine prices, but they contribute to an enormous carbon footprint, which is ultimately unsustainable. Winemakers and bottlers have recently begun shipping wine in large bulk containers, which will ultimately be bottled in the destination country before being distributed. Considering that the glass itself may make up over 50% of the weight of a bottle of wine, these kinds of economies make sense. But that’s not the whole story.
It may take a moment to process, but the entire carbon footprint of a single bottle of wine, measured from cradle to grave (about 2.6 lbs of CO2), includes a 39% contribution from the glass bottle alone.
To improve their bottom line and the overall sustainability of their business, not to mention their reputation as responsible stewards of the environment, wineries are investigating the use of packaging innovations such as paper bottles (lightweight, recyclable, degradable), cans, pouches, bag-in-box and refillable containers. Wine sold in flat bottles made from recycled plastic not only have a lower carbon footprint compared to glass, but they also use 40% less space on a truck and are only 1/10th of the weight of glass bottles. This is an excellent example of seeking the best out of both worlds.
The next question to be considered in the packaging dilemma is: what happens to the packaging once it’s sold and consumed? Glass may be highly recyclable, but it’s very energy intensive to produce, and on average, only 20% of glass is actually recovered. With 80% ending up in landfills, alternative solutions need to be found. Boxed wines are becoming less gauche and require much less energy to produce. In addition, the cardboard (and sometimes the plastic liner) can be recycled.
Transportation
While not as immense as the impact of glass bottles, the mode of transportation also affects wine’s carbon footprint. A bottle of wine traveling across the country by truck from Napa Valley, CA to Groton, CT would quadruple its carbon footprint if shipped by air, because it takes so much fuel to keep a plane aloft. Surprisingly, wine shipped internationally by container ship has a comparatively low footprint.
