The Wine (Bottle) Carbon Footprint

Blind Muscat has been preoccupied lately with worrying about wine’s carbon footprint, and in particular the wine bottle footprint. The standard 750 ml wine bottle weighs about three pounds, half of that wine and half glass. For the new breed of steroid bottles designed to make you think the wine is more substantial simply because the container is more imposing, the packaging outhefts the liquid by 25-50%.

What other consumer product has this ghastly ratio? Helium tanks, I guess, outweigh their contents by a mile and radioactive isotopes are transported (I hope) in beaucoup de protective armor. Caskets generally weigh more than their residents. Some prepared foods in glass jars (all those gourmet mustards and chutneys none of us knows what to do with, for example) approach the 1:1 imbalance, but their contents typically get doled out over an extended period of time. Perfume bottles outweigh their contents, especially since the glitz of the glass is a major selling point; but few of us go through a case of perfume in a week.

The obvious solution, of course, is to drink local, cut way back on the shipping fumes, and recycle the glass. But what makes me and most wine lovers nuts about this category of beverage is the variety; if I limited myself to wines from a 100-mile radius, locavore style, I would be miserable—and that’s a 100-mile radius from the Bay Area, giving me my pick of Monterey, Sonoma, Napa, Santa Cruz and Livermore.  How would I get my fix for a stinging New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or the real deal Riesling from the Mosel, or the occasional Minervois? Because wine is so utterly dependant on the natural conditions under which the grapes are grown, coming up with reasonable facsimiles of far-flung wines is much harder than mimicking foods originating in distant places. 

While I was pondering all this, two fascinating publications added some cold, hard, technical detail to the dilemma. If you haven’t already run across the post about all this on the Dr. Vino blog a couple weeks back, or the working paper it references from the American Association of Wine Economists, do so immediately.  What Dr. Vino (Tyler Colman) and his colleague Pablo Päster did was create a Carbon Calculator, based on the best current information about the net carbon equivalents generated by the various processed involved in wine production—producing the agrochemicals for grapegrowing, shipping barrels from France to California, the release of carbon dioxide during fermentation, and so on. The Calculator lets them plug in the information for a particular wine and a particular final destination and spit out (that’s a technical wine economics term) the carbon cost.

The article contains a number of fascinating findings—that air cargo is vastly more carbonicious than container shipping, that shipping wine in bulk and bottling at the destination makes a lot of sense, and that organic farming does not yield a significant reduction in greenhouse gas production. My favorite piece was the map of the US, with a line down the middle a bit east of the Mississippi: east of that line, there’s less carbon cost from bringing in wines from Bordeaux than from California.

The central—and obvious—finding is that the fossil fuels involved in transporting wine (and winemaking goods, like barrels) are the heart of the matter. Just as I was digesting the article, I found an October 23 press release from The Wine Group, the world’s third-largest wine producer (Corbett Canyon, Glen Ellen, Franzia, Concannon, etc.) claiming that their heavy involvement in the bag-in-box business was in fact a form of visionary, green leadership in the industry. It may be tempting to shrug this off as a naked corporate maneuver, a way to repackage (as it were) low-end wine as some kind of moral crusade, but the fact is, they’re right. Bag-in-box wines reduce the carbon cost of shipment dramatically, and put less junk in landfills when their useful lives have ended.

So, supporting that admirable organic boutique winery halfway around the world may not be the most eco-friendly thing to do. Blind Muscat may start “bottling” his own homemade wines in reusable Ziploc bags.