Carbon Footprint in the Wine Industry

The chapter is aimed at giving a comprehensive view of the environmental pressures related to the life cycle of a wine bottle, thus allowing the identification of environmental hot spots of the production process and providing support for strategic decisions aimed at its improvement and optimization. After an introduction and a brief analysis of the wine sector worldwide (Section 7.2), in Section 7.3, a review of the scientific literature is reported together with a review of the different experiences regarding carbon footprint evaluation in the wine sector. Section 7.4 describes the methodology used for the evaluation of the carbon footprint of the different case studies considered, and Section 7.5 reports the results related to those case studies regarding typical Italian wineries. Results obtained with different methodologies applied to several products, consistent with other literature studies, show a carbon footprint between 0.9 and 2.0 kgCO2eq/0.75 L bottle, the larger impacts arising from packaging and distribution. The life cycle approach was also used to evaluate other impact indicators (e.g., water footprint) and their correlation with the carbon footprint.