Carbon footprint is a sexy topic these days. A lot of people I know drive hybrid cars (or ride bikes) but buy wine (and food, for that matter) from Europe on a regular basis. I drive a pickup truck and drink mostly Oregon Pinot.

My point is this: one’s “footprint” is a matter of balance, and a single flight from NY to Portland will likely emit more carbon than all the wine I can drink in a lifetime. So consume locally if you can (like myself and other lucky posters), and try to mitigate your impact in other ways if you can’t (such as by not drinking bottled water). We can all go off and live like monks if we wish, and save the planet in the process – but even monks have wine.

Also with bottles you need to consider that some new world wineries are using European bottles which have to be shipped to the winery.

It all gets very complicated very fast.

Cheers

Yes, clearly that work in the vineyard is important too in calculating the carbon footprint of wine. In fact, I sort of took it for granted since I often talk about “green wine” here. But nobody talks about such seemingly tedious things as logistics and transportation, which may actually leave a larger carbon footprint than vineyard activity.

Best,

You may want to consider a few other things when calculating a “carbon footprint” though.
The first thing I can think of is the grape production process including tractors, maybe sprays, manual labor, bird netting etc,
Secondly, the wine production process
Thirdly, the packaging considerations. How far bottles, corks paper products may have been shipped plus the production impacts.

It could be that wines from the other side of the world have a smaller footprint than local ones in some circumstances.

Lucky you Sean living nearby a good wine region. But you make a good point about certain items having reached a level of quality elsewhere, making them not easily substitutable, as with the sherry you mention.

Rich- funny re: gout de petrol…And great graph! By the looks of it, eliminating bottled water would be a great carbon offset for wine drinkers!

And Jack, my researchers are standing by with green visors and calculators awaiting your suggestions on how to compute the carbon load.

Instead, we learn that a heavy bottle went from Mendoza to San Antonio to Oakland to New York. Yep.

But wait, here’s my constructive point – Why not change the duty on alcohol to the weight of the bottle (with liquid)? This would discourage cheap wines from having heavy bottles. Yes, I know, I score mega Wile E. Coyote Green-Wino pts here.

This is a whole different perspective on _gout de petrol_!

re: “I was intrigued to read in the SF Chronicle that several
restaurants have stopped serving (imported) bottled water because it
is deemed too carbon inefficient.”

Still, considering that bottled water consumption seems to be growing
much more explosively than wine consumption (see for example
), the carbon footprint of wine
isn’t even on the radar screen. No sweat. A no-brainer.

Wine in the generic is somewhat different. While I occasionally enjoy wines from other parts of the world, I am fortunate to live in San Francisco, where some of the best wine in the world is produced well within a 100-mile radius, so the vast majority of my wine consumption is local. I don’t have to go beyond those boundaries. But again, even as wine-centric as folks are around here, our wine industry could never support the scale it currently does without casting a wider distribution net.