Dr Vino's wine blog

Welcome readers of the Wine & Spirits magazine! If you’re looking for some bullet points and discussion of my research with Pablo Paster on wine’s carbon footprint, check here. Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates on the right sidebar.

And if you haven’t seen the issue that is hitting mailboxes and newsstands now (but not the web), check out the Syrah extravaganza issue with reporting and reviews from Australia, the US (Santa Cruz), Chile and France. There’s also an interview on the back page that I did with editor and publisher Josh Greene.

While some of it covers familiar ground to blog readers, there’s some new material and great art (I wasn’t Simpsonized)! And I also make a proposal for later in the year: because air freight has such a big effect on a bottle’s carbon footprint and much Beaujolais nouveau is sent around the world by plane, how about saying no to nouveau and making the third Thursday of November a global celebration of local wine? Hit the comments with your initial thoughts on this idea. We’ll come back to it later in the year.

One point of clarification: the story ran a chart from our paper that reflects the various amounts of carbon dioxide emissions for bottles from different places. Napa looks horrible with even more than Australia! What was reflected in the text of the paper but didn’t make it into the chart in this story is that all the bottles were being sent to Chicago via differing modes of transport. The Napa one was sent sent by air. Sending it by truck would bring it down slightly below the CO2 emissions of the French bottle.

My friend Kazuma, whom I met in my NYU wine class last year, gave me a gift of two furoshiki recently. They are traditional, decorative cloths used for wrapping and carrying. They’re popular now in Japan since they are reusable and give you the chance to say goodbye to plastic bags. In fact, the environmental minister made one from fiber of recycled soda bottles to boost awareness of furoshiki. The Ministry even has graphics of suggested foldings!

Kazuma says they can serve as a handy wine tote for two bottles. He sent along this video of him showing how to tie one on, furoshiki style. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader, click here to view.)

Welcome readers of the New York Times who saw my op-ed today. If you’re looking for some bullet points and discussion of my research with Pablo Paster on wine’s carbon footprint, check here. Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates on the right sidebar.

If you’re a regular reader and wondering what I’m talking about, surf on over to the NYT where you can check out my op-ed in today’s paper. I suggest drinking local this New Year’s Eve if you are making it a resolution to turn a new, greener leaf in 2008. Local wines have a small carbon footprint because of minimal transportation, which is carbon intensive. And, heck, locavore is the word of the year according to the Oxford English Dictionary, so it’s trendy too!

Be sure to check out my maps of NYC wine shops and NYC wine bars if you’d like info on where to find local wines in the city. If you’re looking to find the Lieb blanc de blancs, click here to find it at stores.

But since it is a big bar night, a few places specialize in local fruits of the vine. The two branches of Vintage New York pour exclusively the wines of New York. Borough Food & Drink, which opened this past summer at 12 E. 22nd St., highlights–you guessed it–food and drink from the Empire State and has about 40 NY wines on its list. Home Restaurant (20 Cornelia St.) is a cozy West Village restaurant focusing on local food and wine and is owned by the couple that owns Shinn Estate Vineyards. The wine list has 30 selections from New York State, including two sparklers.

If you have some favorite places for finding local wines in the City or are a big fan of a certain local winery, feel free to hit the comments. And whatever it is you raise in your glass tomorrow night, may it be a happy new year!

Tesco Merlot, at seven knots
The British supermarket is transporting some wine via barge in canals to reduce emissions. This comes after the retailer started importing wine from Australia in bulk tanks thus “saving 15,840kg of imported glass” per container. Here, here! Did Tesco just became the odds-on favorite for the Dr. Vino green wine retailer of the year? Maybe. Depends how much air conditioning is on ye olde Tescoe barge. [Guardian]

Sideways, the musical?
Wine has conquered the silver screen with Sideways and two forthcoming wine movies. Now our favorite beverage turns its sights on Broadway (well, off-off Broadway). Michael Green, Gourmet wine contributor, is the force behind the interactive production that encourages the audience to “see, swirl, smell, sip, and savor WINE LOVERS — a romance in six glasses.” On their web site, Green says that it’s a send-up of the “theatricality” of wine education–wait, he doesn’t mean my forthcoming class, does he? Limited run, Dec 1-3, 8-10.

Glug, glug: Thanksgiving edition
You know what you poured at Thanksgiving. But what about everybody else? Dr. Debs linked to Cellartracker, a wine cellar management tool, sorted by open date. In my tryptophan haze, I found it a fascinating snapshot of almost 10,000 wines poured. The top six producers were American. [cellartracker]

E-tailer goes bricks and mortar
While most wine retailers struggle to work out selling wine over the internet, Wine.com opens it’s first “bricks and mortar” location, a 2,000 sq ft store, in Berkeley. [PRnewswire]

Today is the day that Beaujolais nouveau (aka NO-vo) is air-dropped on the world. Remember the carbon footprint! Say no to Nouveau for the polar bears.

Some nouveau is sent via ship and the carbon dioxide emissions of that mode of transport are considerably less. Sending a bottle of Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais nouveau by boat to New York creates about 1500g of CO2e. Flying it in creates about 6000g. So if you’re going to say cheers with nouveau, do it after the containers arrive via ship and say cheers tonight with a lovely cru Beaujolais that already is here, via boat.

Even if you wait, you’ll likely still be subsidizing the cost of air freight. The other day a retailer told me that they have to place an order for the all the no-vo they want for the year, say 30 cases. They ask for 10 to be delivered for sale today and have to pay more for those. Then the rest of the order comes later at a lower rate. So consumers pay two rates? No, it gets cost averaged so those who wait underwrite the speed (and carbon) of those who buy today.

And in related news, look what I am turning down, dear reader, in the name of lowering my own carbon footprint! This just in from a PR person:

I am writing you today to invite you and a friend to have the ultimate Beaujolais Nouveau experience. Just in case you have forgotten, this Thursday is Beaujolais Nouveau- a celebration of the first wine of the vintage. Each year our company, which represents the wine-producing region, parties in style with a hop-on/hop-off luxury-bus bar crawl to try different Nouveaus. What’s makes this party even more special is that in-between bar stops we make our way through the city drinking Beaujolais-Village and Beaujolais Cru wines served by fabulous “Beaujoladies” and “Beaujo-Beau.” If you would like to take part in this fun event please contact me directly via email or at (212) xxx-xxxx.

Related: “My beef with Georges Duboeuf: Beaujolais nouveau“

Bonnie, the pun Queen from the excellent food blog, The Ethicurean, posted a comment requesting that we analyze the carbon footprint of her Blanquette de Limoux. She rides her bike to her local wine shop in Berkeley, CA to buy the sparkling white wine from the South of France.

We stopped our carbon analysis at the shop or restaurant and didn’t factor in how people get to the store. But there’s no beating the bike for reducing the carbon footprint, Bonnie!

Since she didn’t provide a producer name, which is fine, I’ve crunched the numbers based on a guesstimate rather than a specific case. Here’s the headline finding: Bonnie’s bottle produces just under 2600g of CO2 emissions, about the same as making and trucking a bottle of conventional wine from California to New York. More on the calculations after the jump. Read more…

My posting last week on the carbon footprint of wine has generated a good discussion around them there internets. But one thing is missing: the wines YOU want to have analyzed!

So, in the comments below, have your say about wines you would like to have Pablo and me pour all over our carbon calculator. Let us know the wine name, winery location and where you will be consuming it. If possible, we would need to know the bottle weight (empty or full–the wine part always weighs the same).

Given our findings that transportation (coupled with glass bottles) makes up such a significant portion of the carbon footprint, it’s hard to say outright that one bottle is worse than another at face value. One of those ridiculously heavy bottles might not be so bad if it were made 50 miles from the winery and then consumed in the winery tasting room. But usually those are sent around the country (world) by air freight, which makes the biggest polluters.

Post here by Friday what you’d like to see us work on. We’ll pick one that seems popular or interesting and we will crunch the numbers over the weekend.

(image: istockphoto)

Dear Mr. George of Beef,

“Korea’s Airlines Enjoying Lots of Wine” read a recent headline in the English Chosun. Really, now, do you want the airlines to be enjoying wine? I’d prefer to see you lending your wine’s enjoyment to ships.

Beaujolais nouveau is airdropped on the world the third Thursday of November. I would submit to you that the carbon cost of air freight is only worthy for a short list wines, and one that was harvested just a few weeks prior is not on it.

Sorry to rain on your Beaujolais nouveau parade. I’ve never been much of a fan of the wine from a taste perspective. But at 12% alcohol, it’s an innocuous enough gateway wine. I really do enjoy the gamay grape and cru Beaujolais–that’s a great way to get your Bojo working.

For consumers who enjoy the nouveau, I suggest leaving it behind this Year of the Falling Dollar and getting to know the differences between a Fleurie and a Morgon, both from the same grape and general area but world’s apart in terms of quality. Basically anything from 2005 works; here’s a run down of some crus with my seal of approval. Many of the wines, bought a year or so ago by importers and stores, are just a few dollars more than what the 07 nouveau will be.

With my earlier bottled water ban and recent calculations of the carbon footprint of wine, I must make this year a Bojo No-vo. Stick it on a ship, use lighter packaging and we’ll see about 2008.

Sincerely,

Dr. Vino

Is that a whiff of raspberries and leather you get from that red wine–or a whiff of petroleum? With some premium wines consuming three times their weight in petroleum, don’t be surprised if it is the latter.

My previous postings on the carbon footprint of wine made me want to determine just how much carbon is involved in the making and transporting of our favorite beverage. So I collaborated with Pablo Paster, a sustainability metrics specialist, and we ran the numbers. Our findings have just been published as a working paper for the American Association of Wine Economists, available here as a pdf.

While I welcome your comments on the whole paper, I’ll post some of the key findings here:

* Organic farming has lower greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity than conventional farming but I was surprised that the difference wasn’t greater. Clearly there may be other differences in a local ecosystem but the GHG difference was surprisingly small. But on the whole, it was the transportation that played a more significant role from a GHG perspective.

* Regarding the “food miles” debate, we find that distance does matter.

* But not all miles that a bottle travels are the same. Efficiencies in transportation make container ships better than trucks, which in turn are better than planes.

* Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio.

* Shipping wine in bulk from the source and bottling closer to the point of consumption lowers carbon intensity.

* Light packaging material such as Tetra-Pak or bag-in-a-box has much less carbon intensity.

* Using oak chips is a more carbon friendly alternative than oak barrels, particularly those that are shipped assembled and empty around the world

* There’s a “green line” that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip. In the event that a carbon tax were ever imposed, it would thus have a decidedly un-nationalistic impact.

What does this mean for the green wine consumer? Drinking a wine made without agrichemicals, from larger format bottles, or wine that has traveled fewer miles is the more “green” option. Beyond these points (or in addition to them), you could perform your own carbon offsets, for example, by giving up one bottle for another and saying no to bottled water.

“Red, White and “Green”: The Cost of Carbon In the Global Wine Trade,” By Tyler Colman and Pablo Paster

UODATE: This paper was been published in the March 2009 issue of the Journal of Wine Research
image 1: istockphoto.com