But the reality is that wine’s carbon footprint has indeed played a role in climate change, albeit a minuscule one compared to other industries. And one generator of carbon is transportation and packaging.
1. Red wine contains antioxidants, which can improve cholesterol and help you maintain healthy blood pressure.
2. Red wine increases good (HDL) cholesterol.
3. Women who drank red wine had a higher sex drive than those who drank another type of alcohol.
Winemaking, the process of turning the grapes to wine, releases emissions – fermentation, for example, wild fermentation or regular, both produce an inordinate volume of CO2.
With all the furore surrounding plastic and the impact of plastic on marine pollution, glass is usually favoured as the more environmentally friendly packaging option. But when you take into consideration the life cycle of glass, it can oftentimes come out worse than plastic.
The switch to screw caps began over 10 years ago when it was believed that the incidence of cork taint* was between 7-8% of all cork-sealed bottles of wine. So there was a shift to the caps which contribute to fewer footprints.
A corked wine doesn’t have tiny bits of corking floating in it, it actually means the wine has become contaminated – not by the presence of the cork but by a chemical compound – TCA (2,4,6- trichloroanisole).
A bottle’s impact starts at the very beginning: the winery. According to Know the Flow, the production of “raw materials” accounts for about 0.80kg CO2 out of the total 1.28kg. This also includes packaging production, but first let’s talk about the vineyard.
Colman and Paster did a study of different transportation methods. They found air cargo is the worst and shipping by sea is the most efficient. That means that if you live on the east coast of the United States, California wine received via air transport will have a larger carbon footprint than French wine sent via cargo ship