The environmental movement took off rapidly in the past few years, and ten years ago few credited this would be possible. Every businesses and industry thought about and implemented methods to green their daily routine, and the wine industry is no different.
Wineries are lucky to have some ways to make greener their business model throughout the value chain, from farm, packaging or shipping processes.
The first choice for environmental friendly actions starts in vineyards. Dry farming the fruit reduces dramatically the water consumption(wineries can profit from this also), but will also reduce the fruit yields, and for most wineries this is very very bad. In the growing areas where there are significant water shortages, dry farming even partially makes sense.
In the tasting room, the wineries can use exclusively reusable energy or at least partially. Installing a solar panel at their wineries helps out not only for the tasting events, but the solar power gathered can cover also about eighty percent of the power needed during long and hot summer days when they need to cool down their wine storage space with even fifty degrees. Many wineries consider that in many years, the solar power will exceed the power needs, and in about eight years they also expect to get 100% their investments back, while the life expectancy of the solar panels is at least twenty five years.
Last option for environment friendly actions is lowering their carbon footprint from their shipping part of industry. A quality and lighter alternative to the glass bottling is preferred, but it’s not on the close horizon yet. Reducing the shipping deliveries of wines in cases to two per year and not every two months or replacing the packaging with biodegradable molds instead of styrofoam packaging are other options. Since all businesses have their attention on finding ways of reducing their carbon footprint, more and more innovations are to be seen.
Photo credit: jimg944 on Flickr