Wine Industry Meets Climate Threat with Ancient Techniques and New Tech

Joao Raposeira surveys his wavy rows of grape vines at the Tapada de Coelheiros vineyard in Portugal. “Most people look at this and they think it’s a mess!” he laughs. “But nature is a mess. That’s how it works best.” Raposeira, the winery’s Director of Agriculture and Sustainability, is one of a group of vintners re-examining ancient winemaking methods, but with a new range of advanced tools and an eye on climate resilience.

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While the carbon footprint of wine’s growth, consumption, and transportation – estimated around 1-2 kg of CO2 per bottle – does not compare to that of aviation or other major emitters, wine “has an incredible social footprint,” according to Tobias Webb, Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Wine Roundtable, an independent global platform dedicated to advancing sustainability in the wine industry.

“People regard it reverently. It has the ability to punch above its weight,” he told Earth.Org. 

Webb believes that the wine business is in a unique position to showcase a range of best practices that will improve or maintain quality, while reducing environmental impact and retaining soil health for the long term. The Roundtable’s 130 members span the entire wine value chain, including growers and producers, retailers, standards owners, packaging suppliers, and academics.

With these areas in mind, winemakers, distributors and retailers have come together with initiatives to improve labor standards, reduce bottle weight, and bring back traditional agricultural techniques that conserve water and carbon and protect biodiversity. 

Portugal’s Approach

A leader in these practices can be found in central Portugal, where the Wines of Alentejo commission both monitors quality of the wines from the region and also offers a voluntary, free-of-charge sustainability program for growers. Its 639 members cover around 60% of the Alentejo wine region, corresponding to more than 13 thousand hectares. 

Joao Barroso, the commission’s Director for Sustainable Development, told Earth.Org that climate change is felt in the water-scarce Alentejo region. 

“Worldwide, we’ve been witnessing a degradation of the soils due to the chemical revolution of the 1960s, so what we have today is extremely poor soils with low levels of organic matter and little capacity to retain water and nutrients.” This, he explained, required “a change of strategy” for the region. 

Fitapreta Vinhos, a winery in Alentejo, Portugal, certified under this program, sustainable practices are rooted in the region’s long history of winemaking. Speaking with Earth.Org, Partner Sandra Sarria said the winery uses a wide range of sustainable methods, including dry farming and cover crops like natural grass or green beans for nitrogen fixation. They only cultivate endemic grape varieties that are naturally suited to the area, and avoid commercial yeast, instead using endemic varieties that are well-adapted to the place. 

Fitapreta is an agroforestry winery, where instead of clean rows of vines in an open space, viticulture is mixed with cork trees and surrounded by a buffer zone in a method used for centuries. Vineyards planted in this way also serve as fire breaks, an increasingly important concern in the wake of this summer’s record wildfires in the Iberian peninsula. 

At the same time, this, along with hedgerows, helps manage airflow and soil moisture content in relatively dry land. “Vineyards are often located next to cities, which is where there is water,” Sarria explained. “But the plants here are more comfortable and the roots go deeper.”

Soil aeration requires both smaller and larger openings, known as micropores and macropores, which in turn require a specific variety of plant roots to maintain. Vintners deploy their specific plant mix not only depending on their root types but also the flowers, which can attract auxiliary insects that help prevent damage from pest species. At the Tapada de Coelheiros vineyard in Alentejo, Portugal, the insect population is further managed by maintaining bat shelters in the trees and on poles, since one bat can eat half of its bodyweight in pest insects in a single night. 

Raposeira follows the keyline water management concept to capture water at the highest possible elevation and comb it outward toward the ridges using gravitational forces. The vineyard also cultivates and manages specific types of vegetation along water lines to gain the benefits of filtration and retention.

Sustainable Wine Around the World

Such techniques are not limited to Europe. 

At Abacela winery in Oregon, US, the vines are managed with a minimum of pesticides (using treatments such as organic sulfur spray as an alternative), and significant manual labor. The team manually removes lateral shoots and thins the fruit to control the crop load and maintain optimum production per acre, while shading and leaf-pulling are used to control the canopy and manage sun exposure. Because the vineyard uses no insecticides, many beneficial insects, especially ladybugs, praying mantises and numerous types of bees, thrive in it. 

“Shade cloths protect the fruit from heat impact, and protect it from bird damage during harvest,” Greg Jones, CEO of Abacela, told Earth.Org. “It’s one of the things we’re doing now which we didn’t do five years ago, when we weren’t having such high heat extremes.”

To help manage energy requirements, a geothermal system is used to heat and cool the building that houses the tasting room.

Some vineyards are experimenting with biodynamics, which views the farm as a self-sustaining organism. Biodynamic farming even takes into consideration the impact of nighttime illumination on microorganisms. For example, at Fitapreta Vinhos, silica is mixed with cow horn as a substrate, and placed under the soil on nights with a full moon to improve plant health. 

The various approaches are working: during the recent European heatwave, where temperatures soared to a record 46.6C on the Iberian peninsula, their plants “suffered nothing more than a little sunburn,” said Raposeira.

Vineyards are also beginning to see other benefits from these methods. “The next big thing is biodiversity credits,” Joao Barroso told Earth.Org. These are a quantifiable and tradable financial instrument that rewards positive nature and biodiversity outcomes by creating and selling land or ocean-based biodiversity units over a fixed period.

“There is a legend of a Roman who traveled throughout the whole empire, who said that a squirrel could hop from tree to tree all the way from Lisbon to Rome,” Barroso said. “500 years later, much of that is gone, but our forest still has as much ecosystem value as the rainforests of Borneo.”

From Vine to Bottle

Once the grapes are harvested, vintners look for ways to minimize processing waste. In a conventional winery, the first pressing of the grapes is considered the best and high-quality wines can also be made from the second pressing, but the rest is normally discarded. However, because there is still juice remaining in this residue, Fitapreta has developed a technique to create a wine from the third pressing, a popular orange skin contact wine called “Laranja Mecanica” (“Clockwork Orange”).

The management of energy and CO2 emissions is also benefiting from the latest technologies. The Penedes winery, part of Familia Torres in Spain, produces more than 50% of its energy needs through photovoltaic panels and a biomass boiler, and uses hybrid and electric vehicles as well as a solar-powered electric train at its visitor centre. A water regeneration plant, operational since 2016, enables the reuse of nearly half of the treated process water. 

While the emissions coming directly from fermentation are not as significant as those from NPK fertilizer, Familia Torres has implemented a capture and reuse program for CO2 generated during wine fermentation, thanks to a pioneering system introduced in 2021.

Once the wine is ready to be bottled, a key focus area is bottle design and weight. According to the Sustainable Wine Roundtable, bottles can make up 25-45% of wine’s carbon footprint. Much of this comes from the energy used to make and transport glass. 

A major breakthrough in this area is the Roundtable’s new Bottle Weight Accord. Its  signatories, representing major growers and producers around the world, agree to limit the weight of their bottles for still wines to an average of 420 grams across the range by the end of 2026. 

In turn, bottle manufacturers such as Verallia are developing ultra lightweight bottles to withstand the rigors of transportation while meeting new weight requirements.

From there, packaging and distribution form the next major challenges. According to International Wineries for Climate Action, 15.9% of carbon emissions among their members come from case goods transportation to distributors and consumers. However, because winemaking is a uniquely fragmented and hyperlocalized industry, it is difficult to implement a single global sustainability standard. 

Challenges

“Regions all over the world, particularly in the New World, like California, Chile, and Australia, created sustainability programs, organizing schemes with qualitative and quantitative aspects, helping to improve the performance of producers,” said Barroso. 

In light of this, the Sustainable Wine Roundtable has developed a checklist to create consistency for what should be in a local standard – a standard of standards – including labor and working conditions. “A global standard looks like a great idea but what you want is the right local standards,” said Webb.

Labor conditions among vineyard workers shot to the forefront of public attention in January of this year, when the wineries in Italy’s Piedmont region were found to be relying on illegal migrant labor. 

According to Webb, issues such as withheld documents, lack of payslips, and lack of accommodation verification persist. “In the past, workers were housed onsite, but now this is impossible, so wineries depend on contractors. We work with many smaller growers to create consistency. In vineyards where there is proper certification to a credible sustainability standard, conditions will usually be much better,” he said.

Retailers are taking note of both the social and environmental aspects of wine sustainability. Some, such as Tesco, have already joined the Sustainable Wine Roundtable, while others create their own requirements. 

“Retailers are definitely interested. They’re mindful of their responsibility, and they want a resilient supply chain,” Anne Jones, Development Director of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, told Earth.Org. “Retailers sit at that privileged point, the fulcrum between the customer and the producer. They have a lot of power and a lot of responsibility.”

Industry participants have mainly adopted sustainable practices to face the realities of climate change, rather than being driven by consumer demand. 

“Being certified sustainable or organic is important for many consumers but not the major driver,” said Greg Jones of Abacela Winery. “Today’s consumers are looking for experiences that bring them knowledge and closer to farming, that the grower is focused on maintaining the ecosystem both within and external to the vineyards.”

Given increasing challenges from weather and climate, winemakers are working within their own spheres of influence to address a way forward. 

“I can’t change whether a 42C heatwave occurs, and I can’t mitigate it either,” Greg Jones said. “But if I can reduce the overall carbon and synthetic product impacts to the environment in my operation, I can work on that side of the coin, and at the same time try to adapt to things we have no control over. We have to deal with the approaches we can, within the framework we have.”