The production of wine begins to have an impact on the environment the moment a vineyard is planted, first having to proceed with the deforestation and excavation of the land. Sometimes this impact is extreme: in some cases the monoculture of the vine has changed the landscape so profoundly that the process appears almost irreversible.
It is a fact that the forest cleared to make room for the vineyard certainly absorbed more CO2 than the vineyard that was planted in its place; even a simple burglary produces an impact, given that the biodiversity of woodland is normally greater than that of agricultural land, even if managed in a sustainable way.
How much CO2 does the wine industry emit?
The most recent literature estimates that the production of a bottle of wine generates between 0.9 and 1.9 kg of CO2-equivalent . Of course, this estimate should be used with caution, given its generic nature (it is necessary to distinguish which wine is produced, in which territory, with which type of processing, which energy mix is used, ...).
Purely by way of example, let's take 1 kg of CO2 per bottle as a value.
This is an extremely low and conservative estimate and it is even more so if it is used as a reference for sparkling wine, given that it requires on average extra processing and heavier bottles which affect both the emissions for glass production and on transportation.
We multiply that kilogram by the billion bottles that Italian sparkling wine intends to produce in 2024: we obtain a projection of 1 million tons of CO2 produced by the Italian sparkling wine industry alone (value to be multiplied by X if we consider higher emissions for the single bottle , as would probably be appropriate).
To give a proportion, a study carried out a few years ago by researchers from the engineering faculty of the Canadian McMaster University, estimated that in 2015 Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, had produced 9.6 million tons of CO2.
We got an idea of how relevant - in terms of CO2 emissions - the impact of the wine industry is.
