Wine’s sustainability problem

There’s more to being green than growing grapes, but the wine business still hasn’t figured that out

Sustainable wine – that is, wine made to be eco-friendly – has been dominating wine business discussions lately. And why not? Climate change is already kicking wine in the head, and it’s only going to get worse, say the experts.

Hence this very impressive green conference last month, which genuinely seemed to try to make a difference. And many producers, whether in New Zealand or California, like Tablas Creek and Spotswoode, have made impressive strides.

But those seem to be the exceptions. Wine too often misses the point about sustainability, and that doesn’t even take into account that no one quite knows how to define the term. Rather, that’s because wine sustainability is mostly concerned with farming and not the rest of what makes wine wine – packaging, quality, and price. (And no, this isn’t going to be another rant about glass bottles, so you can take your fingers off the cancel button.)

Note four recent sustainability moments that, for better or worse, show how far wine still has to go:

• Benjamin Neyman, the production and procurement manager for California producer Shannon Family, offered impressive insights during a recent Zoom sustainability seminar. He said the winery can do everything possible to make grape growing more green, and it has. But “how do we overcome getting glass from China or diesel trucks that get 4 mpg delivering our wine?” And, added Neyman, there is still a sense among consumers that glass bottles are the only packaging that matters.

• Pricing came up frequently during the sustainability seminar, with the idea that $20 was the cost of an entry level wine. In this, I kept getting the sense that the wine business wants to use sustainability to raise prices and accelerate premiumization. Which, of course, won’t do much for the planet.

• A couple of samples arrived recently from California wineries that pride themselves on their green credentials; one of them is famous for it. So how were the samples packed? One used foam peanuts and the other used polystyrene foam. And the famous winery’s bottle weighed 18 ounces, almost four times the weight of a plastic bottle. That’s hardly acting green, is it?

• Finally, quality, which various winemakers have told me continues to lag for green packaging like cans. I can attest to this: One recent can sample, a rose, smelled like rotten eggs and sulfur; the red was bitter and thin. Neither tasted like the wines the company ships in bottles, which are pretty damned good. That won’t get consumers to switch packaging, will it?