Franca Carlotta Foerster* and Moritz Wagner
Hochschule Geisenheim University, Von-Lade-Straße 1, Geisenheim, 65366, Germany (carlotta.foerster@hs-gm.de)

Environmental sustainability has become a key factor in production and consumption of many goods and services. Compulsory requirements from organizations, governments, markets, and society push industries like agriculture to assess and lower their environmental impact. The wine industry, especially the viticulture sector, faces several challenges. Vineyards are often managed intensively with herbicides, systemic fungicides, and insecticides with a high application frequency. An adequate strategy to improve sustainability of the wine industry must start with an accurate and objective quantification of its sustainability performance. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely accepted tool for this. Grape production processes can vary considerably between wineries. Consequently, conducting LCA to identify potentials to improve environmental sustainability is highly context-specific, labor-intensive, and requires expertise in LCA. Therefore, it is not yet a hands-on tool for many wineries to assess sustainability of production processes. Simplifying LCA models could increase its use as a management and decision tool in the wine industry. Simplified models must consider specific regional aspects and individual management decisions, but require just a few key parameters to obtain representative results. For the remaining input data, necessary to build models with high predictive power, fixed generic data can be used. This study sought to distinguish input parameters that can be set to a fixed value from those that must be case-specific. Average input data for vineyard management and its probabilistic distribution was collected from the literature and from research and practice experts. The resulting inventory was analyzed in Brightway2 using Monte Carlo simulation and global sensitivity analysis to establish a parametrized inventory. Based on this knowledge, a simplified LCA model was developed by fixing input parameters with low relevance at their median impact values.

Funding Support: This project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund as part of the Union’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic