Andres Valero,* John Howarter, and John Sutherland
*Environmental and Ecological Engineering, Purdue University, 500 Central Dr, West Lafayette, IN 47901 (avalero@purdue.edu)

Sustainable winegrowing and winemaking practices are being adopted by the wine community as a key driver to adapt to climate change and natural resource depletion while fulfilling consumer expectations. Quantifying and predicting the environmental, social, and economic impact of implementing sustainable practices or programs is challenging due to the lack of multivariable metrics and normalization criteria. The main objective of this research is to develop a methodology to unify sustainability assessment for the wine industry. Our aim is to define the flow of energy, water, and material during winemaking under different conditions and their environmental impact, following a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method. As a first step, we quantified environmental impacts in distinct stages of the life cycle of craft wine in an emerging, non-traditional wine region of the United States. The LCA was performed following ISO 14040 guidelines and the impact assessment was conducted using SimaPro 8.3, in accordance with the TRACI 2.1 /US 2008 methodology. The result is presented in 11 midpoint impact categories. For most of the impact categories, the highest process contributing to environmental impact is fertilizer use during grape production, the production of the glass bottle, and transportation during different production stages. Under the application of different normalization criteria, when explaining the environmental impact of wine, impacts such as ecotoxicity, eutrophication, and water depletion become more relevant to the carbon footprint. To define a sustainable wine scoring system (SWSS) to benchmark region, winery, and wine sustainable performance, a single-score impact assessment as carbon footprint does not adequately represent the environmental impact. The different impacts obtained by LCA must be normalized and weighed, considering the regional ecosystem boundaries.

Funding Support: Argentina Presidential Fellowship for Science and Technology (BEC.AR) and the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine ) research grant