Carbon emissions from fermentation process five times more concentrated than cars or planes, warns academic
Carbon emissions given off during wine fermentataion are five times more concentrated than that emitted by planes and cars, according to a Califonian university academic.
UC Davis professor Roger Boulton told attendees at the international Sauvignon Blanc event in Malrborough last month that it was essential that winemakers started to capture their carbon emissions, describing this as one of the most pressing environmental factors facing the wine industry.
“Carbon footprints have been pushed into a corner,”Drinks Business reported him as saying. “Winemakers have to measure their footprints, own them and be proud of them. The elephant in the room of the carbon world in wineries is fermentation.
“We should be capturing carbon in wineries so they become carbon neutral. Carbon from the winemaking process is five times more concentrated than planes and cars. A litre of juice produces 60 litres of carbon dioxide. Why aren’t we trapping it?
“A single bottle of wine contains 80g of carbon dioxide. As a winemaker, if you want to be a serious leader in sustainability then you have to capture your carbon emissions – a good way to so this is to turn it into chalk,” he said.
One wine company to be spearheading developments in this area is Torres, which has been looking into ways of successfully capturing and transforming the carbon dioxide produced during fermention. The Torres team have been experimenting with eight different technologies offering alternative uses for the CO2 produced during fermentation.
One such experiment uses organic compounds to capture CO2 to create a product that can be used in the paint industry, while another has seen the Spanish wine producer exploring the use of seawater electrolysis to generate a low carbon footprint basic solution that can be later used to capture CO2 in the form of inorganic carbonate.