Life cycle assessment (LCA) to move towards more environmentally friendly winegrowing

Introduction

As six on the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, putting our safe life on Earth at risk (Rockström et al., 2024) and agriculture is significantly responsible for it (Campbell et al., 2017), viticulture, faces the challenge of reducing its environmental impacts through fundamental changes to its practices. However, the diversity of the environmental impacts of winegrowing activities on the environment is not commonly identified by the production stakeholders or advisors. This makes it difficult for winegrowers to identify the most environmentally friendly practices. When information is available to winegrowers, usually focuses on one single impact: carbon footprint.

Nevertheless, a detailed impact assessment that is as exhaustive as possible is the best way to inform improvement decisions. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, which is based on life cycle thinking, like are carbon or water footprints, considers the impacts of the entire life cycle of a product. By assessing all phases of the production process, it ensures that local environmental improvements do not result in the shifting of pollutant loads (Jolliet et al., 2010). LCA offers a comprehensive list of environmental impacts. It is standardised (ISO, 2006) and considered by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to be the method that should be used for ecodesign (ISO, 2011). It is also the method chosen by the European Union (Pedersen and Remmen, 2022) and France for environmental footprinting of consumer goods.

The LCA methodology has been implemented in the wine industry for two decades, for various purposes  such as quantifying the environmental impact of a bottle of wine and identifying the main life cycle phases that contribute the most (Ferrara and De Feo, 2018). For instance, the global warming potential impact of a bottle of wine ranges from 0.6 to 3.5 kg CO₂ (Pinto da Silva and Esteves da Silva, 2022), which is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 5 to 26 km by car. Viticulture contributes 15–60% to the carbon footprint of a bottle of wine, depending on vineyard, cellar and packaging practices. The glass bottle alone accounts for around half of the carbon footprint of a full bottle of wine (Navarro et al., 2017). LCA is also used to compare the environmental impact of different types of wine (European-Commission, 2021). In the last decade, the research unit GRAPPE has been developing the use of LCA to inform the choice of winegrowing techniques (Renaud-Gentié et al., 2020, Gentil et al., 2020) and to conduct ecodesign (Perrin et al., 2022, Renaud-Gentié and Julien, 2024).