How Green is my Wine ?

Carbon footprint?

For many of us, our first notion of ‘Green Wine’ was the ubiquitous Portuguese wine, Vino Verdhi, which literally translates to ‘Green Wine’.

The term green wine was seen until very recently as an insult, commonly a reference to unripe fruit and the unpleasant, vegetal and acidic wines such fruit produces.

Much of the non-wine loving world first heard about eco-friendly, ‘green’ wineries when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt made world headlines in 2008 by taking a three year lease on Chateau Miraval in the village of Brignol near Aix-en-Provence, France. Chateau Miraval is a winery with a reputation for producing very good wines and a strong commitment to organically grown grapes.

Green hasn’t yet replaced red or white as the most important color in deciding which wines to buy, but people have started to think about it. Terms like organic, biodynamic, natural and sustainable are increasingly turning up on wine labels and in marketing communications and are resonating with consumers, not solely because of environmental concerns, but because they producing some truly great wines.

This is due to the fact that a large number of producers who practice some form of natural grape growing and winemaking believe that not only are these methods environmentally responsible but that they make better wine.

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