Wine & Spirits - February 2018 - 22

The Building Certifications
There's a gold standard for "green" winery buildings. With an eye toward sustainability, vintners are increasingly pursuing LEED certification for winery buildings
and tasting rooms. Started in 1998, LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Efficient
Design, is administered by the US Green Buildings Council. Applicants can tally
up points through building-design choices such as using energy from renewable
sources, reducing water usage, reusing building materials, and having access to public transportation (many aspects are required, while optional items add points to a
building's tally). Certification requires certain minimum standards, but buildings
can accumulate points and hit the top tier of platinum. Overall, 14,000 buildings
have achieved LEED certification nationwide, including 19 wineries, with more in
transition. With a nod to the prevailing thought that "the greenest building is the
one already built" and that demolishing a structure simply to rebuild a new, greener
one is not always the best environmental choice, there is now a LEED certification
for existing buildings.

Silver Oak
California's LEED wineries
Frog's Leap, Napa Valley
Hall, Napa Valley
Murphy-Goode, Geyserville
CADE, Angwin
Goldeneye, Mendocino
UC Davis teaching winery, Davis

Niner Wine Estates, Paso Robles
Shale Oak Winery, Paso Robles
Hilliard Bruce Winery, Lompoc
Odette, Napa Valley
Silver Oak, Napa Valley

UC Davis

Packaging Choices

WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2018

1 keg (19.5 liters)
=
26 bottles
(750 ml each)

on what would have been an empty truck. Gotham Project, a supplier of domestic and imported wines in kegs, imports wine in bulk
shipping containers; they hold 2.5 times the amount of wine as
the same-sized container filled with bottles. The wine is kegged on
arrival in the US and distributed locally. This vastly reduces not
only the carbon footprint in transport, but also waste, since the
26 glass bottles that each keg represents never have to be made,
recycled or sent to a landfill. ■

photo of UC Davis by Karen Block; vector illustrations by Vivian Ho

There was a day, not long ago, when pricey California wines would
come with 750 milliliters of wine in a bottle that weighed over 750
grams (1.65 pounds). If such a wine were consumed close to where
it was produced, then the carbon footprint of the wine was not particularly oversized. But two-thirds of the US population lives east of
the Mississippi River while nine out of every ten bottles of domestic
wine are made in California. So transportation factors loom large in
calculating a wine's carbon footprint.
In fact, for a consumer in New York City, the same size bottle of wine
from California generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than one
from Bordeaux. This is because most of the miles from Bordeaux to
New York are by boat, a relatively efficient form of transport per ton,
whereas California wine is often trucked.
Increasingly, the wine industry has noted these environmental, as
well as economic, costs and there has been a distinct trend toward
lighter bottles over the past decade.
Since glass is 100 percent recyclable, if every bottle used were recycled, there would be scant need for new materials to be extracted from
the earth. But the reality is that 34 percent of glass bottles are recycled in the US, according to the EPA. Although plastic is lighter, and
thus generates lower greenhouse gas emissions per 750 milliliters of
wine during transport, it is less easily recycled. Aluminum cans, on
the other hand, are recyclable and their recycling rate recently hit a
high, at 66 percent. Cans have exploded in popularity as a wine packaging: According to a Nielsen study, while cans still represent less
than 1 percent of the wine market, they accounted for $16.4 million
in sales in 2016.
Reusing a wine container is another way to diminish its carbon
footprint. Enter the stainless-steel keg. A full keg contains the equivalent of 26 bottles of wine and weighs about 58 pounds when full (of
which 40 pounds is wine). Kegs are almost infinitely reusable. When
they are kicked, they go back to the winery or importer for refilling

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - February 2018