As products go, wine is pretty green as is. Compared with most crops, grapes require less fertilizer and fewer pesticides in order to flourish and produce high-quality wine. Since most of the carbon emissions generated by the wine industry are produced in the shipping process, it matters less how the wine was made and more where it comes from.

In a 2007 report from the American Association of Wine Economists , researchers calculated the amount of carbon emitted by the planes, trucks, and ocean freighters that bring wine from the vineyard to the consumer. They found that a bottle of wine shipped to New York from California’s Napa Valley, for example, generates 2.6kg of carbon emissions on the long truck trip across the country, while a bottle from Bordeaux shipped by boat across the Atlantic generates 1.8kg, significantly less.¹

The relative efficiencies of shipping drive a “green line” through the U.S. from Ohio to Texas, marking the point at which the embodied carbon of a bottle shipped from Napa and a bottle from Bordeaux is roughly equivalent. Since most of the weight of a bottle of wine is in the glass, buying larger bottles or containers of lighter materials also helps reduce carbon emissions.

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