winemaking
Sustainability
Over-inflated?
Are Australian wine producers keen to capture carbon from fermentation?
Winery operations manager for Taylors Wines, Clinton Taylor.
Although carbon dioxide emissions from fermentation are currently excluded from carbon calculators for the wine industry, this hasn’t stopped experimentation in capturing and sequestering such emissions. As previously reported in the Grapegrower & Winemaker, one such winery to experiment in this area is Spanish-based Familia Torres which announced late last year it had designed a system to capture and reuse the CO₂ from fermentation tanks at its Pacs del Penedès winery. Sonya Logan spoke with four Australian wineries to gauge their current and future interest in such systems as they seek to improve on their environmental performance.
T
here are two schools of thought when it comes to the question of what to do about carbon emissions from fermentation. One is nothing given that the CO₂ is captured from the
July – Issue 702
atmosphere by vines so its impact on the overall production of wine is net zero; hence, fermentation emissions are currently not included in carbon calculators for wine. The other view www.winetitles.com.au
is that CO₂ emissions are not trivial – UC Davis professor Roger Boulton has described them as being five times more concentrated than planes and cars – and should be sequestered by wineries. Grapegrower & Winemaker
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