As a keen collector of irony, I can never resist a smile at the thought of conferences about climate change and sustainability that are attended by a glittering collection of speakers and attendees, most of whom have taken flights and car journeys to get there.
At least the organisers of events like this year’s brilliant Wine2Wine in Verona, where I was asked to talk about sustainability, can argue that the participants need to be present in order to be able to sample the wines that are an inevitable part of the proceedings. But as a defence against Greta Thunberg, it’s pretty flimsy.
If we really care about our carbon footprints, we all have to cut down our air travel. This point was forcefully made to me by someone who questioned why wine critics needed to jet across the globe as much as they do. Most of the writers would claim that walking through the vineyards and cellars and meeting the producers is an essential part of their craft. The environmentalist however, reasonably responded that Robert Parker managed to become astoundingly influential without taking the trouble to visit many of the places where the wines he rated were made. Lining up the samples in his Maryland tasting room unarguably did far less damage to the environment than burning up carbon in the cabin of a plane.
Both arguments are valid, but the advocate of the Parker approach somewhat undermined their own case by revealing that part of their income was derived from running wine tours. In terms of impact on the planet, I struggled to see a difference between a wine critic visiting six regions and half a dozen tourists flying into one. But, without the tourists and the articles penned by the peripatetic professional palates, will the wineries survive? How are we to develop the exciting new opportunities of DTC – Direct-To-Consumer – distribution without the opportunity of welcoming those consumers to our cellars and vineyards?
And what of the hotels, restaurants and all the countless businesses and individuals that benefit from them doing so?
This conundrum was partly addressed in 2017 by a paper entitled Climate Change and Sustainable Tourism: South Africa caught in-between published by Professor Lere Amusan and Oluwole Olutola of North West University South Africa in the African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure. The two authors point out that “lush winelands” contribute significantly to their country’s ranking as the world’s fourth largest and fastest growing tourism industry. “Climate change and tourism,” they say, are “symbolically two-sides of a coin”. South Africa, they continue, is “both a contributor and one of those hard-hit by climate change on the one hand, and a leading tourist destination with the country’s tourism industry representing a key economic sector and growth enabler…on the other.”
At first sight, the problem seems intractable. ‘Tourism-related activities’ add to the climatic changes that increase the threats to the ecosystems and biodiversity that helped to attract the tourists in the first place.
Amusan and Olutola offer few solutions to the problem, apart from promoting the idea of income from ‘green’, sustainable tourism as a means of helping South Africa escape from its dependency on coal.
But the points they raise, and the reference to ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ tourism, are important and cannot be ignored by anyone looking towards the wine industry of the next decade
What does this mean in real terms? Crucially: reducing the carbon footprint of the winery through reduced energy use, and greater focus on environmentally friendly processes and packaging. In Verona, I referenced the Australia-based expert on the subject, Dr Irina Santiago Brown, and her husband Dudley and their efforts in McLaren Vale. Included in their experience as winemakers at Inkwell wines, is effective carbon sequestration. Dudley Brown has calculated that the “two percent of carbon sequestered in the top 30cm of our soil over 15 years is greater than all of the carbon we have produced through the entire lifecycle of grape growing, winemaking and distribution (inc glass) during that time.”
There are other options, however. As someone who is guilty of taking more flights in 2019 than in any previous year, I’ve tried to offset some of my bad behaviour by planting trees. I know that my 1,000 saplings aren’t the answer, but while I strive to cut down the miles next year, they and my electric car are better than nothing. And it’s something wineries can do too, as Michael Back proved as long ago as 2007 when a collaboration with an organisation called Trees For Africa, helped his Backsberg Winery to be declared carbon neutral. A dozen years later, his customers still maintain the tradition by turning out to plant their own trees on Back’s land.
Alternatively, I suppose one might be rather more radical, by taking the winery experience to the consumers, as the big Australian producer McGuigan did a few years ago with its temporary ‘City Vineyards’ in Sydney, Dublin and London. Today, of course, we can be even more sophisticated: urban winery pop ups can come equipped with Virtual Reality headsets that allow people to ‘visit’ regions hundreds and possibly thousands of miles away without burning a gram of carbon.
Thinking of which, I’m betting that it won’t be too long before my hologram is speaking at virtual conferences, maybe simultaneously sampling wine poured from environmentally-friendly, light-to-transport test tubes.
