Likely to go the distance

Will the Soil Association's early summer consultation Green Paper on air-freighted organic food threaten organic wine in the UK? Are Tesco and Constellation Europe more environmentally friendly than Vintage Roots and Vinceremos?

Do you leave a lower carbon footprint buying wine from The Wine Society than in Oddbins? Welcome to the strange new world of wine in an age of climate change.

As it happens the Soil Association is not about to remove organic wine from its array of approved products. But its logic on air-freighted food does beg some uncomfortable questions of wine producers.

Air-freighted food accounts for very high-levels of greenhouse gases that are not consistent with the organic movement's principles of sustainability and "minimising pollution and waste" - a quote from the Green Paper.

As the Soil Association points out, air-freighting food accounts for around 0.2% of all UK carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.

So what's this got to do with wine? Well a rough calculation suggests that the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of transporting wine to this country are not much lower at around 0.13%.

Now remember why the Soil Association launched its consultation on air-freight. Because it is not consistent with a philosophy that seeks to "minimise pollution and waste".

Well what about wine then? "Significant savings in emissions are possible by changing the way that we import wine", points out WRAP, the Waste & Resources Action Programme.

Compared with other products wine is a long way from "minimising pollution and waste". A remarkably high proportion of the energy that goes into wine - and the greenhouse gas emissions that emerge from it - are focused on transport and packaging.

"Fifty two percent of the lifestyle wine emissions (the total emissions of production, transport and packaging) from wine are from transport and packaging," according to Sally Easton MW, speaking at the London International Wine and Spirits Fair, "the rest is from production".

Compare that with New Zealand lamb where only 18% of total emissions come from transport to the UK. The proportion of a wine's emissions coming from transport can vary widely, but it would appear that wine in the UK is an unreasonably large emitter of transport emissions.

So does that mean that for wine to be truly organic it should be imported in bulk, packaged in light-weight, clear glass bottles or even modern bladder packs?

"If I could I'd definitely consider it," says Lance Pigott, director of Vintage Roots the specialist organic retailer and wholesaler.

"But when you ship in bulk it's a question of minimum volumes. I'm just not shifting enough volume to do that. Or else I'd be sitting on stock. It's a difficult one. We're just not a big enough customer to change the way our suppliers do things."

But isn't that just an excuse for organic producers to sit on their hands? Shouldn't being organic sometimes be about leading the way? "We ought to try and lead more, but it's a major investment", he points out. "It's an issue that needs to be led by the bigger players".

But surely these larger players have already led the way? The major multiples have all signed up to the Courtauld Commitment intended to design out packaging waste growth by 2008 and deliver absolute reductions by 2010. "Yes, but they've taken a long time to get their act together," insists Pigott. "They should have acted months, years earlier".

But does the fact that the large players have now "got their act together" mean that the truly environmentally conscious wine buyer now looks to the big players for their wine? It's clear these are the companies with the scale and investment to bring wine into the UK most efficiently.

And when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency is absolutely essential: efficiency and the ability to invest in new packaging technology.

According to WRAP a move to "best in class" packaging by wine producers offers the greatest reduction in the weight of waste packaging of any product on the supermarket shelf. Better wine packaging would remove 352,000 tonnes of unnecessary packaging from UK shelves.

This is important as the UK is unique in the problems it faces with wine packaging.

The UK is the world's largest importer of wine, yet has few economically viable uses for green glass so we simply throw away a lot of the rather weighty packaging that arrives here.

Working in partnership with WRAP, Constellation and Tesco have both already removed around 3,000 tonnes of wine packaging per year. Laudable certainly, although in effect this means unnecessary wine packaging has been reduced by a mighty 1.7%.

However, both have also moved strongly in favour of bulk shipping and UK bottling too. Constellation is opening a new bottling plant in Avonmouth in 2009 and has been keen to trumpet the environmental benefits it should bring, reducing emissions by 40%. Tesco too is moving its own-brand wines towards bulk-shipping and bottling in the UK.

So perhaps the large volume retailers and importers are the new standard bearers for a cleaner, greener future? The Soil Association is keen to be involved in the debate closely not least because a DEFRA report in 2005 suggested that sometimes improvements in transport efficiency were seen to outweigh the "benefits" of organic production. It implied in effect, that consumers might trade the "benefits" of organic production for the "benefits" of more sustainable transport and packaging.

There is another reason the Soil Association is keen to be involved. Much as a few selective statistics, a snappy headline and a mischief-making journalist might suggest that Tesco is more environmentally friendly than Vintage Roots or "Air-freight debate threatens organic wine", the sheer complexity of carbon emissions, transport and packaging makes it uniquely open to damaging distortion. A report earlier this year in The Times suggested that consumers wanting to reduce their carbon footprint should buy European rather than New Zealand wine. According to New Zealand Winegrowers, chief executive, Philip Gregan, the emphasis on food miles appeared to be "a peculiarly British thing", but it was a potentially dangerous approach.

The approach also leads to weak results. Nigel Greening of Felton Road in New Zealand has carried out detailed calculations on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with growing grapes, producing wine and shipping it to a store in the UK. Working through several pages of calculations Greening has arrived at a figure of 337g of CO2 per bottle of Felton Road wine.

"That means that it is better on C02 miles to buy wine from New Zealand than wine from Southern France, Italy or Spain" he insists. Bordeaux would be about a tie with New Zealand, Burgundy marginally less C02 to transport." As if aware of promoting the merits of another Pinot Noir than his own, Greening then comes up with the suggestion that Burgundy requires more C02 to make.

"All our energy for wine production, heating and cooling comes from electricity, but 100% of our electricity comes from carbon neutral sources - hydro-electric - which isn't the case in Burgundy," he ads.

In New Zealand over 60% of electricity is generated from renewable resources.

Most interestingly, though, Greening has calculated that "driving a car one mile in the UK to buy a bottle of wine uses far more CO2 than the shipping of the wine". The Soil Association points out too that the biggest cause of transport emissions are the miles driven by UK distributors and shoppers.

As economist Tim Harford put it in the Financial Times recently, compared to the UK road miles of distributors and shoppers, "air and sea miles are a rounding error". Whilst distribution networks have improved their loading volumes significantly in recent years, the miles chalked up by shoppers remain by a considerable margin the least efficient part of the whole network. So in fact home-delivery from The Wine Society, Laithwaites, Tesco Direct and Vintage Roots is more environmentally-friendly than popping down to Oddbins or Thresher.

Encouraging consumers to buy online and in cases rather than pop out each time they want a bottle seems to make absolute sense from an environmental point of view, as well as in business terms for companies like Majestic. Yet an insistence on bulk packaging risks marginalising smaller producers, a group strongly represented in the world of organic wine. It may also demonise certain "high emission regions"' which require long overland and sea journeys like inland Argentina, there is the risk of damaging the livelihoods of very vulnerable growers too.

Focusing on simple to understand metrics like food or wine miles or bulk versus bottled imports risks creating a distorted picture that's vulnerable to media mischief making. Rather than being complementary green factors as first imagined, the principles of organics and transport appear to be increasingly in conflict with one another.