Our Approach to Carbon
How we measure and offset the carbon footprint of every bottle we sell
Our biggest hesitation when considering starting Vino Cammino was the climate impact our business would create. Shipping heavy glass bottles of wine in big fridges halfway across the world to a country that makes excellent wine, while the climate emergency continues, is indulgent, at best. But having thought deeply about this, we believe that:
- there is a climate friendly approach to wine importing (read below for details)
- these wines are unique and thrilling enough to add real value to the lives of our customers beyond locally made wine
- we should stock up on these global treasures now because who knows how much longer they will be able to be made as the traditional wine growing regions experience hotter and hotter summers (and if we are going to watch the collapse of civilisation we'd prefer to do it with a glass of Barbaresco in hand)
Estimated Carbon Footprint of our Wine
We've completed a high level lifecycle assessment to estimate the carbon footprint for each bottle of wine that we sell. We have used the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Product Standard to guide our calculations. Being a small business with limited resources, we can't justify investing in a robust lifecycle assessment across all of our producers and logistics partners. However, we have engaged Linden Sustainability to verify our emissions estimate and they have confirmed that we've made enough conservative assumptions to make it more likely that we have over-estimated than under-estimated. We will update these figures annually to swap assumptions for real data, and to reflect expected industry improvements (most recent update was May 2025).
In the chart below, you can see our current estimates across the 4 wine and brandy styles we import. Organic red wine comes in with lowest emissions per bottle, mostly due to avoiding synthetic fertilisers, less need for cooling during the winemaking process v whites, and lighter bottles v sparkling wine. Cognac has the largest footprint per bottle due to gas heating during distillations, but is the lowest per standard drink.
These estimates are based primarily on academic studies, with particular reliance on a literature review combining results from 34 Life Cycle Assessment case studies for wineries in Southern Europe. We also real data from suppliers where available, as well as a number of different emissions calculators for stages of the wine's life post-winery. One example of our conservative estimate approach is using the footprint of conventional whites, sparkling wines and brandy because we could not find reliable data on organic production for those styles, even though many of our imports are organically produced and all are made with careful consideration for environmental impact. For red wine, organic production has a 20% lower footprint than conventional production.
In the next graph below you can see the various contributions toward the total figures for each style. There are 3 main contributors:
- Material acquisition & pre-processing: This includes grape production but the bulk of the emissions come from the manufacture of glass bottles, which requires intense heat.
- Production: This includes everything that happens within the winery, with whites and sparkling higher than reds because of cooling requirements. Cognac is much larger here due to the use of gas heaters for distillation.
- Distribution: This is a big category and covers trucking the wine to port, shipping to Australia, storing in a warehouse and final delivery to the customer. We try to keep that last part down by requiring a minimum of 6 bottles per delivery.
The distribution figure is significantly impacted by our decision to keep our wines at optimum temperatures for transport and storage. For example, refrigerated containers have a 30% higher emissions profile than regular containers. But, unlike those "bargain" imported bottles on sale at your local bottlo, we don't see the point of sourcing excellent wine only to have its character flattened by cooking it in a regular container as it sails over the equator, or in a tin roof warehouse on a hot summer's day in Sydney.
Another example of a conservative assumption is that we have assumed our logistics partners are not offsetting any of their emissions, though most make some sort of claim to that end. We will maintain that assumption until we are confident that we have long term relationships with providers who can offer strong evidence of high-quality offsets.
Bottle manufacturing requires extraordinary heat and so it the largest contributor to emissions
Shipping from Europe to Sydney comes in second place for emissions
We buy high quality carbon offsets for 100% of the estimated impact of every bottle sold
We are committed to purchasing high quality offsets to match the estimates above of the emissions of each bottle we sell. Our preference is for permanent carbon removal credits where available.
We acknowledge the need to zero each bottle’s footprint as fast as possible, but believe investing in this type of offset is important while we press for green shipping options and encourage producers and consumers (that’s you) to consider different containers for fine wine.
P.S. If you'd like to know more details about our estimates and approach, have some constructive feedback to share or just want to chat climate and wine, please get in touch with us at hello@vinocammino.com.au