The sustainability advantages of making wine from berries, specifically wild berries.
Sure it tastes great, but how does it compare to grape wine environmentally?
Sustainability is a hot topic these days, as it should be. Climate change is one of the biggest challenge of our time, and it will take a concerted effort from people, companies and organizations around the world to avoid catastrophic changes to the environment. But while this is something we take seriously, as a small company we believed there was little we could do beyond actively recycling waste, using energy efficiently and generally keeping an eye out for opportunities (see sidebar).
That changed when Alko joined with the other Nordic alcohol monopolies to set a goal of reducing CO2 emissions of products by 50% by 2030. Alko is a major seller of our wines, so we do our best to be a good and responsible supplier for them. But reading through the initiative was disheartening; the entire focus is on packaging. We have already looked at making packaging improvements, but the upfront costs were prohibitive for a company as small as ours. Could it be that sustainability for wine is only about packaging? The monopolies admitted that better packaging alone wasn’t enough for them to meet the reduction goal they set, so there must be other ways to also improve.
Some more research uncovered a paper that reviewed a large number of scientific studies on the subject. And while glass bottles are responsible for a significant portion of the CO2 generated in the life cycle of wine production, use of diesel, fertilizer and other items associated with the farming of grapes on average contributed as much or more to the carbon footprint. Vinification, which is the work performed in the winery itself was a relatively minor component.
For us, this was an eye-opening revelation. We had been doing what we could to make our winery greener, but it turns out that something we had focused on simply because that is how we got the best wines was even more important. The majority of the berries we use are wild berries, picked in the forests of Finland. In other words, there is no farm and our wines by that fact alone are likely responsible for at least 40% less CO2 than they would be if we were using farmed grapes.
But that is not the only sustainability benefit of using wild berries for wine. By creating world-class wines from wild berries, we are demonstrating to the world something that can be done in Finland but in few other places. Finland is one of the only countries in the world that still possesses significant forested clean wilderness. Using this wilderness for quality wine production provides Finland with a concrete economic benefit for preserving and expanding forests, which is one of if not the best proven method for sequestration of CO2. Thus, if the demand for wild berry wines helps to preserve or expand forests, the sustainability benefits can become so great that the carbon footprint of wild berry wines could become negative. There is a long ways to go before that could happen; people sometimes ask “are there enough berries to support higher levels of production?” The answer is unambiguously yes – only about 10% of the wild berries that grow in Finland are picked and used, and only a tiny portion of that is made into wine. That means there is a lot of capacity to expand the production of wild berry wines from existing forests. But if other places begin planting forests to copy what we have in Finland, that would be a wonderful result for the fight against climate change.
This leads to a modest proposal for the Nordic alcohol monopolies. You want to reduce the CO2 footprint of the products you sell by 50% by 2030. For wines, that is an easy target to achieve. The first step is to replace those grape wines that currently fill the shop shelves with Nordic wines made from native wild berries.
Sidebar: How Ainoa works to minimize CO2 at the winery.
Minimizing CO2 emissions isn’t just about being a good global citizen who is part of the effort to mitigate climate change. It also makes good economic sense. At individual and small business scales, minimizing CO2 lines up quite closely with minimizing the use of fossil fuels. We can’t afford to spend a fortune paying for fossil fuels for our business, and we don’t want our children to be forced to pay the price for climate change in the future. So we do what we can to make our energy use efficient and if possible use renewables.
The winery uses six large solar panels on the roof for heating in sunny weather. This provides a wonderful zero carbon source of building heat, but only enough to act as a supplement to other sources.
Great sunset. Also visible are the solar panels on the winery building roof.
Currently the main way we both heat and cool the winery building is with the two high efficiency air-air heat pumps we installed. We absolutely needed them for the summer, when the stored wines need to be kept cool to preserve their quality, but they also provided a benefit in the winter over the electric powered heating system that was primarily used previously.
When it gets really cold, air-air heat pumps can become inefficient, at which point we can shift most of the heating burden to our wood burning furnace. We buy the wood for it from one of our neighbors, who harvests it sustainably from his own forest. We plan to use more wood this year than we have in the past, and David is constructing a shed to store the firewood. He built it using 100% scavenged wood, mostly from old pallets but also used lumber taken from a fallen building on the property. Only the metal roof and metal fasteners were purchased.
Wood shed needs its roof. Plenty of pallets still available if it needs to be expanded.
Chiller vent set to “winter” mode.
After building temperature control, the second highest use of energy at the winery is the individual temperature control of the wine tanks. We generally keep the tanks at a lower temperature than the building, and use a chiller unit specifically designed for the purpose. It throws off a lot of heat in the form of hot air, which in the summer we didn’t want. But we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to keep that in the winter? So we constructed a special vent system that allows us to blow the hot air out of the building in the summer and blows it into the building during winter. In both situations, it lowers the energy demands on the air-air heat pumps.
Eventually, we hope to add geothermal power and solar electric or wind power to our mix, but only once we can afford the very high upfront costs of installing those systems.
Lastly, we do use a lot of berries, and end up with a fair bit of waste once we finish using them for wine. We continue to look at ways to get more out of them, but eventually what we can not use ends up in our compost pile, which is a good method of sequestering the carbon back into the soil.