What can the wine industry teach us about sustainability?

• News & Highlights

• Winemaking is a low-emitting sector – but it's under particular threat from climate change.
• Many winemakers today are putting sustainability at the heart of what they do, and are increasingly focusing on fair working practices for employees.
• The sector's efforts demonstrate how collective action and responsibility are key to a sustainable future for businesses elsewhere, too.

There is scarcely a headline today that does not mention ESG, responsible business, or sustainability. The wine industry has an 8,000 year history of adaptation to change, and as such it offers a unique perspective into resilience and lessons that can be broadly applied across sectors and geographies.
To put it in an environmental context, the wine industry is far from the worst emitter. One flight from London to New York city generates almost 1,000kg of CO2 per passenger whereas the average bottle of wine releases just over 1kg of CO2 over its lifetime. So taking just carbon into consideration, that’s almost three years of having a bottle of wine a day to match the emissions of one cross-Atlantic flight. But as recent frosts and fires have shown, even if itself a low emitter, viticulture is threatened by climate change and with it, potentially a substantial part of this over $400 billion dollar global business.