“Vernaccia di San Gimignano DOCG”: towards a sustainable wine farming

The “Vernaccia di San Gimignano” is a white wine, the first to achieve the DOC label in Italy, in 1966. After about 50 years from that achievement, the Consortium “Denominazione San Gimignano” launched a project for promoting environmentally responsible wine-farming among its members. The first phase of the project involved four wine-farms to assess the average Carbon Footprint of one bottle of Vernaccia di San Gimignano (FU, 0.75 L) in order to highlight supply chain hotspots and best practices to put into effects. A minimum value of 0.60 kg CO2-eq and a maximum of 1.34 kg CO2-eq per FU were calculated, mainly due to the use of packaging materials. Main differences depend on the organization of farms, rather than their management (i.e. organic vs conventional). The application of best practices by farms would potentially allow for decreasing impacts of about 33%, in terms of Carbon Footprint.