Environmental profile of an Italian vineyard life cycle

The international wine industry is in a sizable and increasingly competitive market environment. Current global wine production is estimated to be between 262 and 270 million hectoliters, with almost eight million hectares planted for viticultural purposes. The world’s leading wine producing countries are Italy, France and Spain, with other major countries including the USA, Argentina and China. Every year France and Italy compete for the top spot among the world’s wine producing countries. In 2014 France was the world’s biggest wine producer, producing almost 47 million hectolitres followed by Italy with just under 45 million hectolitres (OIV- International Organisation of Vine and Wine). The wine making process is interesting from an environmental perspective as it involves a number of quite different processes, varying across the agricultural (grape growing), to industrial (bottling), to transportation phases. Many of these processes contribute to climate change, which will in turn directly affect this industry, such as through changes in precipitation, occurrence of droughts and higher temperatures. Given that many wine grape varieties can only be grown across a fairly narrow range of climates for optimum quality and production, the wine industry is therefore at a greater potential risk from climate change than many other broad-based crops. The purpose of this work is to assess the environmental impacts of the cultivation, management and disposal of an italian vineyard during its entire life cycle. In particular the aim of this work is to provide a tool that allows on the basis of different properties of the soil (physical-chemical properties, altitude, exposure) to assess the most suitable vine spacing and to evaluate which cultivation is the most suitable for the soil in order to reduce the environmental impacts. The system is a vineyard in an area of 1 hectar with vine spacing of 3x1.5 meters located in the italian province of Reggio Emilia. The functional unit is the production of wine grapes in the thirty years of the productive structure that means a total production of 5661 tons of wine grapes. To assess the environmental impact the analysis was conducted using the SimaPro 8.0.4 software and ReCiPe, USEtox and IMPACT 2002+ evaluation methods. Data related to cultivation, management and disposal were directly collected from the producer or from Ecoinvent database, while data related to the environmental emissions arising from the use of fertilizers and heavy metals were calculated following the criterion proposed by Ecoinvent. Whenever possible, emissions to air, water and soil from pesticide considered in the present study were calculated using the Mackay model. In this study the grape sugar content, that is related to the wine quality, was considered as a coproduct. The results show that the maximum damage is due to direct emissions of fertilizers and pesticides and to land use. In particular, vine spacing affects the duration of the vineyard, the total mass of grapes produced during its entire life cycle, the amount of annual treatments of fertilizers and plant protection products.