Drink Wine or Beer for Least Environmental Impact?

Last month I came across this article on treehugger raising the question of whether drinking wine or beer was less harmful environmentally.  When I read the full piece I was a little disappointed as I had imagined it would cover aspects regarding the production – growing conditions, fertiliser use, energy used in wine making versus malting/brewing.  I started to think that vines could be grown locally with few inputs or mechanisation and the wine-making could be achieved with limited energy use whereas growing barley was going to rely on mechanisation, transport, energy for malting/drying and then all the energy to mash and boil.  However, the article covered none of this, the only factors considered were around transportation – of raw ingredients to the production facility and the final transportation to the consumer.  Therefore I thought I’d look a bit further into the subject.

How Climate Change Could Affect Wine

This morning we had a presentation by Antonio Busalacchi founding director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) and Professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland College Park. He has done research on how predicted climate changes in the next 100 years would effect the wine production areas of the world.  I wrote a brief summary of what I heard…

More benefits of wine

I recently came across the Science Daily web site and signed up for their free email of current science news. The emails come with an enormous number of headlines each day. A few wine-related stories that interested me…

Plastic wine bottles

I just came across this (bottle on the left) in our local supermarket here in the uk…

My attention was drawn by the strange colour of the bottle and the fact that it looked rather small compared to all the other wine bottles. When I picked it up I found that it was very light and had flexible sides.

Not spending much time in the UK, I had missed the news about the arrival of plastic wine bottles.

Apart from thoughts about possible affects the plastic has on the wine, I immediately thought of some major benefits this packaging has for wine…

The Recovery of Sicilian Wine

This is a piece I wrote as a university report on our field trip in Sicily in February 2007…

Port and Northern Portugal

This is a university report I wrote on our field trip in Northern Portugal…

Salumi Field Trip

Last week I had my first field trip with the University of Gastronomic Sciences, a thematic stage looking at salumi (cured meats).

I was very lucky to be allocated to the group going to the Antica Macelleria Falorni in Greve, Tuscany where we were accommodated very generously and luxuriously by the Folonari family at their wine estate, Tenuta di Nozzole. This led to us learning almost as much about wine as salumi during our stay…