Measuring the carbon footprint of wine tourism and cellar door sales

The wine industry has been dedicating increasing efforts to considering the sustainability of the environment. Various approaches have been implemented to reduce the industry's carbon footprint. With over 40 million wine tourists globally, cellar door operations have become an important distribution channel, especially for the financial sustainability of small and medium-sized wineries, but this component has not been addressed in existing environmental life cycle assessments. This paper presents a methodology for measuring the carbon footprint of wine tourism and cellar door sales based on a combination of the bottom-up and the top-down approaches. In the case of Australia, we find both domestic and international wine tourism lead to substantially higher carbon emissions than the standard wine distribution channels. The difference can be more than 100 fold per bottle of wine. In addition, the benchmarking analysis indicates that cellar door sales may become the most carbon intensive component across all life cycle stages of wine. This information offers an opportunity to evaluate the environmental trade-offs that maybe involved in obtaining the numerous benefits of wine tourism, and to consider ways of minimizing wine tourism-related carbon emissions in the future. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.