The winery in a perspective of sustainability: the parameters to be measured and their reliability

In recent years, the entire agricultural and agri-food sector, and in particular the wine sector, has been comparing and adapting to the issue of environmental sustainability, both within the vineyard and within the winery. In this context, various projects and methodologies have been developed to measure the environmental sustainability of the wine sector as a whole (VIVA project). To enter into this perspective, however, the wineries must equip themselves with very complex parameter measurement systems as well as data processing and currently only few of them are able to do so, as most wineries do not have the equipment both at the instrumentation and software level and also do not possess the required expertise. In order to verify the measurement and size of some cellar parameters related to sustainability, a survey was carried out in the area of Friuli Venezia Giulia and Eastern Veneto.The results showed that electricity consumption in Wh/l of produced wine varies considerably depending on the average temperature during the harvesting period and, in the specific case of a small-medium sized Friulian winery (about 2,000 hl/year of wine), the performance indicator shows consumption of around 250-350 Wh/l. As for the consumption of water in the cellar, blue water consumption from the aqueduct in general is around a value of 4 liters of water per liter of produced wine. In the three wineries that take part in the VIVA project, the value is 2.5 liters of water/liter of wine (medium-large wineries). From the analysis it can be observed that water and electricity consumption are high but very variable depending on the climate, place, type of wine, type of cellar.