Environmental Impact of Wine Aging Process in Oak Barrels in Wineries of La Rioja (Spain)

Abstract

Producing quality wines is the primary objective of wine-making companies. Aging plays a fundamental role in the vinification process involved in the production of quality wines. This paper presents a gate-to-gate life cycle analysis (LCA) of all the productive processes involved in aging one liter of wine in Quercus alba/petrea oak barrels for six months. The research was undertaken using 225-L, 300-L, and 500-L barrels.

In the category Global Warming, aging in 225-L barrels has an environmental impact of 3.27 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine for every liter aged for six months in Quercus alba and 3.18 E-02 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine for Quercus petraea. The same aging in 300-L and 500-L barrels has environmental impacts of 2.21 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine and 1.58E-02 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine respectively for Quercus alba. These last values are reduced to 2.18 E-02 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine and 1.53 E-02 kg CO2 eq./liter of wine for Quercus petraea specie.