Guest column: Air travel and the politics of sustainable wine

As the world’s wine trade converges on CapeWine 2025 this week, there will be plenty of talk of the environment – as one panel on regenerative viticulture has it, “as sustainability shifts from buzzword to baseline”. Renewable energy in wineries, water-saving measures and action to preserve biodiversity are all hot topics, even amid the economic pressures of Trump’s tariff assault. But there’s a contradiction here: CapeWine attendees – around 2,000 from 60 foreign countries attended in 2022 – will have racked up a total of millions of air miles and hundreds of tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions getting there.

It’s a dilemma that was certainly on my mind as I researched my new book on sustainable wine this year. Flights for my week-long visit to South Africa alone, in February, racked up over 19,000 kilometres and nearly four tonnes of CO₂. And then there were my planes from London to California, Chile and Argentina, Portugal and Greece. I try hard to avoid long-haul flights, but it’s hard not to fly as a wine journalist or critic, especially one like me based outside the major wine-producing countries. It’s also the only way most of the world’s wine trade is going to get to South Africa to meet producers.

Part of the answer is that it’s relative and a question of scale. Any wine producer serious about working more sustainably needs to conduct a detailed carbon footprint analysis – and the results might surprise them.

Flying to Europe to sell your wine, or professionals like me visiting to publicise it, isn’t great for your carbon footprint. But it’s a drop in the ocean next to the industry’s biggest single source of emissions – glass bottles. In fact on average, energy-intensive glass accounts for around 40 per cent of a bottle of wine’s carbon footprint. To cut your emissions, you’d do better to source a 425-gramme bottle to replace the 550g ones you’re using than to cut out that trip to ProWein. And then there are the important bits of sustainability beyond climate change: cutting use of synthetic agro-chemicals, protecting biodiversity, and making wine more socially sustainable in the communities around wineries.

The hard truth is that sustainability is complicated: there are never simple or complete solutions, either for producers, consumers or anyone in the wine supply chain between them.

On the subject of packaging, for instance, you get easily the biggest carbon savings if you ship wine in bulk to be bottled in the destination market, rather than shipping full bottles from Cape Town to London and Rotterdam. But as RJ Botha, winemaker at Kleine Zalze told me when I visited, “I have a big issue with shifting bottling from a country with 37 per cent employment to a relatively rich county. We need to create as many jobs as possible here.” That’s a social sustainability issue, and he makes an important point. On the other hand, as Praisy Dlamini, founder of black-owned Adama Wines in Wellington, told me, “it’s really hard for a [small] company like this. It is right to bottle here and have the jobs here – but then you’re uncompetitive.”

So there are always trade-offs in sustainability – hard decisions that have to be made by winemakers who, at the same time, are up against it in a tough economic environment. We have to do what we can – and make imperfect choices.

That is precisely what the wine producers I met in South Africa and elsewhere this year are doing. Sustainability, in wine as in any other business, is a journey and a direction of travel, not a box-ticking exercise. And you can always do better.

While the challenges are huge, there are South Africa wine businesses doing just that. For example, Warwick Estate is cutting its water use using data gathered by drone to monitor vines’ vigour and water stress. At Radford Dale in Elgin, Alex Dale showed me the solar power system and batteries that have allowed them to go entirely off-grid. Spier took 20 tonnes of plastic out of supply chain just by moving from plastic tape to glue on cartons. And standing in his Polkadraai vineyards, Johan Reyneke sketched out how his new wildlife corridors will work, restoring some of the native fynbos.

Just because there isn’t a neat, comprehensive solution, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth striving to make wine more sustainably. That’s what South Africa’s most forward-looking producers are doing, and can show the world this week – even if the rest of the trade has had to fly to get there.

• Andrew Neather is a British wine journalist whose blog is A View from My Table.

Neather’s new book, co-authored with Jane Masters MW, Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, is published on 1 October by the Académie du Vin Library. Winemag readers can enjoy a 10% discount using the code WINEMAG10 – click here.