Environmental Pioneers

After decades spent witnessing harvests starting earlier and earlier, Champagne became the first wine-growing region in the world to carry out a carbon footprint assessment of their industry in 2003. (Harvests now begin on average 18 days sooner than 30 years ago). At that time, the region initiated an ambitious climate plan aimed at cutting emissions by 75% by 2050. Among the most significant initiatives: reducing bottle weight (packaging accounts for 1/3 of Champagne production’s carbon emissions), waste recycling (100% of winemaking byproducts such as grape pomace and lees, are now used by the cosmetics, healthcare, and agro-food sectors), and biomass conversion (80% of the 120k tons of annually-generated vine shoots, branches, and other prunings are now ground into the soil as natural fertilizer). From its efforts to date, Champagne has been able to cut C02 emissions generated by each bottle of wine by 20% over the last 15 years.