Wine Leather

A “Must”-Have for Eco-Conscious Collectors

Imagine the opportunity to own two uber-luxury products in one—a Louis Vuitton handbag made using leather dyed in Hennessy Cognac. What if the handbag used leather made of Hennessy Cognac? No longer a flight of fancy, “Wine Leather,” invented by Vegea, an Italian biomaterials company, is a fabric produced with the must (grape seeds and skins) leftover from wine production. The material is 100% vegan, sustainable, and can be recycled. The Vegea team debuted its prototypes made into dresses, handbags and shoes. It will soon be available for the furniture and auto industry—Bently announced it has chosen wine leather for the interiors of their new car model. Every year, 26 billion liters (7 billion gallons) of wine are produced worldwide, creating 6.5 billion kilos (14.3 billion pounds) of grape must. “We can potentially produce 2.6 billion square meters (28 billion sq ft) of VEGEA fabric every year,” he says. Unlike with animal-based leather, no toxic solvents or heavy metals are needed in the production process.

Port—by law—can only be blended, aged, and bottled at shippers’ warehouses, called “lodges” in Oporto.

Answer: False.

For most of its history, Port was matured in the lodges by law—a system that effectively insured that the big Port shippers monopolized the trade and that small growers were excluded from creating their own brands. That changed in 1986, and today Port can be, and often is, aged, bottled, and shipped directly from the farm estate (called in Portuguese a quinta). Today there are more than 100,000 vineyard properties in Portugal’s Douro Valley, the region from which all Port comes. These are owned by the shippers themselves, as well as the region’s roughly forty thousand growers, each of whom owns, on average, no more than a scant acre of vines.

“When it comes to wine, I tell people to throw away the vintage charts and invest in a corkscrew. The best way to learn about wine is drinking.”

—Alexis Lichine
Russian writer who wrote widely on wine in English (1913-1989)

Wine Leather

Get WineSpeed