Life cycle assessment application to the wine sector: A critical review

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool that allows evaluation of the environmental performances of a product, service or process considering the whole life cycle or a part of it. In the wine sector, the application of LCA has grown significantly in recent years and several studies have been carried out about this topic that are similar to other research fields. Nowadays, LCA is an important and acknowledged environmental assessment tool but its application to the wine sector is still in a developing phase. For this reason, the present study proposes a critical review of papers dealing with both the wine sector and LCA. The critical review points out that the main wine hotspots are the viticulture phase (mainly due to fuel, fertilizer and pesticides consumption) and the wine primary packaging production (due to glass bottles). Furthermore, the papers taken into consideration have a wide variability in the system boundaries definition as well as a shortage of availability of original and site-specific inventory data. Such key factors are sensitive aspects that have a huge influence on the results of a study and they are also affected by a wide variability: these issues need further scientific contribution through future studies.