Good Grape Wine Company

October 4 2007

The Answer to All Mysteries Are Discovered With Wine

As my mailbox continues to fill up with magazine covers with a green bent, including my wine magazines, and I get press releases from wineries with one eco story after another, I guess I’ve started drinking the populace-oriented kool-aid about doing a little bit more than just recycling.

I mean, after all, I can’t just stand back as our earth gets warmer and watch passively with the possibility that Napa might become too warm to grow Cabernet.

Doesn’t most altruism start with a dose of self-interest?

Perhaps my work starts with a little prostelyzing … 

Yeah, I know … 

My wife and I went to an informal birthday gathering last night for a friend—a pottery friend — the guest of honor—and other people that constitute a band of folks that take pottery at the local art center, including my wife.  It is a pretty loose bunch of people with all kinds of viewpoints, most settling along the lines that represent the small contingent of blue people in a red state.

Several bottles into the evening for the group, I flippantly asked the hostess if she recycled while holding an empty wine bottle, while casting my effervescent wine-fueled gaze at several other bottles.  It was a light moment.  She said she didn’t recycle.  I added, with a joking nudge, “You’re not a conservative that thinks global warming is fictitious are you?”

Then, as I was mentally re-calculating the relative intelligence of my jousting with this certain Mensa member that went to Cornell and is an engineer, she launched into the following that is loosely paraphrased:

“It actually costs more in energy and emissions to re-use glass then it takes to make glass in the first place.” 

Okay.  I stood corrected.

She continued, again loosely paraphrased, “If you’re really interested in the environment you should be against all development that involves cement production and the use of concrete.”

I reached for a fresh glass … and a fresh bottle.

I think I might have learned something. 

Did you know that, concrete is second only to water as the most consumed substance in the world? Every year, almost one ton of concrete is produced for every human on the planet.

Cement is the principal ingredient in concrete. Producing one ton of cement results in the emission of approximately one ton of CO2, created by fuel combustion and the calcination of raw materials. Cement manufacturing is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for approximately 7% to 8% of CO2 globally.  (See this .ppt for more information)

Yikes.

All those CO2 emissions are the primary culprits in ozone depletion which contributes to greater atmospheric temperatures.  Greater atmospheric temperatures is, of course, global warming.

Cement and concrete is bad, bad, bad. 

So, there you have it.  They key to cocktail conversation?  Provoke somebody.  The key, apparently, to ensuring that your Cabernet continues to enjoy a sense of place for the next several decades in the same place that it currently spends its fruit-bearing days?  Stop concrete production.  Oh, and by the way, the calcination process that occurs in cement production is comprised mostly of mineral aggregate—stones, gravel, and sand … or, in other words, the stuff that makes our wine taste “of place.”

Recycling is good, but scorning concrete is apparently better.  Ah, the things I learn when wine is the social lubricant.

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