Sustainability at Kluge Estate vineyard and winery

Kluge Estate, a vineyard and winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, with one of the largest productions in the Commonwealth, is working to become a more sustainable business. Through implementing sustainable practices, Kluge Estate is seeking to benefit its business, the environment, and its community. However, due to a lack of relevant information about its environmental impact, Kluge Estate's decision-makers are unable to justify sustainable choices with quantified data. To resolve this problem, this paper focuses on assessing Kluge Estate's environmental impact. The Kluge Estate system is a complex combination of agriculture and manufacturing, making it difficult to assess the environmental impact throughout the life-cycle of its products. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a method that quantifies the environmental impact of a product or process; the life-cycle starts with the extraction of raw materials from the earth, continues through manufacturing, transportation, consumer use of the product, and concludes with disposal or recycling. To conduct the LCA, the team mapped the inputs, outputs and processes of each life-cycle stage of the Kluge Estate product Cru, an aperitif wine, with the goal of providing quantitative information about environmental impact to decision makers. SimaPro 7.1, an LCA software package, was used to perform the LCA for the production of Cru. SimaPro 7.1 utilizes databases containing comprehensive data and conversions gathered through research concerning the impacts of specific materials and processes that exist; specifically, the capstone group used the Ecoinvent Life Cycle Inventory database, which contains agricultural information. The comparison of LCA stages of a bottle of Cru shows that the disposal stage has the greatest contribution in human health (DALY) and ecosystem quality (PDF * m
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* yr), but extraction has the greatest contribution in resources (MJ surplus). Further investigations into the extraction stage, comparing product components, show that the glass bottle has the largest contribution in human health, due to the energy intensive process to generate new glass. The Cru has the largest impact in ecosystem quality, due to the processes needed to harvest and cut the wood as well as the generation of ethanol. The Foil has the largest contribution in resources due to the process to generate tin. A look into Kluge Estate's on-site operation shows the processes in the vineyard and winery have similar environmental impacts in human health. The major contributor in the vineyard is the Spraying of the crops due to heavy tractor and agrochemical use. The major contributors in the winery are Aging, Stabilization and Storing, which all require large amounts of electricity. Its operation measured in ecosystem quality, shows the greatest environmental impacts come from the vineyard processes, again due to the spraying.