The 202 wineries affiliated with the Catalunya Designation of Origin (DO) will soon have access to a personalized online tool to calculate their carbon footprint, thanks to a project by the company inèdit and the Catalunya DO. This initiative is pioneering among all the designations of origin in Spain. The goal of this project is to “provide Catalunya DO wineries with a measurement system that facilitates the design of decarbonization plans as much as possible,” says Carles Gasol, Business Development Director at inèdit.

The online tool provided to them is called èdit®, and it is developed by the strategic eco-innovation studio. It allows organizations to measure their environmental impact in a personalized, continuous, and self-sufficient manner, according to regulations such as ISO 14064 and ISO 14046, among others. Thus, inèdit will design an èdit ready for wineries to enter their operational and purchasing data and calculate their carbon footprint. Although support will be offered in calculating the carbon footprint and in the development and monitoring of decarbonization plans, the aim is for wineries to eventually do this autonomously.

The carbon footprint, a “crucial” first step

“Calculating a company’s carbon footprint is the crucial first step in defining and implementing strategies to reduce environmental impact and assessing their effectiveness,” comments Gasol. It allows knowing the absolute value of wineries’ contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as providing knowledge about how these emissions are distributed among the direct and indirect activities of wineries —that is, those emitted by the energy producer required by the winery, those of suppliers, and those emitted by the cultivation of the vine itself. It also enables setting reduction goals and designing and prioritizing effective actions to achieve this purpose. The actions to achieve this goal will be a series of initiatives and carbon footprint reduction actions that will be reviewed and validated based on interviews with Catalunya DO wineries.

Established in 1999, the DO Catalunya includes the majority of Catalan municipalities producing wine and currently has 202 affiliated wineries. Its aim is to improve the quality of wines and vineyards, promoting research and the application of the latest technologies as necessary mechanisms to meet an increasingly demanding market. Currently, over sixty million bottles of wine with the Catalunya DO seal are marketed.