CO2 Share of Wine and Beer Revisited

In a previous post I calculated the approximate CO2 footprint of a bottle of beer to be 125 grams. The calculation did not look at the CO2 share of raw materials (cultivation, storage, transportation) and used the average CO2 output of the entire brewery (New Belgium Brewery) instead of calculating for individual process steps.

The New York Times has a nice calculation for a bottle of wine, shipped from France and shipped (to New York) California. The respective numbers for France and California are, 1371 and 2514 grams. The breakdown is as follows:



The transportation numbers for California are higher due to coast to coast shipping. If we take the average then it is about 700 grams and for local consumption within California it is about 50-75 grams (guesstimate).

To put this in perspective, a bottle of French wine is equivalent to driving 3 miles and a bottle of California wine is about 3.5 to 5.5 miles. So if you biked to work for an average of 6 miles round trip and finished the evening with a bottle of French wine, your saving from not driving th car is cut in half.


The transportation costs for beer is lower because most breweries are located close to the market they sell. The numbers however may well be an underestimate.

In both the Beer and Wine CO2 per bottle calculations, the numbers are average. That is the total numbers are distributed among the quantities produced. But most of these CO2 costs (manufacturing, transportation, storage) are fixed costs and not marginal costs, producing and consuming one more bottle of beer does not increase CO2 cost by another 125 gram. But the numbers do add up if everyone cuts just one bottle of beer per week.

For driving, the 450 grams per mile is marginal cost, so even if you are the only one who chose not to drive there are savings.

I wonder what is the CO2 impact of drunken driving!