The surplus production in the wine sector: environmental costs analyzed by LCA, the case of an Italian winery

In order to reduce the risk of surplus wine production and its consequently environmental damages, this research tests the integration between the grape and others rural productions in the creation of a fruit juices to enlarge grape use and promote new market opportunity for wine sector. The idea is to move from the present linear model of this sector, in which grapes are grown only for wine production, to a more complex one, in which grapes are grown for other uses too, in order to obtain a better exploitation of raw materials, contrasting waste production, like nature does in the ecosystem, where there is no concept of waste. To evaluate the hypothesized improvement of the environmental performance achieved by the complex model compared with the linear one, an LCA analysis was conducted on both.