Dr Vino’s wine blog

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Welcome readers of the Wine & Spirits magazine! If you’re looking for some bullet points and discussion of my research with Pablo Paster on wine’s carbon footprint, check here. Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates on the right sidebar.

And if you haven’t seen the issue that is hitting mailboxes and newsstands now (but not the web), check out the Syrah extravaganza issue with reporting and reviews from Australia, the US (Santa Cruz), Chile and France. There’s also an interview on the back page that I did with editor and publisher Josh Greene.

While some of it covers familiar ground to blog readers, there’s some new material and great art (I wasn’t Simpsonized)! And I also make a proposal for later in the year: because air freight has such a big effect on a bottle’s carbon footprint and much Beaujolais nouveau is sent around the world by plane, how about saying no to nouveau and making the third Thursday of November a global celebration of local wine? Hit the comments with your initial thoughts on this idea. We’ll come back to it later in the year.

One point of clarification: the story ran a chart from our paper that reflects the various amounts of carbon dioxide emissions for bottles from different places. Napa looks horrible with even more than Australia! What was reflected in the text of the paper but didn’t make it into the chart in this story is that all the bottles were being sent to Chicago via differing modes of transport. The Napa one was sent sent by air. Sending it by truck would bring it down slightly below the CO2 emissions of the French bottle.