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Wine

Never before have we had such a vast selection of wine to choose from. But the price of reaching for that cheeky Chile number or that fruity New Zealand wine is a huge import and export market to ship the booze all over the world. Besides transportation, wine also requires a good degree of chemical intervention in order to grow the grapes. A typical vineyard will use up to 17 applications of pesticide, herbicide and fungicide during the growth cycle. These can all have a negative impact on the soil and water tables.

Yet organic wines are now also becoming more widely available in supermarkets, saving you from having to hunt them out at specialist shops. The same is true of organic beer and cider. Although, with beer it has been found to be difficult to grow hops organically in the UK and so often these are imported, which of course carries a carbon emissions price tag in terms of transportation.

But with wine don’t be fooled into thinking that plastic screwtops are better for the environment than natural cork. The current trend of wine makers switching to screwtops, predicted to dominate the market by 2015, has environmentalists and cork producers worried. As it stands, the cork industry is a pretty sustainable industry with most cork coming form Spain and Portugal. But with no market for cork the concern is what will happen to these huge cork oak forests, which are ranked as some of Europe’s top biodiversity hotspots.