Louisa Pearson: Growing vines at home to reduce your carbon footprint

I Have an itch to scratch. My itch has a voice. "Try growing grapes," it whispers. "Think of the stuffed vine leaves, the fruit salads and the home-made plonk. Think of the satisfaction you'll get from showing your luscious bunches to all those who said you can't grow grapes outdoors in Scotland."

We're not talking about a whole vineyard – just one humble vine, most likely the hardy Vitis vinifera 'Boskoop Glory'. I've read so many articles about the Guyot method of training and pruning that I could probably win gainful employment in a real vineyard.

I think it was when my other half said, "We're not wasting space in the garden trying to grow grapes," that I really made my mind up. Chteau Pearson is about to be ramped into production.

If I pull it off, I will be guzzling wine that comes with an incredibly low carbon footprint. But what to do until the grapes start ripening? First, a brief summary of the bad things about wine: shipping miles, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides sprayed on the crops (and accidentally on some of the workers in countries where labour laws aren't very stringent); energy costs for making and transporting all those glass bottles. Hangovers. That'll do for the moment.

The UK consumes about a billion bottles of wine a year. On average, transporting wine to market contributes 35 per cent of its CO2 emissions. Angelic greens will be drinking local and organic wine (visit www.englishorganicwine.co.uk if you think this option is make-believe). Organic wines reduce worries about the effects of pesticides on the environment – www. vinceremos.co.uk has a good selection, while Fairtrade options will mean a better deal for the producer.

Wine coming from sunnier shores might make you worry about drink miles, but most of it gets to us by sea, which means a hundred times less CO2 per tonne/ kilometre than air freight.

On to the packaging. If you lived on the Continent you could take a big plastic vat to your local vineyard and get it filled up before decanting it into reuseable bottles. Think how much money you'd save on heating bills if you lived there, too. Tempting, isn't it? The outdoor markets, stalls laden with fresh vegetables, baguettes and ripe cheeses? Back to reality, there are signs that wine producers are trying to address the glass bottle issue.

Some producers, such as Banrock Station, have switched to lightweight glass bottles. The company says the bottles offer a weight reduction of 27 per cent along with substantial reductions in energy use, CO2 and water use. Back in 2007, Sainsbury's broke new ground by packaging two of its wines in plastic PET bottles, quickly followed by Wolf Blass's Green Label wines. But most still come in standard glass bottles.

One option would be to transport the wine in tankers and do the bottling in the UK. This already happens to about 200 million litres and, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), shipping wine in bulk from Australia or France reduces CO2 emissions by 30 to 40 per cent compared with bottling at source.

You have plenty to think about the next time you pop out for a bottle of red, haven't you? And spare a thought for the willpower it's going to take for me to stick to my eco-friendly principles in the year ahead, seeing as a bit of global warming would probably be highly beneficial to my Boskoop Glories.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, January 17, 2010