Life Cycle Assessment of the production of pisco in Peru

The production of pisco is concentrated along the southern hyper-arid coast in five producing regions. Despite efforts to regulate its production, the Denomination of Origin still lacks a best practices guideline for producers to follow in terms of choosing technologies and operations that can help towards cleaner production. Hence, the present study aims at analyzing a selected number of pisco wineries using Life Cycle Assessment to compute the environmental impacts of this product in order to identify the systems' hotspots and propose improvement actions. A total of six wineries were assessed, including the viticulture, vinification/distillation and bottling stages. Results, which included 13 impact categories and were reported for a conventional 500 mL pisco bottle, showed that environmental impacts vary substantially depending on the winery assessed. Global warning potential (GWP) results ranged from 1.7 kg CO₂eq to 4.0 kg CO₂eq. Viticulture operations presented highest environmental burdens in most categories, pushed by the production and on-site emissions of fertilizers in terms of eutrophication, GWP or fossil depletion and by irrigation in the case of water depletion. The bottling stage was also relevant due to the high impacts of glass production, whereas vinification/distillation processes at the winery were dependent on the energy carrier for the distillation. The type of pisco produced, crop maturity or the degree of mechanization triggered the main environmental impact variations that were identified among wineries.