Sober equation of turning water into wine

● When you pop the cork on a 750ml bottle of wine this weekend, what you won’t see is the 750 litres of water it took to produce it.

With parts of the country gripped by drought, the water footprint of various products and services should be raising alarms, but few are aware of the issue.

Ashok Chapagain of the Water Footprint Network, a global organisation that calculates such “hidden” water costs, said “raising awareness is one of the key challenges”.

Every year, more than 400 million litres of wine leave Cape Town harbour, with a water footprint equal to more than two years’ supply for the city at its latest consumption rate.

Chapagain said the supply chains of water-intensive products were spread over large areas. The UK, for example, imported more than 60% of the water used in products and services consumed there.

Late last year, Enoch Owusu-Sekyere of the University of the Free State published research showing that butter and cheese were the biggest culprits among dairy products when it came to guzzling water. “Producers of these products should consider an investment in technologies that minimise water usage and increase dairy product outputs.”

Agri Western Cape CEO Carl Opperman said farmers in the province had lost R14-billion due to the drought and about 500 000 jobs were on the line.

Chapagain said the solution lay partly in cutting production of water-intensive exports. “It also lies in addressing what is a sustainable approach for each type of goods and service. There is enough water for humanity as long as we change the way we use it.”

Wine industry organisation VinPro said it accepted the Water Footprint Network’s figures “as the reality not only for wine but also a number of other products and commodities. The industry is, and always has been, acutely aware of its dependency on water.”

Christo Conradie, VinPro’s wine cellar division manager, said: “Water efficiency has been part and parcel of all practices in the last couple of years.”

Irrigation techniques had changed, water stress levels were being monitored by “sophisticated equipment”, and producers were receiving training in best practice.

Danish documentary film maker Tom Heinemann, whose Grapes of Wrath revealed labour conditions on wine farms in the Cape, said: “Given the fact that so many workers complain about access to clean drinking water, there seems to be a discrepancy in what the limited amount of water should be used for. Is it for the good of human beings or wine production?”

[The solution] lies in . . . a sustainable approach for each type of goods and service. There is enough water for humanity as long as we change the way we use it Ashok Chapagain The Water Footprint Network