'I wish we could stop oil,' says legendary Miguel Torres on sustainable winemaking worldwide

Spain's Torres wines were voted the world's most admired wine brand in 2024 for the seventh time, and Familia Torres produces household wines like Sangre de Toro.

It's a Spanish success story 150 years and five generations in the making and much of their modern success is attributed to Don Miguel Torres, a vineyard visionary whose passion for the industry hasn't been watered down with time.

"Wine is history, wine is tradition – can you imagine lunch without wine? It would be terrible, no?" Torres tells CGTN in the beautiful Torres vineyards in Penedes, a short drive from Barcelona.

They produce over 30 million bottles of wine per year but Torres says he is concerned about his industry's environmental impact and growing threat of climate change.

Watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth documentary in the 1990s was an awakening.

'100m barrels of oil per day - no planet that can withstand that'

Planetary warming is having a big impact on winemaking, as vines are one of the most weather-sensitive crops on the planet. Yields, composition and wine quality are all being affected by heating and by erratic and extreme weather events related to climate change.

Warmer temperatures affect the entire growing cycle of a grape and budding, flowering, fruit-set, and harvest are all taking place on average 10 days to two weeks sooner than they used to. So is the Torres family worried about the future?

"Yes we are. Climate change and the warming is a great challenge for us," Torres says. "I wish we could stop oil, you know, imagine a hundred million barrels per day. There is no planet that can withstand that."

Familia Torres began taking action 10 years ago to future-proof the business, he says.

"We bought land already close to the Pyrenees in cooler climates," says Don Miguel. "Second, we decided to mitigate our emissions. That's why you see so many photovoltaic panels we produce in this winery - 50 percent of the electricity is produced by us with our solar panels.

"And finally, you know, we created a group called International Wineries for Climate Action. That was five years ago, today we are 150 wineries around the world."

The wine industry's carbon footprint: 30 billion bottles a year

The IWCA aims to achieve carbon neutrality no later than 2050 in line with the UN's Race to Zero goals – but the industry has a long way to go.

In one Australian study, wine was estimated to have a carbon footprint of 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, relatively small compared to 22 million tonnes for civil aviation and 101 million tonnes for transport in general but much still needs to be done.

The weight of wine bottles is particularly important as that accounts for nearly a third of the wine industry's carbon emissions and over 30 billion bottles of wine are manufactured, transported and sold globally each year.

The IWCA says they are taking collective action to decarbonize the global wine industry through initiatives like using renewable energy, creating lighter wine bottles, avoided the use of diesel in transportation, reusing water and calling out greenwashing in the industry.

For his part, Miguel Torres was named by TIME magazine as one of the world's top 100 most influential people leading climate change action.

So despite the great challenges that lie ahead and the impending threat of the climate crisis, does Don Miguel Torres still have hope for the future?

"Yes, I still have hope. Yes," he concludes.