This is a “How wine companies can reduce their carbon footprint when using the internet” story. It’s a passion of mine to find ways to save the earth. Actually, in July of 1995, I wrote an unusual story for the time. It wasn’t about “Cabs,” it was about “Cats.” I would tell people about my cat story, and it was so foreign to wine, that I’d be asked, “Cabs?” I’d say, “No, it’s about “Cats.” That went on for some time. The Wine News called it “Cat O’Wine Tales,” and it was published in their magazine.
I don’t believe a single person in the wine industry was writing about sustainability at the winery level. It was not about a carbon footprint, water use, or what it actually costs the earth to grow a grape and bottle it.
Reduce a carbon Footprint
Sustainability was still worth writing about anyway, because it seemed obvious. That a business built entirely on land, water, and weather ought to be paying attention to how it treated all three. Look at wine today. It’s about sustainability certifications, dry farming, solar-powered wineries, water reclamation, cover crops, regenerative viticulture as a label marketing point. What was a gap in 1995 is now the industry’s most fluent language. Every winery has learned to talk about what happens in the vineyard and the cellar. Still, within wine, almost no one is talking about what happens after that. What happens when the wine industry logs on?
And, There’s Another Blind Spot
Wineries today run in some meaningful part, on the internet. Cloud-based inventory systems, point of sale software, and email marketing platforms sending out newsletters and allocation announcements. E-commerce checkout pages processing wine club orders. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools are tracking every member’s purchase history. Increasingly, AI tools are drafting tasting notes, generating social captions, answering customer service questions, and even helping plan a harvest schedule.
None of that runs on nothing. It runs on data centers, and data centers run on electricity and water. The same two resources the wine industry has spent thirty years learning to steward carefully in the vineyard.
AI’s 2025 Global Water Footprint
A December 2025 peer-reviewed estimate, by data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao, was published in the journal “Patterns.” It put AI’s global water footprint for 2025 somewhere between roughly 312 billion and 767 billion liter. That’s a range that lands in the same neighborhood as the entire world’s annual bottled water consumption. And, that’s about 446 billion liters. It’s a wide estimate.
The companies running these data centers, like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI among them, don’t disclose enough for a precise number. This includes water used to cool the servers directly and the water used to generate the electricity that powers them.
I don’t say this to scold anyone in wine for using a laptop. It is being said because the industry that taught itself to ask hard questions about water in the vineyard. It has not yet asked the same question about water in the cloud. Scolding anyone in wine for using a laptop would be ludicrous.
Robot for helping wine
The WALL-E Problem
There’s a reason the image of a small robot alone on a planet buried in trash has stayed with people since 2008. WALL-E isn’t really a movie about robots. It’s a movie about what happens when a civilization gets so comfortable outsourcing its waste that it stops noticing the waste exists, until someone has to leave the planet to escape it.
Wine has already lived one version of that story. Plastic bottles, nine percent of them ever recycled, piling up by the hundreds of billions a year while consumers reached for convenience without asking what it cost. The industry is only now, decades late, having the bottle deposit and packaging conversation in earnest.
The internet and AI footprint is the next version of that same story, just earlier in the timeline. We get to decide, right now, while it’s still a manageable size, whether we track it and manage it, or whether we let it become someone else’s cleanup problem in twenty years. Not WALL-E, unless we allow it.
Where A Winery Actually Starts
This isn’t a call to abandon digital tools. A small winery’s website, wine club platform, and email marketing are often the difference between surviving and not. The ask is smaller and more specific. Ask your vendors the questions you already ask your vineyard manager. Which cloud provider hosts your e-commerce site, and do they publish renewable energy commitments? Most wineries have never asked, because no one has ever asked them to. These is also Batch AI-assisted work instead of prompting piecemeal. Drafting five tasting notes in one session uses meaningfully less than five separate back-and-forth sessions spread across a week. Small habit, real difference at scale.
There is also being honest with wine club members about what “sustainable” covers. A winery can be dry-farmed, solar-powered, and bio-dynamic in the vineyard while running an entirely conventional, high-footprint marketing stack behind the scenes. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s just an unfinished sustainability picture. Naming the gap is more credible than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Finally, Today’s Wrap-up
And finally, start a conversation publicly. In 1995, nobody in wine was writing about sustainability, so I did. Now in 2026, I can’t find anyone in wine devotedly writing about AI’s footprint. Someone should. It might as well be someone who already knows what it looks like to write about the thing before it’s fashionable to write about it.
Choose your future. It’s the same line I used about plastic bottles, and it applies here too. And, now, go open that glass bottle of wine!
© Jo Diaz, August 4, 2026, All rights reserved.
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Written by Jo Diaz, a partner of Diaz Communications, who is helping to make stars realize their dreams.
Edited by partner Jose Diaz.
To reprint, please contact Jo Diaz: jo@diaz-communications.com
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