How was the Caviro Group founded?

Caviro was established in 1966 by a group of local wine growers, who decided to join forces to develop wine production, and the by-products of the winemaking process, in the area. Since then, we have attracted more and more new members becoming Italy’s leading winery.

Today, the Caviro Group is one of the world's leading winemakers. Can you tell us about your organisation? How big is the group?

We are a second-tier cooperative with 28 members, 26 of which are wineries scattered in 7 Italian regions, with 11,100 wine growers contributing over 600,000 tonnes of grapes, or 8.5% of all grapes produced in this country, from vineyards covering an area of 37,500 hectares, equal to 5% of all Italian vineyards. We process about 175 million litres of wine a year, with exports to more than 80 countries, consistently striving to diversify our products to meet the tastes of international markets.

Besides being the largest winery in Italy, you are also known as a “sustainable winery”. For example, Caviro Group also includes a company called Enomondo, a partnership with Hera Ambiente for the production of green energy from organic sources. How does it work?

Together with Enomondo, which is owned in equal parts by Herambiente SpA and Caviro Extra SpA, we recover around 600,000 tonnes of waste per year and transform it into valuable products, energy and soil improvers for agriculture. We have made a name for ourselves in the agri-food sector and for the recovery of wine-making waste products and cuttings and prunings from public and private green areas. Once cleaned, shredded and sorted, the wood fragments are transformed into a combustible biomass, which we can then convert into thermal and electrical energy for our own use and for the public good by feeding it into the grid. The grass clippings and topsoil are composted and returned to nature in the form of green compost. At the end of all these processes, only 0.4 per cent of the incoming waste is disposed of.

Enomondo, however, only deals with the last part of the recovery cycle. In fact, one of the strengths of Caviro Group, in addition to its size, is that it has created a virtuous circle in which the waste and by-products of wine making are transformed into a new product. How does this cycle work, starting from the wine-making process?

The wine-making process produces by-products called lees, marc and must. The latter are used by the balsamic vinegar industry, the wine-making industry, and the food sector in general. Grape marc is used to extract alcohol, enocyanine – a natural colouring agent used by the food industry – and grape seeds, from which we extract polyphenols, which are antioxidants used for nutraceutical and cosmetic purposes. Finally, the spent grape marc, after everything is extracted, becomes a combustible biomass, while the combustion process produces ash, which is used to make road bases and cement mixes.

And the lees? What are they used for?

Wine lees are processed to extract alcohol and calcium tartrate, from which tartaric acid is made. Abroad, especially in China, tartaric acid is obtained by chemical synthesis, while our tartaric acid is a wholly natural product and, currently, we rank as one of the world leaders in this sector, with an output of around 4,000 tonnes per year. Thanks to its properties, tartaric acid is used in a wide range of applications, in the pharmaceutical industry as an excipient to release the active ingredient of the medicine, in the food industry as a leavening agent and preservative, in the wine industry to adjust wine acidity, even in the construction industry as a cement retarder, and in the chemical and microelectronics industries. The liquid waste from these processes is particularly rich in organic matter and, when anaerobically digested, produces biogas, which in turn produces biomethane for the transport sector and carbon dioxide for the beverage and technical sectors, for producing dry ice.

After the production of renewable energy and the recovery of waste from wine production, which in turn is transformed into a variety of by-products used in a wide range of industries, the cycle is completed by returning fertiliser to the soil. How is this last step achieved?

Anaerobic digestion, besides the biogas mentioned above, also produces a solid residue, the digestate, which is then processed in our own composting plants and returned to the soil in the form of a natural fertiliser known as a soil improver. Ultimately, the cycle starts in the soil with the vines for growing the grapes and returns there as a soil improver, through a virtuous circle in which we recover over 99% of the processing input.

How does this ability to recover and generate renewable energy translate into figures? How much do your energy self-sufficiency and CO2 savings amount to?

We are 100% self-sufficient, in terms of electricity and heat consumption. From a careful analysis of the data, we can safely say that if all the green energy we produce in the form of heat, electricity and biofuels was derived from a conventional non-renewable source, such as methane, we would emit 82,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Regarding water consumption, we have made our processes more efficient, carried out a precise analysis of consumption by installing numerous meters, and increased the recovery of water, which we purify internally by returning it into our production cycles. The combination of these three actions allows us to say that 40% of the water consumption required for our activities is covered by internal recovered water.

The entire company therefore is involved in total circularity, the result of a strategic vision, which initially required a great deal of investment, of course, but which will ultimately ensure many competitive advantages. What gave rise to this approach at Caviro?

Energy transition and decarbonisation, which have forcefully been projected to the centre of the political and economic discourse, are in fact closely linked to business competitiveness. Just imagine what it would have meant, for a company our size, not to be self-sufficient energy-wise, after the hikes in energy prices in recent years it would have been hardly sustainable for us. Thanks to a strong governance and an enlightened strategic vision we have become resilient and can now face the challenges ahead with confidence and on a firm footing.

Read in Italian