Wine drinkers are you east or west of Columbus Ohio?  

It matters.

On Salon.com Andrew Leonard asked: "What is the greener option, in terms of carbon footprint, for a hypothetical wine-drinking citizen of Ohio: a California merlot from Napa county, a cheap Australian bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz, or a French bordeaux?"

The Salon.com article is not just about drinking wine in Ohio though... it  is applicable to the whole US. It turns out when drinking wine it is important to know if you are east or west of Columbus Ohio if you care about being "Green", carbon footprints, cost of transporting that wine to you.  This from an article in 'How the World Works' on Salon.com.  Turns out drinking French Bordeaux is "local"  if you are in NYC, or more "local"  than a California wine.... Or maybe it is "Greener."  If you are in Chicago drinking a California wine it is more local or more "Green" anyway. 

Residents of Central Ohio seem to have the best of both worlds as we are ground central. It seems if your chateau is in Powell, Upper Arlington, or Worthington Ohio you can drink Chateau Rothschild, Chateau Haut Batailley or a California wine with no guilt.  At least no Green guilt. 

Can you tell I am not a wine drinker? I can not tell you a California wine by name... Ernest and Julio's finest...that was what wine was back when I drank wine with any regularity. Gallo.   I am not the "hypothetical wine-drinking citizen of Ohio." My green friend who lived in California but who has moved back to Central Ohio may need to reconsider her choices....

Clevelanders a French Bordeaux is more "local" for you. Cincinnatians a California wine is more "local" for you.  Or a better choice when you figure out the cost of transporting the wine to you.  You could drive to Columbus and drink both? No then you have to figure in the gas, emissions, etc. don't you....

On my other blog, ColumbusBestBlog.com  I went into more detail about the economic study,  'Red, White and "Green" the Cost of Carbon in  the Global Wine Trade' and from the Salon.com article,  "How green is your bottle of red?" 

A lot of it comes down to transportation.  Columbus is a transportation hub so the question of the cost of transporting the wine and the lack of respect for the railroad transportation industry in the Salon.com article caught my attention...  We have lots of train tracks that come through Central Ohio and there is a lot of truck transportation from our market... I would guess some wine both California and European travels through Columbus on it's way to other markets. 

Photo Credits: Both images in this post are from Wikipedia. Wine label  The owner of the image releasedit into the public domain.  Glass of wine    by André Karwath aka Aka "This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license."