Sommeliers Are Using Their Wine Menus to Rally for Greener Drinking Practices

By WineBottleMag
April 17, 2025
Drinking Greener Menus Practices Rally Sommeliers Wine
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While sustainability is easy to imagine in a vineyard—visions of sheep grazing on green vineyards and fields of cover crops come to mind—it’s a tougher concept to grasp in the restaurant space. Is it a wine list padded with biodynamic and regenerative bottles? Cork recycling efforts? A staunch ban on plastic straws?

For wine directors and sommeliers, sustainability looks like a lot of things. It’s upcycling leftover wine in the kitchen or bar program. It’s rallying for producers who practice organic viticulture, or opt for alt-formats like boxes, cans or kegs.

And, it’s not being overly dogmatic. It’s serving sustainable, low-waste or carbon-conscious offerings with a tight focus on quality—nice wine with a side of purpose.

But how do you stick the landing on the above? We talked to a selection of sommeliers who lean hard into sustainability about the benefits of being green.

Laurel Livezey from Little Saint / Photography by Emaa K Creative

Curating Consciously

Laurel Livezey had a few requirements when building the wine program at Little Saint, a plant-based restaurant-slash-wine lounge, in Healdsburg.

“First, sustainability: I’m looking for wines made with organic, biodynamic, regenerative, or otherwise low-impact farming practices,” she says. “Producers who are thoughtful stewards of the land.”

Her second requirement: “Representation—I seek out wines made by people who are underrepresented in the industry: women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ winemakers and beyond.”

Locality is also a big one. Her by-the-glass list is built from the surrounding Sonoma region.

Ann Arbor’s Echelon Kitchen & Bar also approaches sustainability with a local lean—their menu is padded with Michigan growers. It’s a love letter to their state, but it has other benefits. A local focus reduces their carbon footprint and helps sidestep shipping woes and, now, tariff traumas.

“Some of the out-of-state producers have limited allocations and shipping delays,” says sommelier-beverage director Taylor Johnson.

According to the World Resources Institute, shipping accounts for 90% of greenhouse gas emissions in wine. The transportation industry in general accounts for three billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.

“Focusing on local has opened up space to spotlight smaller, independent winemakers, while dramatically reducing our carbon footprint—many of these wines are hand-delivered by the winemakers or by local reps, no long-haul shipping required,” says Livezey.

Livezey’s final must for her wine program is more of a feeling. “I think about our guests. Does this wine pair beautifully with our plant-based menu? Is it something our team is excited to pour? It’s about curating a list that feels intentional, expressive and deeply rooted in community.”

Hawksmoor's head sommelier Dylan Estey — Hawksmoor’s head sommelier Dylan Estey / Image Courtesy of Hawksmoor

Picking Producers

How does one decide the best bottles for virtuous consumption? It’s complicated.

There are fifty-or-so ways to say you make wine more consciously. Regenerative farming and organic viticulture. You can stand by Demeter’s rigorous biodynamic principles, follow homegrown Napa Green’s standards or focus on cleaner watersheds to make a SalmonSafe wine.

Scott Thomas, who oversees a 95% sustainably-produced wine list at Restaurant Olivia in Denver, Colorado, recognizes that sustainability is a difficult—and often overused—label to navigate.

“This isn’t always easy to identify due to labeling laws and the differences between the EU and U.S. certification systems,” says Thomas. “The bureaucracy around labeling often becomes a barrier for producers who are farming organically but choose not to pursue official certification.”

So Livezey doesn’t rely on certifications alone; she champions anyone actively doing better, with the hope that it will encourage more decision-makers to follow suit.

“I understand that formal certifications can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for small producers,” she says. “It’s more about integrity, intention and making choices that respect the land and the people who farm it—walking the walk.”

Wine Director of Restaurant Pearl Morissette, Robert Luo / Image Courtesy of Restaurant Pearl Morissette

Leveraging Leftovers

Wine pairings have been a useful sustainability tool for Restaurant Pearl Morissette, a 42-acre Michelin-starred winery-restaurant in Jordan, Ontario. Most guests opt for a wine pairing, so the team has a firm grasp on what they’re pouring and what wastage it will produce. Often, that’s their own wines, tiny producers from like-minded wineries or sake, which doesn’t oxidize as quickly as regular wines.

“And whatever doesn’t get used, we can either give to the kitchen for cooking, or we reduce the wine for our non-alcoholic program,” says wine director Robert Luo.

Their non-alcoholic pairing is another outlet for sustainability. They upcycle fruits, herbs and vegetables grown in their garden. “We love scraps,” says Luo. “Apples from dessert can be used to make kombucha, which is a creative way to minimize as much waste as possible. Extra parsnip, when steeped, has an almost coconut-like quality.”

Last year, the restaurant received a Michelin Green Star for these initiatives.

Thomas hands off opened bottles to his sustainability director, who transforms it into housemade vinegars or tinctures that are used in our kitchen and bar programs. “Every effort adds up.”

From his dregs, head sommelier Dylan Estey, of Hawksmoor, a carbon-neutral steakhouse, gives his leftover wines to the bar team, who use it to make syrups for cocktails. “We’re really just trying to find any way we can to move the needle in a positive direction,” he adds.

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Beyond Bottles

Packaging has been an increasingly important discussion for producers and consumers. Traditional bottles (and corks, labels and all the other elements that make up a wine) can be carbon-sucking to ship.

Advocacy group Transport & Energy estimates the industry is responsible for 3% of all global emissions, with that number expected to rise to 10% by 2050. According to OIV (International Organization of Vine and Wine), the global wine industry produces 2.99 million tonnes of C02 output from fermentation alone.

So many are eschewing traditional bottles and thinking inside the box.

“Some of our most popular pours have come from boxes or cans,” says Livezey. “Single-serve cans are perfect for our standing-room-only shows: they reduce waste, eliminate the risk of broken glass, and are easy to enjoy on the go. Boxed wine is a win for freshness and volume, especially for our by-the-glass and happy hour programs.”

Sixty Vines, a chain of restaurants throughout Texas, Florida, Virginia, Washington D.C. and Tennessee, has built their business off the kegged wines. These aren’t plonk: they’re Zinfandels from Ridge Vineyards, Greg Brewer’s Santa Barbara Chardonnay, and wines from Duckhorn, Dr. Loosen and Oregon’s Ken Wright Cellar.

Kegs preserve freshness, and eliminate the carbon footprint of a wine package by roughly 76%, according to kegging facility Free Flow Wines.

Sixty Vines finds one keg holds 26 wine bottles—roughly 1,500 over its refillable lifetime. This year alone—and we’re only into April—Sixty Vines saved almost 500,000 bottles from landfills.

Ridge says they’ve saved 10,400 bottles from the landfill, 18,496 lbs of C02 emissions and 15,600 lbs of waste from the landfill annually by switching to kegs.

Wine Syrups at Hawksmoor — Image Courtesy of Hawksmoor

Eliminating Waste

Hawksmoor—a B-Corp certified restaurant—has a number of measures that contribute to their sustainability. Their impacts are uploaded annually for all to read. This includes a system that captures excess heat from the kitchen that’s used to heat water.

And no effort is too small. Case in point? Cork recycling. At the Hawksmoor restaurant group’s Chicago outpost, Estey has also linked up with a company called ReCork, which collects used cork from restaurants and repurposes the material into alternatives to petroleum-based foams and plastics.

At Restaurant Pearl Morissette, which grows its own produce, the garden team grinds corks and uses the material to elevate plant beds. (They also installed a bio digester, which turns waste into gray water for irrigation.)

The recyclability of natural cork has prompted Thomas, of Restaurant Olivia, to phase out wines sealed with plastic Nomacorc.

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“Even though those corks are labeled recyclable, they typically aren’t accepted by recycling programs in most parts of the U.S.,” Thomas says. So, he partnered with Ridwell, a company which recycles natural corks and aluminum capsules and repurposes them into clothing, household goods and other consumer items. Ridwell diverts almost two million corks annually from landfills.

“We’ve also retrofitted our Coravin system to run on a large argon tank, which has reduced our use of single-use canisters by at least 50 in the last six months,” says Thomas.

He’s also into the unsexy details, like being hyper-conscious of distributors who share a warehouse and delivery network. He consolidates orders accordingly to reduce carbon emissions. “If you think about the life of a bottle, even something as simple as reducing extra trips to and from our restaurant can help shrink our piece of the overall carbon footprint,” he says.

“These behind-the-scenes decisions are small, but they matter—and they reflect our belief that sustainability is a daily practice, not just a label.”

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