Differently from what it could be thought, wine production really is a complex activity in which the technology plays the same important role of the grape cultivation and of the winemaker skills. Even if the raw materials are just grapes, yeast and some chemicals, the alternative processes are so various to give wines with very different quality levels. Despite the great variety of wines most of the LCA studies of wine and, above all, those ones with comparative aims consider as functional unit a specific amount of product in litres or kilograms, without any reference to the main characteristics of products. In this paper, the production system of a red wine will be analized through life cycle assessment and compared with a quality wine. The results of this study show how the environmental performance of wine production changes if more technologies are used in order to obtain a high quality level wine and how much the results could change if a different functional unit is used.