Sustainability in the Winery

How do we ensure sustainability in our winery operations?

1.  Design for Sustainability

A key component is in designing sustainability at the beginning.  When we moved from Ladysmith to our new location in Cowichan Bay, we had a chance to incorporate some neat ideas into our winery building.  We use a tankless water heater, as we use hot water infrequently, but when we use it, we use a lot.  We also keep our building heat on only minimally during the winter.  During the coldest spells, we kept the heat on at 7 degrees Celcius; but, in milder conditions, we turn it off altogether and let the temperature hover just above freezing.  This reduces the energy required to keep the building warm, but also helps with the cold stabilization of the wines.  Our energy requirement is kept minimal, and the entire winery building is fed from a tiny 60 amp circuit. 

2. Operating for sustainability

Our best practices are to use as few chemicals in our winemaking as possible.  By hand-harvesting our grapes and maintaining very high quality standards, we have very few chemical interventions in our winemaking.  The low pH wines made from Vancouver Island grapes have the added bonus of requiring much less sulphites to maintain an adequate level of protection over the wines.  Our red wines are fined only with egg whites, and the whites with bentonite (clay).  Both natural materials.  By maintaining high quality standards in our fruit, we don’t typically need to use chemicals in our fining.  This reduces the impact on the environment and improves the quality of the wines.

We also recycle wastes from the winery, and the organic waste from the winery is reused in the vineyard.  We initially purchased all reconditioned barrels, which extend the life of barrels by an extra 50%.  When our first barrels are finally no longer suitable for storing wine we intend to turn them into planters and reuse them that way.