Taking action

It’s not easy being green! Nobody said it would be, but we’re just getting on with it.

Ever wondered what your Society is doing to support nature, soil health and the people behind your wines? Here’s a bite-sized overview to let you know where we’re at.

Dom de Ville

Dom de Ville

Ever wondered what your Society is doing to support nature, soil health and the people behind your wines? Here’s a bite-sized overview.

I have to be honest, I started 2024 feeling slightly nervous, as it had the hallmarks of a difficult financial year. And when that happens, often the first thing to go out the window in many businesses is their sustainability plan.  

But the reason I joined The Wine Society three years ago, is that I believed it’s an organisation that genuinely sees thriving people, soil health and nature as good for its members, good for wine and good for business. And blimey, we have proven that to be true this year. Despite the words of a very wise frog, that it’s not easy being green, we have stayed the course and simply carried on doing what we said we would do.  

Here are some highlights: 

  • Nearly half of the wine we sell is now in lightweight glass bottles – saving hundreds of tons of carbon and reducing our packaging tax bill*.
  • We made a brave decision to put some of our best-selling wines in bottles made from plastic rubbish that would have otherwise ended up in our oceans – please keep buying them so we can do more rPET bottles.
  • We got our teeth into tackling the exploitation of seasonal workers in the wine industry – surely no one wants to drink wine knowing people have suffered making it.
  • We launched a fund to invest in nature in our growers’ vineyards – rewilding, hedgerow and tree planting, supporting regenerative viticulture trials – building ever closer relationships with our producers and ensuring we get the best allocations of wines for our members. Find out more about our Climate & Nature programme. 
  • We started a new partnership with a local charity Home - Feed Up Warm Up, where we volunteer, support financially and provide clothing and food.

And lots lots more, which we will share in our next Annual Sustainability report in July.  

What’s next in 2025? 

Well, to be honest it is simply about continuing with much more of the same.  

Keep reducing our carbon emissions, double our efforts to tackle exploitation in our supply chains, keep on investing in nature and soil health (as without it there will be no wine) and keep making sure our teams in Stevenage are feeling happy and motivated, so they serve our members as best they can.  

Onwards!

Find out more in our Sustainability hub.

*In 2025 the UK government is introducing a new packaging tax called Extended Producer Responsibility. This is designed to encourage businesses to use less packaging and ensure it call be recycled - the less packaging we use, the less we pay in tax. A financial and environmental win-win.   

Dom de Ville

Director of sustainability and social impact

Dom de Ville

Dom, our director of sustainability and social impact, has overall responsibility and accountability for our sustainability plan, and has been involved in sustainability for most of his 20-year career, including ten years in international development.

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When you visit the vineyards of Beaujolais, the chances are that you expect to see vineyards populated with rows of gamay vines. Odds on you’d be right (with the slight caveat that around 5% of the region is planted with chardonnay). All these stats are what makes the Sicarex experimental vineyard in southern Beaujolais so unusual. There’s gamay planted here, of course, but each row features a different clone of the grape. Other rows are planted with different grapes, well-known in their home regions, but less so in this particular location – you’ll find gewurztraminer, auxerrois and roussanne, as well as merlot and syrah. And then things get a bit weird, with crosses, varieties like marselan, gamaret, picarlat and peaugaray, ripening gently in the warm summer sunshine. There are no hybrids planted in this particular vineyard, but they’re increasingly common in other regions and in other countries, where viticulturists and viticultural scientists are doing due diligence in researching varieties that may be better adapted to our mid-term-future. The clones, crosses and hybrids they’re planting are of increasing interest to grape growers around the world, for a variety of reasons, not least for their potential to help future-proof vineyards against climate change and to reduce the need for treatments of all kinds. Clones Clones are, perhaps, familiar to anyone who’s ever studied botany or viticulture (or, for that matter, anyone who’s ever seen a Star Wars movie). Grape varieties aren’t always consistent in their genetic make up, and gene variation within a species gives rise to different expressions of that variety. Among the numerous pinot noir clones available to growers, 777, is widely planted in both the Old and New World by producers seeking to make high-quality wines because it gives small bunches and berries, characteristics that give rise to wines of intense colour and structure (in the context of pinot), as well as typically spicy aromas. Move two numbers along, though, to number 779, and you find a higher-yielding clone that is more typically planted in Champagne (and other sparkling wine regions), where its relative lack of structure creates a more neutral platform for the winemaking processes to come. It's not just pinot noir, of course, that comes in clonal ‘flavours’. Whether you’re planting shiraz or chardonnay, the selection of clonal material is an important decision. Unless, of course, you’re planting a massal selection rather than a clonal selection. 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