What Sustainable Actually Costs

Sustainable is a word that has been worn smooth, so here is what it costs us in hours, in yield and in money. Read it and decide for yourself whether the bottle is worth what we ask for it.

Cover crops

We sow clover, vetch and rye between every row. They feed the soil, they hold it together in a heavy winter, and they compete with the vines for water, which is exactly the point: a vine that has to work grows smaller, better fruit. It also means mowing eight times a year instead of spraying twice.

Hand weeding under the vine

This is the expensive one. The strip directly under the vines cannot be mown, so it is either herbicide or people. We use people. It is four passes a season and it is the largest single line in the vineyard budget.

A smaller crop

Our yields run around a third below what these blocks could carry. Some of that is the cover crops, some is a green harvest in December when a vine has set more fruit than it can ripen properly. Fewer bunches, better bunches, less wine.

What it adds up to

A bottle that costs more to grow than it needs to, from an estate that will still have topsoil in fifty years. We are not going to pretend those two things are unrelated to the price on the shelf.