Asked what JancisRobinson.com is doing for Earth Day 2023, Tara responds …
Search JancisRobinson.com for ‘sustainability’ and you’ll find over 160 features. Jancis – who just returned from Napa RISE, a climate and wine symposium in California, has been campaigning for lighter bottles since 2006, ‘for the sake of those who have to lift cases of them as well as for the good of the planet’.
The site Jancis started in 2000 has been on the forefront of reporting on biodynamics, regenerative agriculture, grazing-based viticulture, conservation viticulture, heritage vines, hybrid vines, and maybe especially old vines, for which we’ve even created an Old Vines Register to catalogue these repositories of viticultural history, heritage and biodiversity around the world.
We’ve given talks and hosted podcasts devoted to climate change, and it seems we’re never short these days of dramatic stories about the effect climate change has on vine-lands around the world. (Read about Jancis’s recent narrow miss with Cyclone Gabrielle here.)
As a publication devoted to an agricultural product, every day is Earth Day, because if we don’t pay attention to climate change, land use, biodiversity, water usage, chemical inputs, industrial pollution, bottle weights, transportation costs and all the other elements of growing, making and transporting wine from field to glass, we risk not having anything worth writing about – let alone drinking.
Images from our coverage of sustainable approaches to viticulture in Penedès and Oregon.