A bright blue lorry swings in, reverses until the back of its tank kisses the edge of quai number two, and I clumsily climb up on top of it. Once up there, I feel a tad dizzy; I'm not used to being at this kind of height. But the September sun reflecting on the steel and the wasps flying everywhere bring me back to focus. I open the hatches one by one and draw a sample from each. Then I'm off, down and across to the little lab behind the deck, dropping the samples on the bench. I say: "Montgeux, compartments one, two, three." They check the juice's density, give me the "C'est bon!", and only then do we send it down into the massive belly of the winery. And repeat: sample, lab, "C'est bon!", pump, next lorry. A few thousand times over about two and a half weeks. That, more or less, is a harvest inside one of the biggest wineries in Champagne.

I bet it's not the harvest you're picturing. There are no baskets, no pretty rows, no secateurs in the morning mist. By the time the raw material reached me it had already been picked and pressed out in the villages and driven in by the tankful. On hot days, some of it was even fermenting already by the time it arrived. As you've probably gathered by now, my job sat at the next stage, the unglamorous one nobody photographs: getting that juice off the truck, past the lab, and into the right fermenting tank.

Let me back up, because how I ended up on that deck is half the story.

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Back to Champagne

At the end of Part 3 I did something that looked quite insane. Two months after deciding my whole future was in London, I quit. There was a harvest about to start in Champagne. One month of it paid what two or three months in a freezing station bar did, and the bar wouldn't give me the time off. I bet on the harvest, obviously.

The Maison I went to was then one of the biggest in the region, the second largest at the time, in fact. In this part, I’m keeping names out, because some of what I’m about to tell you could land real people in trouble, and they don’t deserve that for the sake of a personal article. What matters is this: my dad worked there. He had spent most of his life inside that place. I was about to spend two months working right beside him.

So I went for one month and stayed for two, because I worked hard and they asked me to. I did the harvest, then the soutirage (racking), then watched the first wines head off towards tirage and the extended rest in the cellar. In Champagne the law makes you wait at least fifteen months before a non-vintage can leave, and three years for a vintage. As a producer, you spend the money now and you sometimes get it back half a decade later. It’s quite a gamble. I’d even say it’s a brutal way to run a business, and nobody in that courtyard seemed to think about it for a second. Neither did I; we had trucks to empty.

Junior

My name lasted about a morning. By lunch on day one I was “Junior,” and Junior I stayed, to most of my dad’s colleagues, even to this day.

I loved it more than I can properly explain. My mum and dad split when I was young, and after that I saw him on the every-other-weekend rota that French separations run on. He was a wonderful dad and a gloriously forgetful one, the sort who, a few times, left me at the swimming pool after a late waterpolo match and had me walking half my teammates home through the dark before I walked myself back. It’s funny how I never really got mad at him. “It’s just how he is,” I would say, and still say! So to be beside him all day, every day, for two months, to be introduced around as his son, to watch a whole winery greet him like a favourite, that was worth more than the wage.

And he was liked. Everywhere he went, a nod, a joke, a hand on the shoulder. Being Junior meant the doors he’d spent thirty years opening swung open for me too. I was in the middle of everything from the first hour: summer holiday stories, anecdotes, and even some bromance ones.

The broom

My first real lesson had nothing to do with wine.

We were on the deck on the very first, very slow morning of the harvest, with everything cleaned and ready. No trucks yet, though. So I stood by my dad, who lit a cigarette, and I put my hands in my pockets. My dad instantly told me to take them out. “You’re a contractor,” he said. “Even if you’re my son. If they decide you look idle, they’ll find a reason to let you go.” Then he took a puff, handed me a broom, and told me to sweep a corner that did not need sweeping, and to keep sweeping until a lorry came.

I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and part of me still does. Look busy or be gone. It’s a very French idea, maybe a very European one. Fifteen years in Britain have taught me the opposite reflex, that if there’s genuinely nothing to do you don’t insult everyone by miming it. But I’ve never forgotten that broom, because it was the first time I understood that the son of a top employee and the man on a two-month contract were, to the company, the same disposable thing.

The good side of a factory

Despite that, I won't pretend it was hard living. The pay was excellent, better than anything I'd touched by then. So far my experience had been stacking cans in a large supermarket, lifeguarding at a summer swimming pool, or stacking parcels in a chicken slaughterhouse. By contrast, working for a large Maison in Champagne comes with incredible benefits compared to the amount of work required. On top of a very decent salary come the bonuses, a thirteenth month, a fourteenth, sometimes a fifteenth, so people walk out in December with something close to four months' wages at once. I'd come from the other end of the working world, from those grim shifts (I'll spare you the details), and here I was earning twice that in a spotless winery.

And the rhythm was not the rhythm of a traditional factory, not like a previous summer job that had me shifting heavy piles of cartons for eight hours, either morning, evening or at night, at a pace I found inhuman back then. It's more like the rhythm of a school. Workers wait outside the factory, smoking cigarettes, talking about a football match or a punch-up someone got into over the weekend. Then the morning bell, to tell them to start their day. A bell to break at 11:30am. A bell back to work at 1:30pm, yes, a two-hour break, and a bell to send you home at 5pm. And like at school, some are already waiting by the door five minutes before the last bell of the day. Grown men and women moving on the ring, every day, and I remember thinking they were a little like pupils who had never been let out. Slaves to the bell. I could tell this way of working suited the majority of them just fine. The school system had worked nicely here. That said, this is not a criticism. I totally get why people want a steady job that pays well and lets them switch off at five. It just frightened me a little.

The joy

But harvest is different. It’s the happy month. After a year of feeding labelling machines or stacking pallets, a select few get pulled into one loud, physical, shared effort, and the place comes alive. That select few are always eager to meet again at harvest, in the winery. They are colleagues, but for most of the year they only see each other in the locker room, in the morning or before leaving. Harvest brings them together, and that is where a camaraderie à la “Band of Brothers” starts. All united, focused, happy. And there is the champagne…

This will surprise nobody and I won't pretend otherwise. A few of them kept a small glass, a blida, in their front pocket, over their heart, which can tell you a lot. Every so often through the day, someone would say "Lapin," nearly whispering it, then pretend he hadn't said a thing if you didn't know what a rabbit had to do with the day's work. It was the code to say Champagne was available to sample. Hidden behind a large vat, hidden in the staff-room toilets, hidden inside a cement vat, far from the main action, always. Cheeky, somewhat harmless, part of the fun.

That said, there is a dark side to this. There is a recognised alcohol-addiction problem in Champagne, in pretty much any Maison, large or small, and it exists in other regions too. In a place surrounded by open wine, all day, every day, some people don’t stop at cheeky. I worked alongside men back then who were fighting something they never beat, and a few of them are gone now. It is an easy trap to fall into in wine, in beer, in spirits, anywhere the product is always at your elbow and always free. The harvest is a party, but for a few people it was also the loudest edge of a problem, and I’d rather say that plainly than just hand you a rosy little picture.

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Curiosity

Other than transferring must to fermenting tanks, there are other jobs happening in the winery during harvest, and right after it.

One day I was told to pour a thick sweet syrup into some of the tanks, the ones where the juice was greenest, suggesting grapes weren’t quite ripe enough. I did it, then asked the Maison employee next to me what it was. “Sugar”, he said. I taste it and find it rather nice. Why are we putting sugar in wine? He didn’t know. “I do it because they ask me to. That’s the job.”

That answer bothered me. So I went and knocked on the boss’s office and asked him instead. It’s the liqueur for chaptalisation, he said, sugar to give the fermentation enough to work with when the grapes haven’t ripened enough on their own. I went home that night and read everything I could find, met a Frenchman named Chaptal on the page, and discovered the method is banned across much of the wine world and allowed in some cool corners like Champagne, where full ripeness has always been a gamble. Less of a gamble now, chaptalisation is less and less used in Champagne which is another proof something is going wrong with climate… But that’s another piece to write in itself.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. We were two men doing the same task, one had done it for years and never once asked why. How is that even possible? The other couldn’t rest until he knew. Curiosity really, more than any wine, is the difference that made me. There were other new words that autumn, for me. Like Bentonite, a sort of clay you drop into the wine before bottling to pull it clear, an astonishing amount of it was used. We were pouring, tank by tank, tick the box on the “to-do” list, move on. Factory Champagne at its finest.

The day we lost five hundred litres

There was a tank mid-fermentation that had gone still on top, though the temperature said it was very much alive. A pocket of carbon dioxide had formed inside it, big enough to wall off part of the wine from the rest, and, left alone, the whole tank could turn. The fix is a sort of “push-under”: draw the wine from the top, push it back in at the bottom, and force the pocket up in the process.

A colleague showed me how, and told me to film it but never share it. His exact warning: there are two ways this goes, perfectly, or catastrophically. We got catastrophically. The pocket must have been enormous, because when it went, it went like a geyser, firing fermenting juice straight up against gravity for a good ninety seconds, over the top, over us, over everything. The noise was absurd and the smell filled the cellar. We put about five hundred litres on the floor that day, and it was an exercise we, thankfully, never had to repeat.

What struck me the most that day wasn't the sheer amount of unfinished wine being wasted; it was the reaction of the band. Before we even began, colleagues called each other over as if it were some attraction they shouldn't miss; it felt like they wanted the catastrophic outcome more than the perfect one. As the geyser kept vomiting wine over everything, I looked around and saw a bunch of men, in silence, smiling, some with their hands in their pockets. The noise of the flying juice was so loud that no one even tried to talk over it. Instead we watched. I was surprised and amazed; the veteran seemed satisfied.

The opportunity I declined

I went back again, and one autumn my dad slipped on his first day, turned his knee badly, and was carried off to hospital. The manager was discussing with some veterans, they seemed to disagree. At some point, he made a decision that seemed to not land with the committee. He opened the little sash window that separated his lab from quay two and said: “Junior, you’re taking the dispatch and quai two.” And just like that I was running the busiest corner of the deck, the one my dad had run for years, deciding which juice went to which tank across the whole map of the cellar and I became, for a fortnight, the chief. I loved every minute.

Which is why the question they asked me stung. Would I stay full time? A real job, the good pay, the bonuses, the four-day weeks when things go slow. I said no, without much of a pause.

Because a month of harvest is a month of harvest. It is not twelve months of it. The other eleven are the labelling line, the pallets, the bell, and I already knew that would hollow me out. Some people are built for the steady rhythm and are honestly happy in it, and good for them. I am not. I need a problem to chew on. I need to make something. Standing at a machine feeding it bottles, I make nothing, and something in me goes quiet. The money was better than hospitality by a mile. I still chose hospitality, and the city, and the harder, stranger life. I think I already knew I would.

The party and the money

Harvest ends the way it should, with a feast. The Maison sat us all down, including all the lorry drivers, fed us, poured for us, and we drank until we couldn’t remember our names. The first year we ended up at somebody’s house until four in the morning. The end-of-harvest party is called the “cochelet.” It happens everywhere in Champagne, but at different times. It always amused me how all these Maisons, vignerons and growers would do the same work, sometimes finish harvest on the same day, in the same town or village, and then not party together. It’s not one cochelet; it’s hundreds, if not thousands, of them happening within the same few days.

My brother Alexis does this for a living at the moment, chasing harvests around the planet, one hemisphere then the other, a French cellar one month and Margaret River the next. As I type this he is in Provence, working at Château d’Esclans, the maker of Whispering Angel. He took our youngest brother, Mathis, with him this time. Later this year the two of them will head to Australia, likely to Margaret River, which Alexis had just come back from in July. I did two autumns of it and knew it wasn’t my road, but I understand completely why he loves it, and I wish I’d had the chance to do one harvest alongside the two of them.

And for the money, it did what I needed it to. The two months of my first harvest paid roughly what four in London would have, and Lucie and I badly needed it. We were living mostly on my wage by then, both stuck in jobs that matched our shaky English rather than our ambitions. The cash was a lifeline. It could not fix the other thing, which was that the two of us were slowly, gently coming apart, and we had both started to know it.

And then, up

That was my last harvest at the winery, in fact, it was my last harvest altogether. It was also the most formative, the one that taught me leadership: standing up for what I believed was right, and knowing when to admit that my older colleagues’ experience was worth listening to and considering. That last harvest made me want to lead a team, to create my own band of brothers (and sisters, obviously!), and to build something. It helped me a lot in my career in London, something I’ll touch on later in this series.

So I came back to London with a fuller pocket and an emptier idea of what came next. I stopped by the old station bar to say a proper sorry for vanishing, and there were no hard feelings, they’d replaced me weeks before. But someone there knew someone, and pointed me towards a bar and restaurant with, he promised, a view I would not believe.

I went to find the address, stood at the foot of the building, and looked up. And up. About a hundred and eighty metres of it, with the bar right at the top.

That’s Part 5. See you at the top of the Gherkin.

^{Early August 2011, my birthday on the Tube. No winery photos exist, I was there to work, so this will have to do.}

La vue avant le vin

Nous nous sommes d’abord retrouvés au bureau, en haut de la colline, dans le village de Chavot, là où le conseil se réunit une fois par mois. On prononce « Chavost », avec le « s ». Le bâtiment fait face aux vignes, et par une lumineuse journée de juillet, la vue est de celles qui coupent une conversation. On distingue Épernay, à cinq minutes en contrebas, avec, entre les deux, rien qu’un vignoble vert, soigné, à perte de vue. J’ai grandi au milieu de ces coteaux et je suis quand même resté planté là une bonne minute, comme un touriste. Cette vue compte, ou du moins c’est le sentiment qu’elle inspire : tout ce que Chavost a accompli ces cinq dernières années revient à plaider qu’un lieu aussi beau, porté par un projet aussi collectif, mérite mieux que de disparaître.

^{Un côté de la vue panoramique depuis la salle de dégustation, où l’on aperçoit la légendaire église de Chavot.}

La coopérative que l’on donnait pour morte

Chavost a été fondée peu après la guerre, par une poignée de familles. Il y a une dizaine d’années, tout le monde vous l’aurait dit, elle filait droit vers le cimetière. En une vingtaine d’années, elle avait perdu une quarantaine d’hectares et une douzaine de familles, parties faire leurs propres bouteilles ou tenter leur chance ailleurs. Une coopérative qui perd ceux qui mettent en bouteille n’est plus qu’un pressoir avec un crédit sur le dos, et c’est exactement ainsi que meurent les coopératives : les adhérents qui vinifiaient s’en vont vinifier pour eux-mêmes, la cave se réduit à un simple centre de pressurage, et les charges fixes de bâtiments jadis conçus pour embouteiller et dégorger achèvent le travail. Juste à côté, Moussy et Saint-Martin-d’Ablois ont été absorbées par la coopérative de Pierry. Ça arrive tout le temps.

Puis, en 2019, un jeune chef de cave débarque avec une seule condition : ce sera à ma façon.

Fabian, et ce don que je n’ai croisé qu’une poignée de fois

Fabian Daviaux fait partie de ces gens-là. J’en ai rencontré quelques-uns à Londres, des entrepreneurs capables de voir une chose qui n’existe pas encore et, plus rare encore, de la faire voir à tous ceux qui les entourent. C’est cette seconde qualité qui est rarissime, une sur un million, et passer quatre-vingt-dix minutes avec lui en fut une démonstration éclatante. Il parle vite, avec fougue, et il a cette présence qui remplit une pièce.

Sa façon de faire, la voici. Cesser d’ajouter du soufre au vin, une chose qu’il détestait depuis qu’enfant il s’effondrait par terre, incapable de respirer les vapeurs, en aidant son père le dimanche. Pas de sulfites ajoutés. Pas de dosage, donc pas de sucre pour arrondir les angles. Pas de filtration pour faire joli. Convertir au bio les cinq hectares en propre de la coopérative. Et puis habiller le tout d’étiquettes couvertes de personnages saisissants, façon dessin animé. Des étiquettes qui n’ont rien de champenois, ce qui était précisément le but. Ces personnages sont de petits vignerons et viticulteurs en plein ouvrage, dessinés comme ils auraient pu l’être dans les années 1930 : celui au pantalon rouge, c’est le patron, on pourrait dire que c’est Fabian, les autres étant les adhérents de la coopérative.

^{L’un des personnages emblématiques que l’on retrouve sur les étiquettes se cache aussi dans la cave de Champagne Chavost.}

Pour cerner l’homme, voici la scène qu’il m’a racontée lui-même. L’hiver précédant le premier tirage sans soufre, les adhérents ont voté sur la forme de la bouteille. Il en voulait une large, tout sauf champenoise, pour porter les grandes nouvelles étiquettes. Ils ont voté pour une bouteille classique. Il a perdu à une voix près. Le lendemain matin, il a déchiré le procès-verbal et leur a dit qu’ils avaient tort, qu’ils l’avaient embauché pour sortir la maison de l’ombre, et que ce serait sa bouteille. C’est, dit-il, la seule chose antidémocratique qu’il ait jamais faite ici. C’est aussi exactement ce que fait un fondateur pour imposer une vision. Et il faut se rappeler qui il devait convaincre : un conseil de vignerons plus âgés, souvent en fin de carrière, à qui l’on demandait de miser l’héritage que leurs familles avaient mis près de quatre-vingts ans à bâtir sur l’idée d’un seul jeune homme. Ils l’ont laissé faire. Et ça, bien plus qu’une bouteille, c’est toute l’histoire.

Le lancement dont personne ne voulait, à la maison

Ils se lancent en avril 2021, sur Instagram, en plein confinement. Première année, vingt mille bouteilles. Vendues en France : zéro. Pas une.

Pourquoi ? Parce que, dit-il en haussant les épaules, « les Français détestent les coopératives, et un caviste qui entend le mot cesse d’écouter ». Ça vous rappelle quelque chose? Les premières commandes sont donc venues d’ailleurs. Un influenceur italien aux dix mille abonnés achète soixante bouteilles, en boit une de chaque avec des amis à Naples, poste une jolie photo de la gamme et enjoint aux siens d’en commander. Quelques jours plus tard, un importateur singapourien que personne n’avait jamais rencontré à Champagne Chavost commande deux palettes, mille deux cents bouteilles, et paie rubis sur l’ongle, sans rien avoir vu. Et ça ne s’est plus arrêté. Vingt pays la première année, une courbe qui passe de plate à verticale.

Aujourd’hui, Chavost produit environ cent quarante mille bouteilles, vend dans une cinquantaine de pays, et grandit alors que le marché du Champagne se contracte autour d’elle. L’exercice de l’an dernier s’est clôturé autour de cent six mille bouteilles ; cette année, ils ont dépassé les cent trente-six mille dans les dix premiers jours de la campagne. Tout le monde paie encore d’avance, cinq ans plus tard. Deux importateurs américains ont un jour proposé de prendre toute la production annuelle, à condition d’en obtenir l’exclusivité mondiale. Fabian a dit non, et l’a annoncé au conseil le mois suivant, face à une assemblée qui ne comprenait pas la décision.

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Le passage qui m’a scotché

J’ai demandé comment se fixe le prix du raisin, car en Champagne le vigneron est payé au kilo. On m’a expliqué que ce prix au kilo est en réalité fixé tout en haut, par les géants du type Moët & Chandon. Chaque année, ils le poussent vers le haut. On croirait à de la générosité. C’est plutôt l’inverse. Montez le prix au kilo assez haut et un petit producteur ne peut plus acheter de raisin en dégageant un bénéfice sur sa bouteille : vous maintenez le vigneron dans son rôle de vendeur de raisin, dépendant, et vous éliminez les indépendants sans jamais avoir à le dire. Un vigneron peut prendre environ huit euros le kilo aujourd’hui et être payé dans l’année, ou faire une bouteille qui en vaut treize et attendre cinq ans pour la vendre. La plupart, on les comprend, prennent les huit euros.

La réponse de Chavost est précisément ce qui me pousse à écrire ces lignes. La coopérative achète désormais la quasi-totalité du raisin de ses adhérents, ce qui lui permet de fixer son propre prix, à l’écart du jeu des grandes maisons. Comme le dit Fabian, ce ne sont pas les maisons de Champagne qui nous paient, c’est la banque. Et par-dessus un prix de base, les adhérents touchent des primes selon leur façon de cultiver : pour la certification haute valeur environnementale et durable, pour le bio, pour le cru, plus une prime de fidélité. Environ mille cinq cents euros de plus par hectare et par an dans la poche du vigneron. Payez les gens pour bien faire, et voyez à quelle vitesse le « bien faire » se répand.

🍃 Toute une série de mes articles cherche à savoir qui paie réellement pour la durabilité dans le vin, et le plus souvent la réponse est : personne, ou le vigneron seul. Si ça vous dit quelque chose, c’est normal : c’est exactement ce que Jackson me confiait en Rioja, à savoir que le seul moyen d’amener les vignerons à mieux cultiver, c’est de les payer pour leur façon de cultiver, pas pour les volumes qu’ils livrent. Chavost a inscrit ce principe noir sur blanc dans ses comptes.

Vous pouvez lire les quatre premières parties de mon travail sur les vins durables ici🍃

La visite avec François, l’autre frère

Fabian a dû partir, et la visite elle-même a été menée par son frère François, un tout autre personnage, et la raison pour laquelle l’ensemble tient debout.

Il nous a fait traverser la cuverie de fermentation puis entrer dans la pièce qui nous a cloués sur place tous les deux. Ils ont bâti un chai à barriques à l’intérieur de trois anciennes cuves en béton, en abattant les cloisons pour n’en faire qu’un seul long espace. Le carrelage blanc qui l’habille, du sol au plafond en passant par les murs, n’est pas une coquetterie de décorateur : ce sont les revêtements d’origine des cuves, laissés exactement là où ils ont toujours été. Encore une de ces choses que l’on ne voit nulle part ailleurs en Champagne : les vieilles fondations de la coopérative ouvertes et remises en service, plutôt que dissimulées. Rafraîchissant, une fois de plus. Dans cette pièce, ils élèvent une réserve perpétuelle, lancée en 2018, et leur ratafia perpétuel, un vin jadis méprisé comme le fond de cave du grand-père et aujourd’hui vendu aux cavistes et aux chefs étoilés au Michelin comme un bon cognac.

^{Le superbe chai à barriques, et François qui en raconte l’histoire.}

Les détails s’enchaînaient, et ce sont ceux qu’aucun communiqué de presse ne vous donnera. Les trois nouveaux pressoirs, installés en 2024 grâce à des fonds européens, ne sont pas boulonnés au sol comme partout ailleurs. Ils sont suspendus au plafond, pour que la pièce se nettoie correctement et se libère les cinquante autres semaines de l’année. L’idée est née d’une galère : en 2023, le vieux pressoir s’est bloqué avec deux tonnes de raisin écrasé sur la vis, et ils ont passé trois heures à le dégager à la main. Trois heures à dégager un pressoir, ce sont trois heures à ne pas presser, et en pleine vendange, avec du raisin cueilli qui attend son tour, chaque heure perdue se paie sur la qualité ; surtout quand on vise un vin sans sulfites.

Puis l’histoire qui glace le sang. Un matin, un homme qui travaille là depuis vingt ans descend l’escalier à six heures : le gaz carbonique de la fermentation de la nuit s’était accumulé au ras du sol, l’extraction étant coupée. Il a failli tomber sur place, a retenu sa respiration et s’est jeté dehors par la porte du garage en s’agrippant à une corde. Impossible de dire à qui la faute, alors la règle est désormais simple : l’extraction ne s’arrête plus, jour et nuit, avec des alarmes en secours. Ce n’est pas un travers du vin nature, soyons clairs : les accidents au gaz carbonique surviennent dans des caves du monde entier, chaque année, et chaque année ils tuent. C’est l’une de ces réalités avec lesquelles un domaine en activité doit composer.

Et, une chose que j’ai adorée, parce que je n’arrête pas d’en parler dans ma série sur la durabilité : ils viennent de faire fabriquer leurs bouteilles chez Verallia, à dix minutes de route, en retirant quelque quatre-vingts à cent grammes de verre par bouteille. Le verre est de loin le poste le plus lourd de l’empreinte carbone d’une bouteille : plus légère, produite localement et moins chère à transporter, c’est trois bénéfices d’un coup. Dans une région célèbre pour le poids de ses flacons, c’est tout simplement du bon sens.

J’ai abordé la question du poids des bouteilles dans la quatrième partie de mon enquête sur les vins durables. Une fois cet article terminé, filez y jeter un œil (traduction pas encore faite en français, désolé!):

Au-dessus de tout cela, avec une ouverture prévue vers 2028, un bar-terrasse et un espace de dégustation courant sur toute la longueur du toit, avec deux bars, une petite cuisine pour le fromage et la charcuterie, et une boutique. Exactement ce qui manque à la Champagne, je ne cesse de le dire. Une région à quarante-cinq minutes de Paris qui accueille encore ses visiteurs par un « sur rendez-vous uniquement », voire une pancarte « producteur de Champagne, pas de visite ». Chavost bâtit l’inverse.

Les vins, et l’honnêteté qui va avec

Partout, le même refus de la facilité. Le Blanc d’Assemblage, la plus grosse cuvée, c’est cinquante pour cent de Chardonnay et cinquante de Meunier issus des vignes cultivées durablement par les adhérents, sans sucre ni sulphites ajoutés.

À l’autre bout, il y a Eurêka !. Elle fermente du début à la fin sur les levures indigènes du raisin, sans, comme ils disent, le moindre intrant, pas même la trace d’argile que la plupart des producteurs emploient pour empêcher les lies de coller, et sans filtration. Même la prise de mousse, la seconde fermentation, est déclenchée avec du moût congelé issu des mêmes raisins, et non avec des levures et du sucre ajoutés. Elle est si instable que certaines années ils ne peuvent tout bonnement pas la produire, faute d’un vin assez bon pour tenter le coup. Quand elle aboutit, c’est extraordinaire. « Lunaire », l’a baptisée François, et il a raison. Son étiquette montre un monde qui n’est pas tout à fait la Terre : l’église de Chavot, présente sur la moitié des cartes postales de Champagne, réimaginée et posée sur une planète qui surplombe la nôtre. Le vin, dit-il, est sur une autre planète, et cette planète, c’est Chavost.

^{En parcourant la cave, des dessins apparaissent ici et là. Tous ont été réalisés par François lui-même.}

Nous avons acheté une bouteille et l’avons ouverte le soir même avec Alexis et Mathis, mes frères de vin : c’est vraiment autre chose. Vineux, d’une profondeur presque infinie, des arômes d’amande et de pomme verte avec une touche de coing mûr. En bouche, une pétillance délicate, une mousse subtile qui ne se forme qu’au contact du palais et de la langue. Parfaitement sec, et pourtant on devine la plus infime pointe de sucre, venue tout droit du fruit, et une note de basse-cour qui rappelle l’absence totale du moindre ajout : un Champagne fait de jus de raisin et de rien d’autre, du début à la toute fin. Une rareté.

François est d’une honnêteté désarmante sur le risque. Quand l’acidité volatile grimpe trop, le vin n’est pas rattrapé : il part à l’alambic pour être distillé, parce qu’ils ne se croient pas meilleurs que les autres, ils refusent simplement le filet. Quand une cuvée sans soufre sort nette, il parle de miracle, et il le pense. « On banalise la fabrication du Champagne », me dit-il, entendant par là que le métier la traite comme une recette qu’il suffit d’appliquer. Leur projet, c’est tout l’inverse : se compliquer volontairement la vie, assumer le stress, accepter de ne jamais tout maîtriser, et ne jamais cesser d’apprendre. Les meilleurs vignerons qu’il a rencontrés, en Bourgogne, dans le Jura, partout, lui ont tous dit la même chose : ils ont appris quelque chose de nouveau, et commis une erreur, chaque jour de leur vie.

Les deux frères

Si Fabian est le scientifique et la force, François est le regard, celui qui fait tenir l’ensemble. Il est posé là où son frère est vif, mesuré dans ses mots, et l’on sent le respect qui circule entre eux. On pourrait l’imaginer s’effacer, laisser son frère décider. Ce que j’ai vu, c’est de la complémentarité, et une vraie tendresse.

Son chemin jusqu’à la vigne a emprunté la voie la plus longue, et cela explique beaucoup de l’allure des vins. Il n’est arrivé qu’en 2020, un an après Fabian. Avant cela, il a étudié les langues étrangères et le commerce international, vendu du Champagne à l’export pour une petite maison, puis passé environ quatre ans dans une agence de communication à Épernay, à aider des vignerons brillants au chai mais démunis dès qu’il s’agit de bâtir une marque. Ce n’est qu’ensuite qu’il s’est reconverti : une année à l’école viticole d’Avize pour le diplôme d’exploitant, en reprenant une petite parcelle que ses parents avaient cultivée sous un vieux bail, dans le village voisin de Pierry. Il n’a pas de diplôme d’œnologie, et il ne prétend pas le contraire. Son frère, dit-il, a pris tout le versant scientifique pendant que lui était ailleurs, et c’est justement pour ça qu’à deux ils fonctionnent si bien.

Pendant la dégustation, François a répété, plus d’une fois, qu’il aurait aimé en savoir autant que son frère sur la vinification. Mon avis sincère, et j’espère qu’il le lira : c’est une chance qu’il ne s’y connaisse pas autant. Il a une tête littéraire, pas scientifique, et ça se voit de la plus belle des manières. C’est lui qui dessine chacune de ces étiquettes. Prenez Paradoxe, l’assemblage sur cinq ans sorti en septembre dernier. C’est lui qui l’a baptisée, en remontant à la racine du mot, para, contre, et doxa, l’opinion commune : un vin qui va à l’encontre de tout ce que le métier attend d’un Champagne. Puis il a dessiné une vague pour l’étiquette, après que la coopérative eut expédié une palette vers l’Amérique sur un cargo à voile. Un scientifique, seul, n’aurait sans doute jamais osé. Fabian sait voir l’avenir et y entraîner les autres. François le rend assez beau pour qu’on ait envie de suivre. Retirez l’un ou l’autre, et Chavost y perdrait beaucoup.

^{Paradoxe était ma préférée de la gamme dégustée}.

Mon avis

Je suis monté sur cette colline enthousiaste plutôt que sceptique, et j’en suis redescendu convaincu que tout le métier doit des excuses à la coopérative.

On réserve toute la part de romance au vigneron-récoltant solitaire, aux initiales sur l’étiquette, à l’artisan seul contre le monde. La coopérative, elle, n’a droit qu’au haussement d’épaules. Or en voici une qui cultive en bio là où elle le peut, refuse d’ajouter soufre ou sucre, vend un Champagne nature et éminemment buvable dans cinquante pays, paie ses vignerons davantage pour qu’ils cultivent mieux, offre à la région une véritable porte d’entrée, et fait tout cela pendant que les géants s’excluent eux-mêmes de leur propre marché à force de prix. Ce n’est pas l’ennemi du bon Champagne. À la lumière de tout ça, c’en est peut-être l’un des plus beaux espoirs.

Peut-être la question n’a-t-elle jamais été coopérative ou vigneron. Peut-être est-elle simplement : qui prend vraiment soin de ceux qui font pousser le raisin. À cette aune, la coopérative dont personne ne voulait est en train de gagner. Cinq heures là-haut, mon frère à mes côtés et les deux frères de l’autre côté de la table, comptent parmi les après-midi les plus inspirants que j’aie passés dans le vin depuis longtemps. Allez-y, si vous en avez la chance.

The view before the wine

We met at the office first, up on the hill in the village of Chavot, where the committee gathers once a month. Say it “Chavost,” with the “s”. The building faces the vines, and on a bright July day the view is the kind that stops a conversation. You can see all the way to Épernay, five minutes down the hill by car, with nothing in between but green, tidy, endless vineyard. I have grown up around these slopes and I still stood there for a minute like a tourist. That view matters, or at least it felt like it, because everything Chavost has done in the last five years is an argument that a place this beautiful, and a project this collective, deserves better than to die.

^{One side of the panoramic view from the tasting room shows the legendary Chavot’s church}

The cooperative that was ten years from the grave

Chavost was founded not long after the war, by a handful of families. A decade ago it was, by everyone’s honest reckoning, on its way to the cemetery. Over roughly twenty years it lost about forty hectares and a dozen families, off to make their own bottles or moving elsewhere. A cooperative that loses its bottle-makers is left as a pressing shed with a mortgage, and that is exactly how co-ops die. The members who made wine leave to make it themselves, the co-op becomes a place that only presses grapes, and the fixed costs of buildings once built to bottle and disgorge finish the job. Nearby, Moussy and Saint-Martin-d’Ablois were swallowed by the Pierry cooperative. It happens all the time.

Then, in 2019, a young chef de cave walked in with one condition. We do it my way.

Fabian, and the gift I have only seen a handful of times

Fabian Daviaux is one of those people. I have met a few in London, entrepreneurs who can see a thing that does not exist yet, and, rarer still, can make everyone around them see it too. That second part is the one-in-a-million bit, and spending ninety minutes with him was a masterclass in it. He talks fast, with vehemence, and he carries a room.

His way turned out to mean this. Stop adding sulphur to the wine, a thing he had hated since he was a boy dropping to the floor because he could not breathe the fumes helping his father on a Sunday. No added sulphites. No dosage, so no sugar to round the edges. No filtration to tidy it up. Put the cooperative’s own five hectares into organic conversion. And then wrap the whole thing in labels covered in striking, cartoon-like characters that look nothing like Champagne, which was the entire point. These characters are little vine-growers and winemakers doing winemakaing things, drawn as they might have looked in the 1930s: the one in red trousers is the boss, and you could say that is Fabian, and the rest are the cooperative’s members.

^{One of the iconic characters you can find on the labels is also hidden in Champagne Chavost's cellar.}

For the clearest picture of the man, take the scene he told me himself. The winter before the first no-sulphite bottling, the members voted on the bottle shape. He wanted a wide, un-Champagne bottle to carry the big new labels. Members voted for a normal one. He lost by a single voice. The next morning he tore up the minutes and told them they were wrong, that they had hired him to drag the place into the light, and it was going into his bottle. It is, he says, the only undemocratic thing he has ever done there. It is also exactly what a founder does to force a vision into the world. And it is worth remembering who he had to win over: a committee of older growers, many of them near the end of their working lives, being asked to bet the legacy their families had spent the best part of eighty years building on one young man’s idea. They let him. That, more than any bottle, is the story.

The launch nobody at home wanted

They went to market in April 2021, on Instagram, in the middle of lockdown. First year, twenty thousand bottles. Sold in France: zero. Not one.

Why? Because, he shrugs, “the French hate cooperatives, and a caviste who hears the word stops listening”. Sound familiar. So the first orders came from everywhere else. An Italian influencer with ten thousand followers bought sixty bottles, drank one of each with friends in Naples, posted a pretty line-up, and told his people to buy. Days later a Singapore importer nobody had ever met ordered two pallets, twelve hundred bottles, and paid in full up front, sight unseen. Then it did not stop. Twenty countries in year one, the growth going from flat to vertical.

Today Chavost makes around a hundred and forty thousand bottles, sells into something like fifty countries, and is growing while the Champagne market shrinks around it. Last year’s exercise closed near a hundred and six thousand; this year they passed a hundred and thirty-six in the first ten days of the run. Everyone still pays in advance, five years on. Two American importers once offered to take his entire annual production if the Co-op would sell it all to them, as a global exclusivity. Fabian said no, and told the committee the following month, to a room of people who could not understand why.

The bit that actually stopped me

I asked how the grape price works, because in Champagne the grower is paid by the kilo. I was told that kilo price is effectively set at the top, by the giants like Moët & Chandon. Every year they push it up. You would assume that was generosity. It is closer to the opposite. Push the kilo price high enough and a small producer can no longer buy grapes and still make a profit on a bottle, so you keep the grower as a grape-seller, dependent, and you price the independents out without ever having to say so. A grower can take around eight euros a kilo now and be paid within the year, or make a bottle worth thirteen and wait five years to sell it. Most, understandably, most take the eight.

Chavost’s answer is the reason I am typing this. It now buys almost all of its members’ grapes itself, which means it sets its own price, decoupled from the game the houses are playing. As Fabian put it, it is not the Champagne houses that pay us, it is the bank. And on top of a base price, members are paid premiums for how they farm, for sustainable and high-environmental-value certification, for organic, for cru, plus a loyalty bonus on top. Roughly fifteen hundred euros a hectare more in the grower’s pocket per year. Pay people for doing it properly, and watch how fast “properly” spreads.

I am writing a whole series asking who actually pays for sustainability in wine, and mostly finding that the answer is nobody, or the grower alone. If that rings a bell, it should: it is exactly what Jackson told me in Rioja, that the only way to get growers to farm better is to pay them for how they farm, not for how much they cart to the door. Chavost has written that principle straight into its accounts.

You can read the first four parts of my take on sustainable wines here.

The tour with François, the other brother

Fabian had to leave, and the visit itself was led by his brother François, who is a different creature entirely, and the reason the whole thing works.

He took us through the press room and then into the room that stopped both of us in our tracks. They had built a barrel cellar inside three old concrete fermenting vats, knocking through the walls to join them into one long space. The white tiles that line it, floor, walls and ceiling, are not a decorator’s touch: they are the original linings of the vats, left exactly where they always were. It is another of those things you simply do not see anywhere else in Champagne, the old bones of the cooperative opened up and put back to work rather than hidden away. Refreshing, again. In that room they age a perpetual reserve, running since 2018, and their perpetual ratafia, a wine style once dismissed as the grandfather’s leftover and now sold to cavistes and Mihelin starred chefs like a good cognac.

^{The stunning barrel room and François telling its story}

The details kept coming, and they are the ones no press release gives you. The three new presses, installed in 2024 with European funding, are not bolted to the floor like everyone else’s. They are hung from the ceiling, so the room can be cleaned properly and freed up the other fifty weeks of the year. It came from necessity: in 2023 the old press jammed with two tonnes of crushed grapes on the screw, and they spent three hours clearing it by hand. Three hours clearing a press is three hours not pressing, and in the middle of harvest, with picked fruit waiting its turn, that is time the raw material cannot spare ; especially when aiming to make wine without sulphites.

Then the scary story. One morning a man who has worked there twenty years came down the stairs at six in the morning, and the carbon dioxide from the overnight fermentation had pooled at floor level with the extraction off. He nearly went down where he stood, held his breath, and threw himself out through the garage door on a rope. Nobody could say whose fault it was, so the rule is now simple. The extraction never stops now, day or night, with alarms as backup. This is not a natural-wine problem, to be clear: carbon dioxide accidents happen in cellars all over the world, every single year, and every year they kill people. It is one of the things a working winery lives with, and plans around.

And, a thing I loved, because I keep banging on about it across the sustainability series, they have just moved their bottles to Verallia, made ten minutes down the road, and taken something like eighty to a hundred grams of glass out of each one. Glass is the single heaviest part of a bottle’s carbon footprint, so lighter, made locally, and cheaper to ship is three wins in one move. In a region famous for the weight of its bottles, that is plain good sense.

I covered the bit on bottle weights in the fourth part of my research on sustainable wines. After you’ve read this article, head there:

Above all of this, opening around 2028, is a rooftop bar and tasting space running the whole length of the building, with two bars, a small kitchen for cheese and charcuterie, and a shop. Which is exactly the thing I keep saying Champagne is missing. A region forty-five minutes from Paris that still greets visitors with “by appointment only,” or a sign that says “producer of Champagne, no visits.” Chavost is building the opposite.

The wines, and the honesty behind them

Everywhere you look there is a refusal to take the easy road. The Blanc d’Assemblage, the biggest cuvée, is fifty per cent Chardonnay and fifty Meunier from the members’ sustainably-farmed vines, with no added sugar.

At the other extreme sits Eurêka!. It is fermented start to finish on the grapes’ own indigenous yeast, with, as they put it, absolutely no inputs at all, not even the trace of clay most producers use to stop the lees sticking, and no filtration. Even the second fermentation, the one that puts the bubbles in, is set off with frozen must from the same grapes rather than added yeast and sugar. It is so volatile that some years they cannot make it at all, because the wine simply is not good enough to risk. When it does come through, it is extraordinary. “Lunaire,” François called it, and he is right. Its label shows a world that is not quite Earth: the church of Chavot, which sits on half the postcards of Champagne, reimagined and placed on a planet overlooking Earth. The wine, he says, is on another planet, and the planet is Chavost.

^{As you walk through the cellar, drawings appear here and there. All were produced by François himself.}

We bought a bottle and opened it that evening with Alexis and Mathis, my brothers in wine, and it truly is a different thing. Vinous, with an almost infinite depth, aromas of almond and green apple with a touch of ripe quince. In the mouth a delicate petillance, a subtle mousse that forms only as it hits the palate and the tongue. Bone dry, and yet there is the faintest, barely-there touch of sweetness coming straight from the fruit, and a hint of farmyard that reminds you of the total absence of anything added: a Champagne made from grape juice and nothing else, from the beginning to the very end.

François is disarmingly honest about the risk. When the volatile acidity climbs too high, the wine does not get rescued, it goes to the still to be distilled, because they are not better than anyone else, they simply refuse the safety net. When a no-sulphite cuvée comes out clean, he calls it a miracle, and means it. “We banalise making Champagne,” he said, meaning the trade treats it as a recipe you just apply. Their whole project is the opposite: put knots in your own brain, take on the stress, accept you will never fully master it, and never stop learning. The best growers he has met, in Burgundy, the Jura, anywhere, all told him the same thing. They learned something new, and made a mistake, every day of their lives.

The two brothers

If Fabian is the scientist and the force, François is the eye, and the reason the whole thing holds together. He is measured where his brother is quick, careful with his words, and you can feel the respect running between them. You could imagine him simply deferring, letting his brother decide. What I saw instead was complementarity, and real affection.

His road to the vines was the long way round, and it explains a great deal about how the wines look. He arrived only in 2020, a year after Fabian. Before that he studied foreign languages and international commerce, sold Champagne on export for a small Maison, then spent about four years at a communications agency in Épernay, helping vignerons who are brilliant in the cellar and hopeless at building a brand. Only then did he retrain, a year at the wine school in Avize for the growing diploma, taking over a small parcel his parents had farmed on an old lease in nearby village called Pierry. He has no oenology degree, and he does not pretend otherwise. His brother, he says, took the whole scientific side while he was always on other things, which is exactly why the two of them work.

When we tasted, François said, more than once, that he wished he knew as much about winemaking as his brother does. My honest view, and I hope he reads it: it is a gift that he does not. He has a literary head, not a scientific one, and it shows in the best possible way. He designs every one of those labels. Take Paradoxe, the five-year blend they released last September. He named it himself, digging out the root of the word, para, against, and doxa, the common opinion, a wine that goes against everything the trade agrees a Champagne should be, and then drew a wave for the label after the co-op shipped a pallet to America on a sail cargo ship. A scientist, left alone, might never have dared it. Fabian can see the future and drag people towards it. François makes it beautiful enough that they want to come. Take either brother out of the picture and Chavost is a lesser place.

^{Paradoxe was my favourite of the range we tasted.}

My take

I went up that hill excited rather than sceptical, and I came down thinking the whole trade owes the cooperative an apology.

We hand all the romance to the lone grower-producer, the initials on the label, the artisan against the world. The cooperative gets the eye-roll but here is one that farms organic where it can, refuses to add sulphur or sugar, sells drinkable natural Champagne into fifty countries, pays its growers more for farming better, is building the region a proper front door, and is doing it while the giants price themselves out of their own market. That is not the enemy of good Champagne. On this evidence it might be one of its best hopes.

Maybe the question was never cooperative or grower. Maybe it is simply who actually looks after the people who grow the grapes. On that test, the cooperative nobody wanted to buy is winning. Five hours up that hill, with my brother beside me and two brothers across the table, was one of the more inspiring afternoons I have had in wine for a long time. Go, if they will have you.

And at more or less the same moment, somewhere in those same dry hills, I would put money on a grower sitting through a sales call, being sold an AI platform that promises to cut his vineyard’s water use by a fifth.

What I find fascinating? The rep is actually telling the truth.

The good news, and it is real

AI-assisted deficit irrigation, which is a fancy way of saying "give the vine exactly the water it needs and not a drop more," is one of the genuine success stories in vineyard tech. In the better cases, estates running it are seeing water and energy use fall by as much as 20 to 30%, along with lower costs and sometimes better margins, because a model trained on years of yield and weather can time a watering schedule tighter than any human with a clipboard ever could. Treasury Wine Estates, the group behind Penfolds, is trialling AI-linked smart irrigation from a firm called Lumo, which reckons it saves growers up to a third of their water while the system waters itself through heat spikes and weekends alike. Over in Napa, estates like Pine Ridge and Chateau Montelena have been cutting water the same way for years, with sensor-driven kit from Tule. And it is not only out in the vines. In the cellar, Jackson Family Wines has cut its winery water use by 43% since 2008, down from nine gallons of water for every gallon of wine to under five and a half. Precision viticulture as a whole is on track to be worth more than two billion dollars this year, and growers are not buying in because it is shiny. They are buying in because they are frightened. Something like 1.8 billion people are expected to be living under absolute water scarcity this year, and drought, heat and freak rainfall are now just part of the job.

So on the vine, the tech does exactly what it promises. I am not writing a “don’t trust the robots” piece.

But the vine is not where AI lives

Because “AI” does not actually run in the vineyard. It runs on a model, the model runs in a data centre, and data centres are consuming a lot of water. Like a looooot. Around the world, AI data centres are reckoned to have got through roughly 264 billion gallons of water in 2025, most of it just keeping the servers cool. That is roughly what 1.8 million Americans get through at home in a year, and that is one industry alone.

And it does not land evenly. Two-thirds of the 800 or so new AI data centres planned in the US are going up in places that are already short of water. Texas on its own is projected to jump from about 49 billion gallons a year for data centres in 2025 to nearly 400 billion by 2030, which is eight times the water in five years, in a state that already has its own droughts and its own farmers scrapping over what is left.

No need to say, there are a lot protests taking place there at the moment.

But also in Utah.

And everywhere I looked, really…

So the real story is not “AI is thirsty, keep it off the farm.” It is sneakier than that. The water gets saved at the vine and spent at the data centre, and the data centre is very often sitting in someone else’s drought. The water problem is not fixed. We have moved it, and made it harder to see, because nobody stands in a field and watches a server rack drink.

My take

I will be honest, I don’t have a neat answer to this one, and I’d rather admit that than invent one. I am certainly not going to tell a grower in the Veneto, Spain or the US to rip out a system that is genuinely saving a fifth of their water. From where I sit, that would be mad. But I dn’t think the industry gets to call precision irrigation a “water solution” and leave it there, not without asking the next question. Where are the electricity and the cooling water for that clever little model actually coming from, and is that supply under the same pressure the vineyard is trying to escape?

And to be straight, the cooling water is only the part we can count, because the bigger thirst sits upstream, in the power stations feeding the servers and the plants etching the chips, and that water hides even better.

Wine has always been a story about one specific place. It is worth remembering that the technology we are using to keep growing it does not live in that place at all.

It turns out I meant it more than I knew.

February 2011. I am standing near a glass box on a mezzanine at St Pancras International, a cloth in one hand and a champagne flute in the other, and it is about five degrees celsius. Not in a fridge. In the station. St Pancras is open to the weather, open to the trains, open to the wind that rolls off the Eurostar tracks every time the doors release another wave of people. And there I am. Polishing. Again.

Let me set the scene, because it’s a good one. Most Londoners have passed through St Pancras at least once, tucked as it is next to King’s Cross and Euston. In the morning the commuters pour in from the countryside and the Eurostar arrivals hall breathes in waves: the doors open, hundreds flood the grand corridor between the smart shops and the sandwich places, then it falls still again. Above all that movement, on the mezzanine, past the Booking Office and what was then a Carluccio’s, out towards one of the lonelier platforms, sat the Grand Champagne Bar by Searcys. A glass box. A big fridge in the middle stacked with champagne, a wall of glass between us and the trains, and nine or so stools around three sides of a square; this is where I spent 8 to 12h a day for a few months, standing and polishing glasses.

Something else I had never seen in my life. A Nebuchadnezzar (*). Twenty-five years living in Champagne, and it took a station in north London to introduce me to a bottle that size.

Now, in Part 2 I may have slightly oversold myself at that interview. I said I was a Champagne expert who just needed to sharpen his English. The truth, standing in that cold box, was that I was learning English and Champagne at the exact same time, from scratch, in public. I was told, politely, not to speak to customers until my English improved. Fair enough. There weren’t many customers to not speak to. The bar wasn’t making money. In winter the team shrank to a bartender, a couple of waiters, a few runners who mostly stayed in the warmer restaurant next door, and me, on the glasses the handful of regulars actually used. When trains ran late, which in winter is most of the time in England, people drifted over and ordered coffee. I spent more time working the coffee machine than pouring wine. Hold that thought.

You spotted “Nebuchadnezzar“ with its little (*). That’s your cue for the Mini-Wiki-Winy-Moo, where I explain the wine world’s odder words in plain, slightly silly English. Have a read, only available to paid subscribers.

My first lesson in British drinking culture

We opened at 7:30 in the morning, with a licence to serve alcohol at that hour, which to a Frenchman is a minor act of madness. Stag parties came through in packs, pints lined up before nine, then onto the Eurostar for a day in Paris. The hen parties took cocktails, or Prosecco when our one bartender couldn’t keep up, which was always. Sometimes the same faces reappeared in the evening, greyer and slower, held upright by a kinder friend. Grown adults, drinking at dawn, for no reason other than they were on holiday. You see the exact same thing at Heathrow or Gatwick any morning of the week now.

Why would anyone drink like that on a Tuesday? Because they had earned it, and because earning anything here costs more than it does at home. In France, a permanent contract, the famous CDI, is a golden ticket: a 35-hour week, real protection, near enough impossible to be sacked. I didn’t pay for my studies either, and the state actually handed me around 180 euros a month towards my rent. In the UK you take on tens of thousands of pounds of debt for a degree, then work the hours to dig yourself back out. Nothing is given here. You earn everything, including the right to a wild morning off. I didn’t have the words for it yet, but I was starting to feel the shape of the place.

Funnily enough, at a Champagne bar, all I really made was coffee. In France a coffee is an espresso, or an allongé if you want water in it, or a café crème. Nobody is fluffing milk. Here I had to learn the whole circus: flat white, latte, cappuccino, more or less the same drink wearing different amounts of foam. I resisted, then fell for it completely, and now cappuccino is all I drink. You can even date a Londoner by their coffee. My lot, early-to-mid forties, order cappuccino. Five years younger, flat white. You can sort the whole city by milk.

People and language

The people saved me. In hospitality your colleagues become your friends and then your family, because you spend more time with them than with anyone you are actually related to. Mine were also my English teachers. Doni, the Brazilian manager who took the chance on me. Manu, the Portuguese assistant manager with faultless French and more charm than should be legal. Philippe and Hélène, the French shift managers who would flip back to my language when the pressure came on. Zoltán, Lina, Edyta, Tom, Jader, from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Brazil, a little United Nations behind a champagne fridge. And Toby, the only Englishman, an actor, who could do every accent in the country and, when he saw me drowning, would speak English in a French accent so I could keep up.

I learned the language two ways. Chatting with Hungarian Tom on the commute, same train, same stop; he was doing most of the talking. And reading the Metro and the Evening Standard on the Tube, then hunting down the same story in the French press to work out what I had just read. My grammar was quite good. What I was missing was most of the words. All of the words, really.

If you’ve made it this far into a freezing champagne bar with me, you may as well stay for the head-shave at the end. Subscribe and the next stories come to you.

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Then summer arrived, and the empty box filled up

By the busy months I was polishing glasses at a rate I did not know was physically possible. Hundreds a shift. People queued for a stool, bookings turned over on a strict ninety-minute clock, in and out, in and out. And one afternoon it tipped into something close to an episode of Fawlty Towers.

I am at my station, polishing and people-watching, when a customer catches my eye and waves. “Where’s the loo, please?” I ask her to repeat it. Then again. Then I admit defeat and wave Toby over.

He has a quick word with her, sends her on her way, and turns to me. “She wanted the toilets. When that happens, just say: it’s inside, to the right, at the very end.” Then he drops into that exaggerated French accent of his. “Can you repeat zat sentence to me?” I do, and I get it right. “Perfect,” he says, sliding straight back into his lovely, polite, British self. I feel ready.

Moments later, a man stops at the exact same spot. “Where’s the gents, mate?” Cold sweat. I don’t catch a single word. With fifteen years here now, I can tell you he was a Scouser, and Scouse is one of the toughest accents in the country to crack. Toby is close by, watching, amused, ready to pounce. This time he says nothing out loud. He just mouths it at me, in silent French shapes: “Toi... let... tes.” I relay the directions, word for word. I glance at Toby. Thumbs up, and a wink.

A little more time passes, and I send three or four more people the right way, in English, like a professional. Then the language moves the goalposts. “Loos.” Toby, from across the bar: “Toi-le-ttes.” “Restrooms.” Toby, materialising from behind a fridge: “Toi-lettes.” “Lavatory.” Toby, thumbs up, we are still talking toilets, a word I have not heard once since. “Bog,” which makes him laugh, and was signal enough on its own. He told me later that one was a bit rude.

One twelve-hour shift. Half a dozen new words in my vocabulary, every single one of them meaning the same thing.

And that thing was toilets.

Also, what a place to learn people too. A station is a theatre of arrivals and departures. The sad goodbyes, a partner leaving, a parent watching a child head off to study in the North. The happy reunions, someone home at last from a long way away. Once, two people sat at my bar who had talked online for five or six years and were meeting, that morning, in the flesh, for the first time. I poured them champagne and tried to look busy. You catch entire lives at a station, in ninety-second scenes.

The shifts

Off the clock, life was less cinematic. First, the Isle of Dogs, E14, a houseshare by the river: fourteen of us on three floors, two washing machines, 2 living rooms carved into triple bedrooms. Lucie and I had the ensuite room at the top and felt lucky, which tells you plenty, given we had left our own flat in France to get there. We kept a kettle and a microwave in the bedroom to dodge the kitchen. In June we moved south to Streatham Hill, into an old bank a hardworking Vietnamese family had turned into a beautiful shared house. Rent, £680 a month. My salary ran between 900 and 1,200. Transport took about 150. Lucie, whose English was about as good as mine, couldn’t find work. We ate into our savings and watched London do the thing London does, which is charge you for the privilege of staying. You are not given this city. You earn the right to stay in it, and even then you never quite get to rest.

And somewhere in all that, the two of us began to come apart. Lucie had pictured London as heaven, and the grind was rubbing the gold off it. I was going the other way, lit up by the colleagues, by the language arriving word by word, and most of all by all these cultures I had never met before, how they cooked and celebrated and grieved. My brain had woken up and it wanted more. Around the middle of 2011, four months into the job, that difference started to show. Nothing dramatic, no row and no rupture, just two people slowly beginning to want different things. It was the beginning of the end, but a gentle one, and we would stay together for the best part of a year yet.

My ambition had a face. Peter, the general manager: Swedish, sharp, respected, and completely bald. I looked at him and thought, “that”. I want to be “that”. I could even see the rungs, from polishing glasses up past Philippe and Hélène, past Manu, past Doni, and one day, maybe, Peter. So in July 2011, in the heat, in the top-floor bathroom of that old bank, I bought a shaver and took it to my own head. I had been losing my hair since my twenties, so the decision was half made anyway. But it did not feel like surrendering to a receding hairline, it felt more like signing a contract with myself.

^{The day I cut my hair real short. Clearly, my hands were still vibrating…}

Six months. January to July 2011. A cold box, endless milky coffees, a bar losing money, a relationship running out of road, and a newly shaved head.

Everything I am today started right there.

So, barely two months after deciding my future was in London, I quit.

That autumn there was a harvest waiting back in Champagne. One month of it paid what over two months in London did, and the bar would not give me the time off to go. So I chose the grapes. I went back to France, Lucie stayed in London where the job offers were finally starting to come, and we left it there for the time being.

What I experienced inside one of the biggest houses in Champagne over those few weeks is the next story. No names, no maison, just what really happens when the harvest comes in.

And that’s in Part 4.

I didn’t. And the bit that throws people: I didn’t even look at the prices.

Not because price doesn’t matter. It matters enormously, and it has its own letter in how I work, the C in SCALE, for Cost. Just not today, and not at this stage. When a sample lands, the bottle is the product. The liquid comes later. So today it’s the other four letters, SALE, and the price list stays in the drawer where it can’t sway me.

This is how I actually work through a box like this.

S is for Source and Segment. These are all Rioja, and Rioja is already everywhere in UK online and physical retail, which sets the bar high. So the first question isn’t “is this nice,” it’s “where would this even sit next to the fifty Riojas already on the shelf.” The encouraging part is that this box mostly isn’t more of the same. There’s a traditional-method sparkling Rioja, four whites including a nine-variety field blend off vines planted in 1900, a varietal Graciano, and a run of single-vineyard reds. Sparkling and white Rioja, and these Viñedo Singular bottlings, are exactly the corners that are growing and under-represented here. That’s far more interesting to me than another oak-heavy Reserva.

A is for Appeal and Aesthetics. Now I pick each bottle up, and this is the part I actually filmed. The label first, and the question I ask is whether a British drinker could remember the name after one glass. Half of these are a mouthful: Jusan Valdelana Viticultor Artesano, Marqués de Vargas Sección Privada Viñedo Singular Pradolagar, Fernández de Piérola. Gorgeous on the bottle, but a name nobody can hold onto is a name nobody reorders. There’s a lot of craft on show too. Seven of the twelve are individually numbered, five are dipped in wax, one has a hand-painted label of old vines, another has its name embossed into what looks like wood. All lovely.

And then, because I spent a whole series on exactly this, I can’t unsee the last thing. They are heavy - something I am not touching on in the video.

I weighed all twelve, full, and worked back to the glass. The average empty bottle in this box lands around 685 grams. The lightest is about 490. The heaviest, a red called Monte Real El Bagazo, is a little over 900 grams of glass wrapped around the same 750ml of wine as everyone else. For reference, the industry average is roughly 550 grams, and the Sustainable Wine Roundtable wants the average still-wine bottle under 420 by the end of 2026. Every single bottle in this box is over that target. Most are half again as heavy, and a couple are more than double.

I’ll forgive exactly one, the sparkling, because a traditional-method wine has real pressure inside and needs the glass. The other eleven don’t have that excuse. They are heavy because heavy feels expensive, and that instinct is going to cost these producers on carbon, on the truck, and now on the UK packaging fees I wrote about not long ago. None of it makes the wine taste better.

You can read the first 4 parts of my series on sustainable wines here. You can also subscribe for free 👇🏼

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L is for Look-ups. Then I go digging. A few of these names I know, Marqués de Vargas, Matarromera, Franco-Españolas, Monte Real, so my first job is checking whether they are already represented here, because if they are, the gap I’m looking for has already been filled. The ones I don’t recognise, Ostara, Magadi, El Belisario, Montecano, are the ones that make me sit up: little or no UK footprint, which is either a problem or an opening.

E is for Experience. Last, the crowd; you. Vivino, CellarTracker, the odd Reddit thread, for a read on whether real drinkers, and not just the trade, have warmed to wines like these. It certainly is not gospel, but a signal when I read things like: “I would definitely buy again” or “I wish I’d ordered cases of it” (real quotes by the way).

Only once all of that is done do I let myself think about a corkscrew. Some importers bring wines in because they like them. I bring them in because I want to establish the brand and sell it. Research, research, research. Then taste, maybe.

That last “maybe” is doing a lot of work, and it’s exactly why I filmed the whole thing.

More of these to come, make sure you subscribe to drinc. (and don’t forget the dot).

That was the Champagne I grew up with. It isn’t quite the Champagne anymore, and after fifteen years watching the trade from London, buying the stuff for a living rather than selling experiences around it, I’ve got a few thoughts on why.

The gates are opening, and someone is paying for the hinges

Start with the names you’ll know. Bollinger, in Aÿ, a house that has never once opened its doors to the public, is turning one of its buildings into a 20-room hotel with tasting rooms, a private dining space and a reworked cellar. They expect something like 20,000 visitors a year once it’s done, all timed to land before the house’s 200th birthday in 2029. This isn’t a rumour I picked up at a tasting: Bollinger announced it back in 2022, and the builders have been in ever since.

Taittinger reopened its Saint-Nicaise cellars in Reims in 2024, after eighteen months of work, then went a step further last year and added Polychrome, a restaurant built on one simple idea, that Champagne belongs at the dinner table and not just in an ice bucket. A different chef is invited in each year, and the food is there to serve the wine rather than the other way round.

Thiénot has opened Le 3 in the centre of Reims, a boutique hotel with a rooftop Champagne bar looking over the cathedral and restored cellars beneath it. Twelve rooms, which tells you exactly which kind of guest it’s after.

None of this is cheap, and none of it is charity. It’s a bet on wine tourism as a category, the same bet Barossa and Napa placed decades before Champagne got round to it.

It isn’t only the big houses

The part that actually got my attention wasn’t the hotels, though. It was the growers.

Cédric Moussé, a fourth-generation Meunier obsessive down in Cuisles, has been throwing his doors open to show what his grapes can do outside a flute, barbecue and all. By his team’s account, that kind of visit has gone from the odd day a week to several. Up on the grand cru slopes of Bouzy, the Paillard brothers now hand visitors the keys to a Méhari to potter through the vines before a four-course chef’s table matched to the wines, at a domaine that used to keep the gate firmly shut.

That’s the tell. When it’s not only the houses with marketing departments but the growers too, all moving at once, it stops being a trend piece. It’s an industry deciding, more or less together, that the cellar door is worth more open than closed.

^{An image of Champagne by drinc. and Canva}

Why now

Because the numbers made them. Champagne shipped 298.7 million bottles in 2023, down 8.2% on the year before. Then 271.4 million in 2024, down another 9.2%. That is roughly 55 million bottles that stopped leaving the region in two years, while the price of a bottle climbed 20 to 25% over three. Two rough years, in other words, and exactly the kind that make a producer look hard at where their next loyal drinker is coming from.

That’s where tourism earns its keep. Someone standing in your vineyard, tasting your wine, hearing the story from you and not from a shelf-talker, is a far stickier customer than any supermarket listing will hand you. And the footfall is already there: Reims pulled in 7.5 million visitors in 2023, and the tourist office’s problem now is beds, not bodies. Épernay has a 110-room Marriott going up as I type.

Then the squeeze. Since the 1st of July 2025, Épernay has put a hard cap on short-term tourist lets: 450 across the town, and no more than 190 in the hyper-centre. Once those slots are full, that's it, new applicants join a waiting list. So the one kind of bed that scales quickly, the Airbnb sort, has just had a ceiling fixed over it, in the town that most needs the rooms. Hotels can take up the slack, but a hotel takes years to build and a small fortune to finance. Which is my roundabout way of saying the demand is here now and the beds are not, and the region is leaving money on the table while the concrete sets.

Champagne is 45 minutes from Paris by train. It carries UNESCO World Heritage status. It makes the most famous wine on earth. For most of my life the region treated all three of those as somebody else’s problem to monetise. That’s the bit that’s changing.

My take

I’ve spent my career on the trade side, buying wine rather than selling experiences around it, so I watch this less as a tourist and more as someone doing the sums on what “direct to consumer” actually does to a producer. It isn’t just prettier. It’s a different, stickier relationship with the person drinking the bottle, and it’s one Barossa and Napa learned to build long before Champagne bothered.

And I’m from there. I still go back often, and each time a few more of those gates are cracked open that used to be bolted shut. I spend a fair amount of my own time now thinking about what a proper stay in Champagne could be, one built by someone who grew up on the wrong side of the gates, not a hotel group bolting a Champagne label onto a spa menu. The maths is hard to ignore, too: the visitors keep coming, the easy beds have just been capped, and the hotels are years off. That is a gap, and gaps are where things get built. More on that another time.

For now, one piece of advice if you’re heading that way: go easy on the big Avenue de Champagne names, and ask a grower if you can visit instead. The answer is “yes” far more often than it used to be.

There is a lot of rubbish floating around Facebook, and plenty more dressed up as journalism. Same thing really: clickbait, no substance, no truth. So let me have a go instead. Who is better placed than a wine professional who actually lives with the condition?

And before anyone asks whether I ran this past my consultant first: no, and that is rather the point. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who know this condition inside out, nurses, specialists, the odd doctor, and I lean on them plenty. But there is a line. They understand the science. Not one of them knows what it is to live inside it. None of them has felt the confusion of a 3am hypo, or carried the endless admin that never clocks off, or watched a good day come apart over one miscalculated dose. They can’t feel it, so they don’t carry it, and they don’t lie awake under it.

So I trust them on the science. I stop trusting them the second they tell me how many units to take, or hand me a list of what I can and can’t eat. After ten years, that part is mine.

How it actually works

My condition is auto-immune. My white blood cells decided to attack the cells in my pancreas that make insulin, so I don’t produce any. None. Which means I do it by hand: synthetic insulin, in pens, injected somewhere between 5 and 20 times a day. Twenty is a rough day.

Carbs push my blood sugar up. Insulin brings it down. All I have to do is balance the two. Sounds simple. It absolutely isn’t. And carbs aren’t only sugar: there’s glucose, fructose (the sugar in fruit), starch in potatoes, rice, pasta, and plenty more. So you can add part-time nutritionist to the job description.

The things that move my blood sugar are endless: stress, bad sleep, exercise, a walk, an afternoon of DIY. Even waking up nudges it higher (that one is called the Dawn Phenomenon, and it happens to you too, you just don’t notice because your insulin keeps it in range).

People with T1D make up to 180 diabetes-related decisions a day. Here is a typical example.

A non-diabetic: I fancy an apple. I eat the apple.

Me: I fancy an apple. What is my blood sugar doing? How much insulin would it need? Hang on, I’m swimming later, so if I eat it and take 3 units I could go hypo mid-session. Although I’m walking the dog first, a good hour of it, and this heat wrecks my insulin absorption anyway. Maybe I’ll leave the apple. But I’m starving now.

With wine, I never have to run that loop. With one exception, and I’ll get to that.

Wine and Carbs

One wine term you need, and I promise it’s friendlier than it sounds: residual sugar. It is the natural grape sugar that remains in a wine after fermentation is complete.

A glass of decent red, the sort that costs £15 to £20 and up per bottle, has almost none. In carb terms that is roughly 1 to 3 grams per 150ml, so somewhere around 5 to 15 grams across the whole bottle. Which is why I don’t reach for insulin when I have a glass of it. Or, if we’re being honest, even the bottle.

Same story for white, rosé and most sparkling, Champagne included.

A pint of lager or a rum and coke is a different matter, and for those I do need insulin. There are simply more carbs in a beer than in a glass of wine. The table below gives rough estimations, it can vary from brand to brand.

The thing that winds me up

The thing that winds me up most in the tabloid headlines is that nobody bothers to tell one drink from another. To them, alcohol is alcohol, full stop.

Beer, spirits, wine: yes, they all contain alcohol, but they carry wildly different amounts of carbs depending on what they are made from and how you drink them. The alcohol itself is essentially ethanol, and ethanol has zero carbs. Pour a 40% spirit, top it with Diet Coke, and you have an alcoholic drink with 0g of carbs. Pour a Guinness 0.0% and you have a carb bomb, around 17g a pint. So much for the “healthy” alcohol-free option.

I know this from experience. I was in Dublin on a work trip, ordered a Guinness 0.0% at the hotel, one pint, and my blood sugars went haywire and my sleep was shot. A vile drink, for the record.

This lazy lumping-together ends up demonising whole categories of drink, wine very much included, when wine could do with a bit more love, not less.

Now, one thing every type of alcohol does do is raise the risk of a hypoglyceamia. That isn't a diabetic quirk, it happens to everyone. The reason is the liver: it can do plenty of jobs, but not all at once, and clearing a toxin like ethanol jumps the queue. While it's busy with that, it stops releasing the stored glucose your body leans on. So if you play sport, don't have a heavy one the night before a match or a race, diabetic or not, because you are stacking the odds against yourself.

Type 1, Type 2 and alcohol

There are several kinds of diabetes. Mine, type 1, just turned up one day. Bad luck, nothing more. Type 2 is the one governments now talk about like an epidemic: it's where the body either can't make enough insulin, or has stopped responding properly to the insulin it makes. My own dad had part of his stomach removed, lost a lot of weight, and reversed his type 2. It can be done.

Either way the goal is the same: keep blood sugar from running high. Hand a type 1 and a type 2 a beer and both their blood sugars climb. Hand them a neat tequila and nothing moves. A glass of decent dry rosé, nothing either. A glass of cheap White Zinfandel, and now it ticks up a bit.

It was never about alcohol. It's about which alcohol.

What I drink

Around 95% of what you will find in a good independent wine shop won't touch your blood glucose. I buy for www.perfectcellar.com, and I can tell you I never inject for the wine I drink from our range. Mind, that is my body and my ten years of trial and error, not a dosing chart for yours. Your numbers are your own.

The ones I'd steer you away from sit at the cheap end of the supermarket shelves: the mass-produced, big-brand bottles churned out by the tankerful and deliberately made sweeter to please as many palates as possible. They tend to carry more residual sugar than you would think, red, white or rosé alike. If your thing is Gallo’s White Zinfandel, Hardy’s Shiraz or anything in that sweeter bracket, then yes, you are drinking more sugar, which means more calories too. Worth knowing, that's all.

This article isn’t a nudge to drink more of anything. It’s just an attempt to cut through the noise from someone who has lived it every day for ten years, and who happens to know a thing or two about wine as well.

Life is better with a glass of wine in it. I’m a type 1 diabetic who still eats chocolate when the mood takes him, has the odd Fanta (or Orangina back home), and never turns down a glass of wine.

Unless it’s a bad one.

Pour un vinificateur, la durabilité consiste à protéger son style, sa marque et son approvisionnement en raisin, afin de pouvoir continuer à faire des vins qui comptent à mesure que les conditions se durcissent. Pour cette note, je pose la focale sur la Rioja, en Espagne : une région en pleine mutation, confrontée aux mêmes pressions que le reste de l’Europe. Des héritiers qui feraient tout sauf reprendre la bodega familiale, de jeunes vinificateurs qui veulent sortir de la DO (leur AOC), des vignes que l’on arrache en Rioja Oriental, l’essor des blancs, et un virage vers des vins débarrassés des vieux repères Crianza/Reserva/Gran Reserva qui ont fait la gloire de la Rioja au départ.

Dans la Partie 1, nous avions laissé la durabilité chez les viticulteurs, où elle se résumait souvent à de l’auto-préservation : garder des sols vivants et transformer les vignes en un actif exploitable pour celui qui viendra ensuite. Cette deuxième note descend d’un cran dans la chaîne, jusqu’au chai, où les pressions ont un autre visage : gestion de l’énergie, main-d’œuvre, réglementation, et ce petit détail qu’est le fait de produire des vins que les gens ont encore envie de boire. Je reste en Rioja, avec deux ou trois producteurs qui essaient de donner au mot « durable » un sens concret dans le chai, plutôt qu’un énième terme attrape-hipster sur une étiquette.

Au passage, si vous n’avez pas encore lu la première « Note Courte » sur la durabilité, je commencerais par là : elle pose le point de vue du viticulteur avant qu’on entre dans le chai ici.

Le point de vue du vinificateur

C’est étonnamment difficile de trouver des sources qui séparent proprement ce qui relève du viticulteur et ce qui relève du vinificateur quand on parle de durabilité. La plupart des référentiels sérieux, de la Californie à la Nouvelle-Zélande en passant par le Royaume-Uni, ont tendance à regrouper « culture de la vigne » et « vinification » en un seul continuum, du sol à l’emballage. Sur le terrain, c’est logique, mais ça brouille vite la question de qui est responsable de quoi. Et ce flou fait déjà partie du problème : si on ne sait plus si l’on parle de décisions prises à la vigne ou au chai, chacun peut facilement supposer que l’autre porte la charge, et c’est presque impossible à expliquer à des amateurs curieux sans les perdre en route.

Pour le dire simplement : pour un vinificateur, la durabilité consiste à concevoir et faire tourner le chai, de la réception du raisin jusqu’à l’emballage, de manière à gérer ressources, personnes et finances avec un minimum de dégâts et un maximum de résilience, pour que le style de la maison et l’entreprise durent des décennies, pas seulement quelques millésimes.

Ce qui préoccupe vraiment les vinificateurs

• Toute la chaîne : la vigne + le chai

Cela dit, les vinificateurs qui prennent la durabilité au sérieux regardent toute la chaîne : comment le raisin est cultivé, comment il est transformé, comment l’eau et l’énergie circulent dans le chai, comment le verre et l’emballage sont choisis, et comment tout cela retombe sur les gens et sur les marges. Sur le papier, c’est logique. En pratique, bon nombre de chais « durables » savent à peine ce qui se passe dans les vignes qui les approvisionnent, surtout à grande échelle.

Des États-Unis à l’Australie, les programmes parlent désormais de « winegrowing » (culture-vinification) plutôt que de simple vinification, un choix délibéré pour garder la vigne et le chai liés. Concrètement, ça veut dire relier les décisions à la vigne (rendements, couverts végétaux (*), programmes de traitement) directement au style recherché au chai, repenser les procédés du chai pour gaspiller moins d’eau et d’énergie, et traiter les RH, la santé-sécurité et les relations avec la communauté comme une composante de la qualité, et non comme un exercice de conformité à part.

• Les ressources au chai : eau, énergie, déchets

Une fois le raisin rentré, la durabilité se transforme en pompes, pressoirs, cuves, groupes de froid, tuyaux.

• Eau : robinetterie à faible débit, meilleurs protocoles de nettoyage et, là où la réglementation le permet, recyclage de l’eau de nettoyage sans sacrifier l’hygiène.

• Énergie : froid et pompes performants, meilleure isolation, planification plus maligne pour éviter les heures de pointe, et renouvelables quand les chiffres tiennent la route. En Rioja, j’ai découvert Fernández de Piérola, où une seule éolienne produit assez d’électricité pour faire tourner le domaine, avec environ la moitié de l’énergie revendue au réseau ; un exemple très concret de la façon dont des décisions énergétiques « durables » au chai peuvent se voir à la fois dans les comptes et dans le paysage.

• Déchets : réutiliser ou valoriser marcs et lies (compost, distillation, cosmétiques), réduire les pertes de produit lors des transferts, et prendre au sérieux les plastiques à usage unique dans les tuyaux, les joints et le matériel de labo.

C’est en partie une question d’empreinte, en partie celle de ne pas se faire dépouiller par les pénuries d’eau et les flambées d’énergie tous les deux-trois ans.

• Carbone et emballage

Le verre et la logistique font une bonne partie des dégâts. Une grosse part de l’empreinte d’un vin se trouve dans la bouteille et sur le camion, pas dans la cuve de fermentation, et c’est pour ça que l’emballage revient si souvent quand on parcourt les guides de durabilité.

Je décortique la logistique dans la Partie 3, vous savez quoi faire.

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L’International Wine Challenge place désormais l’emballage au même rang que la viticulture comme levier de durabilité, avec des bouteilles plus légères, des formats alternatifs et un design plus malin, le tout sur la table pour réduire les émissions. Berry Bros. & Rudd disent la même chose aux buveurs, en plus simple : si la durabilité vous tient à cœur, il faut regarder l’eau, le plastique et le carbone, de la vigne au transport, le poids et le format de la bouteille étant des leviers évidents. Du coup, les vinificateurs qui s’en soucient vraiment poussent pour du verre plus léger là où la marque le supporte, des formes plus standard pour mieux palettiser et moins casser, des formats alternatifs pour les bons vins (BIB, canettes, fûts, verre consigné, que BBR ne vend pas, au passage… je dis ça, je dis rien), et des schémas d’expédition qui n’impliquent pas de promener de l’air autour du globe dans des conteneurs à moitié vides.

• Qualité, régularité et survie économique

Rien de tout cela ne tient si ça nuit à la qualité du vin ou à l’économie du chai.

Les producteurs qui s’accrochent à la durabilité la présentent en général comme un moyen de :

• améliorer l’équilibre et la propreté du raisin, pour moins jouer les pompiers en cuve

• réduire les coûts d’exploitation dans le temps (eau, énergie, casse), ce qui donne de la marge pour encaisser les mauvaises récoltes ou les marchés mous

• renforcer leur rapport qualité-prix, parce qu’ils ne traînent pas de coûts et de risques inutiles dans tout le système.

Les études de cas américaines et néo-zélandaises que j’ai trouvées regorgent d’exemples : des domaines qui investissent dans du matériel économe en énergie et dans le recyclage de l’eau finissent par réduire à la fois leurs factures et leurs émissions, et parlent de durabilité dans la même phrase que de qualité et de viabilité à long terme. En ce sens, la durabilité devient un moyen de continuer à faire les vins qu’ils veulent à des prix que leurs marchés accepteront. Et c’est peut-être ça qui parle aux consommateurs, ce qui fera l’objet de la dernière partie de cette série.

• Les gens et la communauté

Comme on l’a vu côté viticulteur, c’est aussi la dimension de la durabilité qui me surprend encore le plus. Ça devrait être évident : le vin est fait par des gens, et ces gens changent à tous les niveaux, des équipes de chai aux techniciens de labo, des chauffeurs au personnel d’accueil, jusqu’aux voisins du coin qui finissent souvent par être les consommateurs.

Le Wine Institute de Californie définit le « sustainable winegrowing » comme « respectueux de l’environnement, socialement équitable et économiquement viable », et les documents du programme parlent de préserver les ressources, protéger l’environnement et améliorer la qualité du vin, à la vigne comme au chai : une vision en trois piliers qui met les travailleurs et les communautés sur le même plan que l’eau, le sol et l’énergie. Le programme de la filière néo-zélandaise est encore plus explicite : il décrit la durabilité comme « la recherche continue d’un équilibre entre variables économiques, sociales et environnementales », et la définit comme livrer d’excellents vins « d’une manière qui permette à l’environnement naturel, ainsi qu’aux entreprises et aux communautés concernées, de prospérer ».

Traduit dans le quotidien, ça veut dire un meilleur contrôle de l’exposition aux produits chimiques, moins de journées de stress thermique au chai, des perspectives d’évolution et de la formation plutôt qu’un turnover sans fin, et une approche réfléchie du bruit, du trafic et de l’impact visuel, pour que le domaine soit perçu comme un atout, pas comme une nuisance.

Mesure et crédibilité

Les vinificateurs sérieux sur le sujet veulent des chiffres. Et ça, j’aime beaucoup. J’écris ceci pour essayer de comprendre la vraie valeur du mot « durabilité » dans le vin, pas pour pondre un article scientifique avec courbes et tableaux ; donc ce qui suit, et l’exemple que j’ai choisi, est volontairement formulé pour rester loin des tableurs, tout en prenant la mesure au sérieux.

Les guides de la filière commencent en général par « mesurer, puis agir » : calculer les émissions, suivre l’eau et l’énergie consommées par litre de vin, repérer où se situe l’emballage, puis bâtir un plan. Les programmes de certification, de Sustainable Winegrowing Australia aux divers dispositifs de protection du climat en Espagne, ne sont au fond qu’une façon de transformer tout ça en un langage commun, avec des audits pour garder tout le monde honnête.

L’enjeu, ce n’est pas le logo sur la contre-étiquette. C’est de pouvoir montrer à l’équipe et à vos viticulteurs que les décisions font bien ce qu’elles sont censées faire.

L’exemple de Cosme Palacio et du vinificateur Jackson Brooke

Ancrons tout ça dans un lieu précis : Cosme Palacio, en Rioja Alavesa, qui fait partie du groupe Entrecanales Domecq, avec le vinificateur australien Jackson Brooke au chai.

La tension historique avec les viticulteurs

En Rioja, comme dans la plupart des régions, les contrats de raisin ont toujours payé les viticulteurs au kilo ou à la tonne. Plus de kilos, plus d’argent. Fertilisation, choix de taille, décisions de vendange en vert : tout est tiré vers le volume.

La viticulture durable, avec couverts végétaux, moins d’azote, moins de produits de synthèse, moins de bourgeons, fait en général baisser les rendements à court terme, tout en construisant le sol et la résilience sur la durée. Pour un viticulteur payé au poids, ça ressemble à une simple baisse de salaire.

On a donc un conflit structurel :

• le chai veut des sols plus sains, moins de résidus, des vignes plus résilientes et un meilleur raisin

• le viticulteur est payé pour maximiser les tonnes, pas la résilience.

Le discours sur la durabilité sonne très noble ; le contrat, lui, dit toujours : « Je te paie au poids. »

Le coup de Jackson : payer pour le comment, pas seulement le combien

La vision de Jackson, telle qu’il l’a exposée lors de notre rencontre, c’est de changer ce que le chai rémunère.

Au lieu d’un tarif fixe à la tonne, sa logique est de payer davantage le raisin issu de vignes conduites selon des pratiques durables convenues, comme des couverts végétaux entre les rangs, une réduction des herbicides et des systémiques, des rendements plus faibles mais mieux ciblés, et d’appuyer tout ça par des contrats plus longs et plus sûrs pour les viticulteurs qui s’engagent.

Cela reflète une évolution plus large : payer les producteurs pour de meilleures pratiques, pas à pas, avec de vraies incitations plutôt que de belles paroles. Sustainable Winegrowing Australia et des plateformes intersectorielles comme Bonsucro reposent sur la même logique.

Transposé à la Rioja Alavesa, Jackson transforme tout simplement la pratique en signal de prix. Les viticulteurs qui investissent dans le sol, acceptent une baisse de rendement et réduisent les intrants ne rendent plus service au chai : ils deviennent les partenaires que la bodega valorise le plus et rémunère en conséquence. Les pratiques durables cessent d’être un supplément moral pour devenir un moyen rationnel, pour les viticulteurs, d’améliorer leurs revenus et de sécuriser leur avenir.

^{Jackson Brooke présentant la philosophie du domaine à notre groupe.}

Pourquoi c’est une stratégie de vinification, pas juste de l’éthique

Vu depuis la porte du chai, ce n’est pas un projet RSE ; c’est une stratégie de vinification.

En payant pour la conduite plutôt que pour la seule masse, Jackson :

• sécurise un raisin issu de vignes plus à même d’encaisser des saisons plus chaudes, plus sèches et plus erratiques

• relève le niveau de la matière première (équilibre, fraîcheur, maturité phénolique), ce qui lui permet de faire des vins plus précis et plus détaillés avec moins de corrections

• réduit la dépendance du chai à des systèmes gourmands en intrants, dont les coûts et les effets secondaires ne vont que dans un sens

• donne à Cosme Palacio une structure et un récit qui le distinguent des pairs qui s’appuient sur des sols épuisés et des relations purement transactionnelles.

Les couverts végétaux et des enherbements plus diversifiés ne sont pas juste « sympas pour la biodiversité » : la littérature agronomique est claire, ils augmentent le carbone organique du sol, améliorent la structure et l’infiltration de l’eau, et soutiennent des communautés microbiennes qui aident la vigne à encaisser le stress. L’intérêt bien compris du vinificateur est ici évident : des vignes mieux tamponnées, c’est un raisin plus régulier et moins de millésimes catastrophiques.

Au fond, il achète du temps : pour que les sols se régénèrent, que les vignes s’adaptent et que le style de la maison évolue avec le climat, au lieu de se battre contre cette réalité millésime après millésime.

Un nouveau contrat entre le chai et le viticulteur

Sous tout cela se cache un nouveau type de contrat entre le chai et le producteur.

Il lui faut :

• une définition partagée de la « meilleure conduite » qui pousse l’usage des couverts végétaux, la réduction des herbicides, de meilleures pratiques de palissage et de sol, et de vrais indicateurs de sol ou de biodiversité

• un risque partagé : le chai assume une partie de la perte de rendement via des prix plus élevés ou des garanties de volume ; le viticulteur prend sa part de la valeur ajoutée sur la qualité et la marque

• un horizon plus long : des accords pluriannuels qui donnent aux viticulteurs la confiance d’investir dans du nouveau matériel et de nouvelles habitudes

Sur le papier, c’est un cadre de durabilité ; en pratique, c’est le règlement commun qui maintient viticulteurs et vinificateurs sur la même longueur d’onde.

Mon avis

À mesure que j’avance dans mes recherches, j’obtiens une définition plus claire de ce qu’est la « durabilité », du moins du côté de la production.

Les vinificateurs qui s’en soucient travaillent ainsi : ils gardent du bon raisin issu de sols vivants, font tourner un chai qui n’hémorragie pas d’argent en eau, énergie et déchets, construisent des relations de long terme avec des viticulteurs et des équipes qui veulent progresser avec eux, et utilisent juste assez de données pour savoir si tout cela sert vraiment à quelque chose.

Ce qui ne les intéresse pas : un vernis vert qui laisse les contrats de raisin, le travail au chai et l’emballage exactement là où ils étaient ; réduire la « durabilité » à un seul badge (bio, biodynamie, nature, faible intervention) comme si ça réglait quoi que ce soit ; ou des gains faciles qui inscrivent la fragilité dans le système, qu’il s’agisse de bouteilles lourdes, de matériel assoiffé ou de relations fragiles avec les viticulteurs.

On a déjà vu que, pour les viticulteurs, la durabilité est avant tout de l’auto-préservation. Les vinificateurs ont le luxe de choisir leurs fournisseurs, mais s’ils veulent vraiment faire des vins durables, ils doivent aussi choisir un raisin qui a été cultivé de cette façon.

Les deux camps doivent s’aligner : viticulteurs et vinificateurs doivent comprendre ce que chacun a en jeu, trouver comment répondre aux attentes de l’autre, et le faire tout en encaissant les variations de la demande, les chocs économiques et les changements dans la façon dont les gens achètent et boivent. Les efforts se multiplient pour bâtir des normes et des cadres communs pour cette coalition, en Rioja et bien au-delà, mais tant qu’ils ne se traduisent pas en vins et en histoires que les buveurs peuvent réellement reconnaître, ils restent cantonnés au métier.

« On est tous dans le même bateau », a dit Jackson autour du déjeuner. « Toi compris, le caviste. »

Il a raison. Parce que rien de tout ça n’atteint les buveurs si les acheteurs, les importateurs et les cavistes ne choisissent pas de soutenir ces viticulteurs et ces domaines, et de vendre vraiment l’histoire. Mais avant d’en arriver à ce point de vue acheteur/importateur/caviste, il faut parler de ceux qui déplacent le vin : transporteurs, logistique, acheminement. Ce sera la Partie 3.

Vous avez peut-être remarqué « couverts végétaux » avec un petit (*). C’est votre signal pour plonger dans le Mini-Wiki-Winy-Moo et y faire un tour, idéalement après avoir cliqué sur « s’abonner » :

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This is the job. As a buyer at Perfect Cellar, my day is a long string of small “yes” and “no” decisions. “Yes” to that unique dry Moscato, “no” to the third Argentinian Malbec this month, “yes” if you can get the price under a certain number, “no” if the freight makes it silly. Multiply that by a few hundred wines and you have a portfolio.

(Believe it or not, it takes hours of work just to get one bottle of wine listed on www.perfectcellar.com - just saying)

At the end of Part 2, Australian winemaker Jackson Brooke said the line that kicked off this detour: “We’re all in it together. That includes you, the retailers.” In Part 3 we followed the bottle through the bit nobody writes about: pallets, ports, trucks, the 40% of its footprint hiding in transport and packaging. Then the container clears customs and the bottle lands on a desk like mine.

If you’re only joining us now and have no clue what I’m talking about, I invite you to read the early pieces on Sustainable wines. And so you get the situation, here’s the “why” behind me putting myself through this: I don’t really know whether “sustainable” means anything by the time a wine reaches your glass, or who is genuinely asking for it. So I’m walking the chain one seat at a time, from the vine to the drinker, to see where the word earns its keep and where it falls apart. This is the fourth seat, and the picture keeps moving.

So now the question is genuinely mine. Do I buy it? And does “sustainable” change my answer?

In the vineyard, sustainability was about the land. In the cellar, about energy. For the haulier, it boiled down to one currency: carbon emission. For a buyer, it resolves into something less romantic and more uncomfortable. What I choose to back, and who pays for me backing it. Keep those two halves in mind. They run under everything below.

What buyers and importers actually care about

Being the gatekeeper (and knowing it)

Here is the bit the trade doesn’t say out loud often enough. The buyer is a gatekeeper. A grower can farm with cover crops, ditch the herbicide, ship in bulk and lighten the glass, and none of it reaches a single drinker unless someone like me lists the wine. We don’t make the wine sustainable. We decide whether sustainable wine gets a market.

That’s real power, and it cuts both ways. Back the right producers and you pull the whole chain towards better practice, because a confirmed order is worth more than any amount of encouragement. Back the wrong ones, or back nobody in particular, and the grower doing the hard, expensive, soil-first work watches a cheaper, heavier, lazier bottle take the listing instead.

Most buyers I know feel this. Few of us are angels about it. A listing decision is still mostly about whether the wine is good and whether it sells.

Format and glass, the lever that’s actually ours

If one sustainability decision genuinely sits on the buyer’s side of the table, it’s packaging. We don’t farm and we don’t drive the truck, but we absolutely influence what the wine travels in.

Glass is the headline, and we already poked at it in Part 3. The Sustainable Wine Roundtable (SWR) reckons the bottle alone can account for up to half of a wine’s total carbon footprint, and the average 750ml still-wine bottle still weighs around 550 grams, a good chunk of which is pure theatre. Heavy glass says “expensive.” It doesn’t say “better.” It costs more to make and more to move, full stop.

This is why the SWR’s Bottle Weight Accord might be the most important thing happening in my corner of the trade that nobody outside it has heard of. Signatories commit to getting their average still-wine bottle below 420 grams by the end of 2026. In January 2026 five more names joined, including UK distributors Ellis Wines and Guy Anderson Wines, Spain’s Bodega Beronia, Argentina’s Domaine Bousquet and Quebec’s SAQ, taking the Accord past 2.5 billion bottles a year. SWR says many members are already in the 350 to 370g range, with 300g bottles increasingly in circulation, and is eyeing an even lower target. That kind of progress is exactly what catches a buyer’s eye: not a pledge buried in a sustainability report, but a tangible, holdable thing - a lighter bottle on a pallet - that shows the whole approach, from vineyard to winery, is actually working. A grower who can pair that story with a certified sustainable operation has something rare: proof you can put on a shelf.

Then there’s lighter glass more broadly, and the bulk-versus-bottle question Part 3 took apart: shipping the wine as liquid and bottling it at destination. That isn’t only the haulier’s call. The buyer decides whether the brand can carry it, whether the price tier expects heavy glass, whether destination-bottling spooks the producer. We’re often the ones who say “no, not this one,” and we should be honest that we say it more from habit and perception than from necessity.

Three more parts to go before I’m done pulling sustainability apart. If you’d rather they turned up on their own than chase them down, the button below sorts that out.

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The bill that lands on my desk, not the grower’s

For years, sustainability in wine was sold to buyers as a halo, a nice story to tell. In the UK, in 2025, it stopped being a story and started being an invoice.

Under the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme, any business that imports or supplies packaging into the UK market is liable for the cost of dealing with it, charged by weight. Import the wine and that is you. PackUK confirmed the glass fee at £192 per tonne in June 2025, with producers invoiced from October. That was almost a relief, because Defra's earlier forecast had floated £240 a tonne and the trade had not taken it well. The Wine & Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) puts the average EPR cost at around 12p on a bottle of wine (5p on beer, 18p on spirits), and its chief executive Miles Beale called the £240 forecast "an unwelcome shock," with the WSTA still part of a drinks-trade coalition calling the whole scheme flawed.

Suddenly that 550g bottle isn't just a carbon number in a report I will never read. It is a line in my cost of goods. The heavier the glass, the bigger the cheque. For once the environmental logic and the commercial logic point the same way. Lighter glass is cheaper and cleaner, and you would be amazed how motivating a tax is where a decade of moralising was not.

Worth watching alongside it is the Deposit Return Scheme, launching across the UK on 1 October 2027. Glass is out in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Only Wales is including it, and even there with a four-year transition during which the deposit sits at zero pence. So wine bottles mostly dodge the deposit, for now. I would not bet the cellar on “for now” lasting.

Credibility, and the fear of getting caught

The other thing buyers care about, though we rarely say it out loud, is not getting caught looking like idiots. Slap “sustainable” on a shelf-talker with nothing behind it and you’re one curious customer, or one journalist, away from an awkward afternoon. So the serious end of the trade wants proof it can stand behind: certifications, real numbers, audited schemes rather than vibes. The honest version of the importer’s worry is this. I am the one putting a claim in front of a British drinker. If it’s hollow, it’s my name and Perfect Cellar’s one on it, not the grower’s in another country.

The importer who built it in: Liberty Wines

For an anchor, look at Liberty Wines, one of the UK’s big fine-wine importers and a tidy example of doing this as architecture rather than decoration. They became the first UK wine company to go carbon-neutral certified back in 2014, then “Carbon Neutral Plus” in 2021, offsetting more than they emit. They say the carbon tied to each £1 of wine they sell has dropped 39% since 2017, partly by shifting European shipments from road to rail (the same modal-shift logic the hauliers preached in Part 3), partly through solar panels installation and the rest. They’ve applied for B Corp certification and back habitat projects on the side.

You can argue about offsets all day, and people do. But the shape of it matters: an importer treating its footprint as something to measure and cut, not a sticker to buy. That’s the buyer’s version of what Jackson was doing back in Part 2, paying growers for how, not just how much.

The structural tension

Same tension as every part of this series, moved one seat along.

The buyer sits in the middle. Producer on one side, retailer and drinker on the other. Sustainability costs more somewhere in the chain, and the middle is where the “who absorbs it?” argument actually happens. I can swallow the EPR fee and watch a margin that is already thin get thinner. I can pass it to the retailer, who passes it to you. Or I can lean on producers to lighten the glass so the bill shrinks for everyone. Usually it is a messy bit of all three.

And the gatekeeper power, real as it is, has limits. I’d love to tell you I list purely on principle. I list on what’s good, what sells, and what survives a spreadsheet. A beautiful, sustainably farmed, featherweight-bottled wine that nobody buys twice helps nobody: not the grower, not the planet, not me. The market gets a vote too, and as we will see in the parts still to come, the market is mostly thinking about itself.

You definitely don’t want to miss that part.

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My Take

So where does that leave me? With a lot of power I don’t use enough, if I’m honest. The grower farms to survive. The winemaker guards a style. The haulier shaves a route. And I sign the order that makes all of it worth the bother, or I don’t. I could swing my whole list towards lighter glass, bulk where it works, growers who actually do the graft. Mostly I swing it towards whatever sold last quarter, because that is the job and the rent is real.

What’s finally changing how I buy isn’t a lecture or a logo. It’s a £192-a-tonne invoice landing on every heavy bottle I bring in. The most effective sustainability campaign ever aimed at buyers turned out to be a tax. Make the heavy, dirty option cost more than the light, clean one, and watch how fast the trade finds its values. I’m not proud of that. I think it’s true.

All that said, I care deeply about the vine growers and winemakers who pour their soul into making better wine in a better way. Look at what we have actually been importing at Perfect Cellar and the shift is real. We have ramped up the number of sustainable wines drastically, and close to everything we are landing in 2026 fits the bill. Hedges Family Estate is a model of sustainable viticulture in Washington State. Chris Sciacca at Kapitel Zwei uses cover crops, irrigates with rainwater collected in the vineyard and runs his tools on solar power. He, and Uli and Robert at Feldtheorie, are true defenders of minimalist wines: organic, slow and honest. And Vincent’s wines from Oregon tick every box we laid out in the earlier parts of this series.

So, is sustainability real from the buyer’s seat, or a marketing coup? From where I sit, increasingly real. Partly because someone finally put a price on doing nothing, and partly because some of us would have backed these growers anyway.

Which leaves two people we still haven’t heard from. The retailer, who has to sell all this across a counter or a wine list. That’s next. And then the one whose money actually settles the argument: the drinker. The “me, me, me” from Part 3. They have said nothing this whole series. Time to work out why.

To help me write this “close-to-my-heart” note, I had the joy of reading a bunch of dull articles on GOV.UK and GOV.WALES. Also important, and much more pleasant to read, were pieces from the WSTA, a compelling story from Liberty Wines’ blog (although written in 2021, five years already!?) and The Drinks Business, which I turned to for some clarifications.

He’s right. But before the retailers, before the importers, before us at Perfect Cellar, there is a leg of the journey that almost nobody talks about when they write about sustainable wine. The bottle leaves the winery. Then what?

Well, it sits on a pallet, in a container, on a truck, in a port, on a ship, in another port, on another truck, in a warehouse. Weeks pass, even months. Thousands of miles. And every single one of those movements generates emissions, and almost none of them appear on the back label next to the certification logo.

In the vineyard, sustainability is fundamentally about the land: soil health, water management, chemical inputs, biodiversity. In the winery, it is about energy: how much power the fermentation, refrigeration and packaging require, and whether you can run those systems without bleeding carbon. When you move to the logistics side of the chain, the language shifts again. For a haulier, sustainability has one dominant currency: carbon emissions. The truck, the ship, the route, the load factor, the fuel; every variable resolves into a single question. How much CO2 did this movement generate per bottle?

That shift matters, because carbon emissions in freight are measurable, quantifiable and, increasingly, legally regulated in a way that farming practices are not. Which raises two questions worth holding onto as you read this note. Does the average wine drinker know any of this? And if they did, would it change anything?

^{Continuing my AI-art adventure. “Sustainable Winemaker Waving Goodbye to her Production”}

What most people skip

Transport and packaging, combined, account for at least 40% of a wine bottle’s total carbon footprint. That is not a niche green-marketing claim; it is what supply chain analysts and logistics specialists have been documenting consistently. This is not a fringe finding. The OIV, the WSTA, and specialist logistics operators like Hillebrand Gori have all identified packaging and transport as among the highest-leverage areas for reducing wine’s supply chain footprint; a view now reflected in how the International Wine Challenge frames its sustainability criteria.

The reason this matters is that, for most drinkers, the footprint of a bottle of wine is invisible from the moment it leaves the producer’s gate. The farming credentials are on the label. The winemaker’s name is on the label. The logistics company’s name is not.

Which is odd, because the logistics company has, in the case of long-haul imports from Chile, South Africa or New Zealand, a bigger carbon contribution per bottle than most farming interventions could offset.

What about the consumers? A Napa Green survey of more than 1,500 wine consumers found that many have low awareness of eco-friendly wines altogether. The survey also found that consumers care less about transportation than about the product itself. As expected - from me at least - the three things consumers care about are: “my health”, “my wealth” and “my personal world” (local products, health for friends and family). It is always “me, me, me” (*) when it comes to consumers; perhaps the first clue as to what they really think of “sustainable” wine.

Adding to this, the IWC reported in October 2025 that one major restaurant wine buyer said no customers had asked about carbon footprint in the past three years. Not one. For all the column inches written about sustainable wine, it is not yet translating into what people actually ask about at the shelf or the table.

That gap between what is happening in the supply chain and what drinkers understand or care about is perhaps the defining challenge of the whole sustainability conversation in wine. It is also why the choices being made by hauliers right now are going largely unnoticed by the people who will eventually benefit from them.

Yes, you saw it again. “Me, me, me!” (*) is your reminder that a new word has been explained in the Mini-Wiki-Winy-Moo! Click below to go to bed a little smarter tonight.

The basics: what is the problem, actually?

For this part, I’ll try to compare the transportation of bottles versus bulk wines. This is because the major link between a winery and a haulier - like an unannounced collaboration - is weight. The heavier the bottle, the greater the CO2 emissions. This is a key variable over which hauliers have absolutely no control.

A standard container shipped with bottled wine carries roughly 3,080 bottles. The same container shipped in bulk - wine travelling as liquid in a flexitank or ISO tank, bottled at destination - carries the equivalent of around 5,280 bottles. That efficiency gain alone cuts emissions per litre significantly, and it eliminates the transport of heavy glass manufactured overseas.

“We shouldn’t be shipping glass that’s been made in another country all the way around the globe,” Paul Braydon of Kingsland Drinks told The Drinks Business at the World Bulk Wine Exhibition in December 2025. “The further the distance, the bigger the sustainability benefits.”

A flexitank container can carry 24,000 litres of wine, 2.5 times more than a bottled shipment, reducing carbon emissions by up to 38%. A ProseWorks analysis of Australian exports found that bulk shipping reduces CO2 emissions by approximately 164g per 75cl bottle compared to bottling at source - roughly 40%. The Wine and Spirit Trade Association puts it more starkly: shipping 26,000 litres of bulk wine in one container dramatically reduces the carbon footprint compared to shipping the same volume in bottles.

Road freight sits at the other end of the efficiency spectrum. Hillebrand Gori notes that road freight accounts for 53% of global CO2 emissions by trade transport mode. Road emits around 137 grams of greenhouse gases per tonne per kilometer - nearly six times the rate of rail.

Obviously there are many reasons it is impossible to get all wines transported in bulk: appellation rules (a Champagne must be aged in bottle), style considerations (sparkling wines don’t do well in bulk), perception - since bulk wine is often associated with supermarket-level quality - and finally, operations: bottling wine from a flexitank requires specialised equipment, space, and some skill.

Beyond these, there are structural barriers that are less discussed. Flexitanks typically hold around 24,000 litres, which makes the economics unworkable for small producers. At the premium end of the market, destination bottling raises questions of producer identity and traceability; many winemakers feel their wine should leave the cellar in the exact state they intended, with no further variables introduced. Wine stability is also a factor: delicate whites or low-sulphur wines carry a greater risk during bulk transport than they would sealed in glass. And in some markets, the weight and presentation of the bottle are simply part of what a buyer at a certain price point expects - a reality that makes bulk shipping a harder sell above a certain tier, regardless of its environmental logic.

Some hauliers in action

For most of its history, wine logistics has been a service industry that competed almost entirely on price and speed. The bottle gets there on time and intact; that is the job. The conversation about carbon has been slow to arrive, but it is arriving, and a handful of specialist operators are beginning to shape what it actually looks like in practice.

Kukla Beverage Logistics

Kukla Beverage Logistics - part of the German Robert Kukla Group, with UK operations launched in 2017 - is a good example of a specialist operator starting to build sustainability into its architecture rather than treating it as an afterthought. They are working toward Net Zero by 2040, through structured carbon measurement, ISO 14001-certified operations, and a preference for lower-emission modes: rail freight, short-sea shipping, intermodal solutions.

What I find credible about Kukla’s approach is that they are not positioning sustainability as a premium bolt-on. They work with carriers that invest in alternative fuels - HVO, LNG, biofuels - and they have a stated commitment to optimising routing to reduce unnecessary mileage and congestion. The Kukla team is also explicit that bulk wine shipping, carrying 24,000 to 26,000 litres per container, can reduce carbon emissions by around 50% compared to bottle transportation - making the format question not just a winemaker’s choice, but a logistics one.

They are a smaller, bespoke operator. That has real advantages: when I think about the kinds of boutique producers Perfect Cellar imports, the conversation about routing and emissions can actually happen between people rather than being buried in an account management portal. In fact, there is a reason we work with them…

Hillebrand Gori

If Kukla is the specialist, Hillebrand Gori - now a DHL company - is the category leader. They move wine, beer and spirits at scale across almost every major trade lane in the world, and they have built what is probably the most complete sustainability infrastructure in beverage logistics today.

Their Carbon Calculator lets importers compare emissions across different routes and transport modes before booking. Their myHillebrandGori platform gives emissions reporting per shipment. Their GoGreen Plus service, using Sustainable Marine Fuel (SMF) and Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) through a book-and-claim methodology, can reduce well-to-wake greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% compared to conventional fossil fuels.

The book-and-claim model is worth understanding because it looks like it will come up more and more. The principle is this: sustainable fuel is physically used somewhere in the transport network, and the resulting emission reduction is allocated - via a verified accounting process - to a specific customer’s shipment. The physical ship carrying your wine may not run on SMF. But within the same network, the same volume of emission reduction has been achieved. It is not perfect. Critics of the model argue it risks becoming accounting fiction. Hillebrand Gori is transparent about the caveat, and the methodology follows the Smart Freight Centre’s framework, which is becoming the industry standard.

What Hillebrand Gori also gets right is the “burn less before you burn clean” logic. They suggest optimisation - route planning, consolidation, modal shift, positioning stock closer to point of sale - before reaching for fuel alternatives. This matters because, for a small importer, the biggest wins often come from not driving empty space around the world rather than from purchasing SAF credits.

Their partnership with Lanchester Wines is a useful real-world illustration. By switching to northeastern UK ports and bulk flexitank shipments from Chile, Lanchester has meaningfully reduced its inland carbon footprint compared to routing through southern ports. The flexitanks are mechanically recycled. The bottles used for at-destination bottling are manufactured within the UK. It is a supply chain built around the logic of waste reduction, not carbon offsetting.

CEVA Logistics and FORPLANET

CEVA Logistics is a global giant: 170+ countries, more than 110,000 employees, part of the CMA CGM Group, one of the world’s largest shipping companies. Their sustainability play, launched in November 2024, is a sub-brand called FORPLANET.

The naming choice is deliberate. FORPLANET positions CEVA’s sustainability offer as a suite of solutions, not a compliance response, but a product. It focuses on two areas: low-carbon transport and the promotion of circular economies.

On low-carbon transport, FORPLANET offers modal shift solutions (air to ocean, road to rail or barge, sea-air combinations), alternative fuels including biofuels that can cut CO2 emissions by up to 80%, and, since February 2026, wind-powered maritime transport. That last one particularly got my attention: depending on the technology deployed, wind propulsion can reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by up to 90% compared with conventional ocean shipping, while maintaining competitive transatlantic transit times. Back on Land, a single block train removes 25 trucks from the road, reducing both congestion and emissions by up to 90%.

For wine, CEVA’s FORPLANET is not sector-specific. Their biggest clients are automotive, retail, luxury and technology. But the infrastructure they are building, and which includes eco-calculators, digital visibility tools, decarbonisation consultancy, is exactly the kind of toolkit that a wine importer would need to answer: how much does my supply chain actually emit, and where do I start?

CEVA is also part of a broader structural shift. Their scope 3 emissions - those generated in customers’ supply chains, not CEVA’s own operations - accounted for 95% of their total 2023 emissions footprint. Which means that, for CEVA, making customers’ logistics cleaner is not just ethics. It is how they close the gap to their own 2050 net-zero target.

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The regulations that is making this unavoidable…

… and costly.

The EU’s Fit for 55 package - so called because it targets a 55% reduction in European net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - is the single most consequential regulatory development for wine logistics in a generation. It has two levers that directly affect how wine moves.

The first is the EU Emissions Trading System. Since 2024, ship operators calling at EU ports have been required to buy emission allowances to cover their verified emissions. In 2025, that requirement jumped to 70% of reported emissions, up from 40% the year before. From 2026 onwards, 100% of emissions must be covered, with companies that fail to surrender allowances facing a fine of €100 per tonne of CO2. For an importer, this means one thing in practice: shipping costs will rise, and the premium for doing nothing will compound.

The second lever is FuelEU Maritime, which came into force in January 2025. It requires commercial vessels over 5,000 gross tonnes calling at EU ports to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of their fuel on a ratcheting schedule: 2% by 2025, 6% by 2030, 14.5% by 2035, and so on, all the way to an 80% reduction by 2050. Hillebrand Gori estimates that the combined effect of these regulations means a 75% increase on EU ETS surcharges from January 2025 alone, with further quarterly adjustments based on the EU carbon allowance market price.

There is a third mechanism worth watching: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which imposes a carbon price on carbon-intensive imports. For wine with a higher transport-related carbon footprint, the CBAM is a future cost that has not yet bitten but is calibrating.

All of this is to say that the regulatory pressure is shifting from voluntary to mandatory. The conversation has moved from “should we reduce our transport emissions?” to “how much does delay cost us?”. Hillebrand Gori’s framing is apt: supply chain changes are now a financial hedge, not just an ethical position.

The structural tension

Sustainable logistics costs more. In many cases, it costs more up front - premium fuels, rail infrastructure, book-and-claim allocations, intermodal complexity. And wine is a sector where margins are already thin and competition on price is brutal.

Hillebrand Gori is honest about this: the right logistics choice depends on your priorities - lead time, volume, market requirements, product characteristics. There is no one-size answer. Kukla frames it as a structural choice, not a premium service: you build sustainability in through certified operations, partner selection, and routing discipline - not by charging clients extra for a green badge on a PDF. CEVA’s FORPLANET is positioned as a commercial product: customers buy into lower-carbon solutions as a value-added service, the same way they buy temperature control or tracking.

None of these are wrong. But together they reveal the same tension that runs through every part of this series: sustainability in the supply chain is not free, and someone has to pay for it. In the vineyard, that tension sits between grower and winery. In the cellar, it sits between winemaker and buyer. In logistics, it sits between the haulier, the importer, and ultimately the consumer.

The Fit for 55 regulations are slowly resolving this tension by pricing conventional shipping upward. When the cost of doing nothing rises fast enough, the cost of doing something starts to look competitive. We are not there yet. But the direction is clear.

My Take

As an importer and buyer at Perfect Cellar, I spend my days thinking about wine. I do not spend my days thinking about how it arrived.

That is exactly the problem.

Every conversation and lecture I have had about sustainability in wine has circled back to the vineyard, or the winery, or the certification on the label. The logistics leg sits in a blind spot - partly because hauliers are not glamorous, partly because the conversation about emissions in freight is genuinely complicated, and partly because the tools to measure and act on it have only recently become accessible to businesses at our scale.

But the numbers do not let me off the hook. If transport and packaging represent 40% of a bottle's footprint, and if shifting from bottled to bulk shipping on a long-haul lane can cut emissions by 38–50%, then the decisions I make about format, routing and logistics partner should be straightforward. Sadly they aren't, and one main reason is that the fragmented wine world - in size, in available capital, in aspirations, in location… - doesn't allow for it.

Vine growers protect the land. Winemakers protect the style. Hauliers, at their best, protect the journey. And the journey - it turns out - is where a very large chunk of the sustainability story either gets told or gets buried.

Next time: the buyers and importers. Including me.

Research for this piece drew on materials from Kukla Beverage Logistics, Hillebrand Gori (a DHL company), CEVA Logistics (FORPLANET), The Drinks Business, the International Wine Challenge, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, and published research on wine supply chain emissions.

Mathis is in Champagne and has a technical diploma in oenology; he always talks about chemistry and fermentation and he’s about to join Alexis on a harvest job at Château d’Esclans. Alexis is between Australia, New Zealand and France, where he works harvests and is building an incredible level of knowledge and skills in making wine from different perspectives. I’m in the UK, being our link with the industry on a global scale, mostly on the post‑production side. Dream Team? Totally. Don’t be surprised when we announce we’re starting our own project.

Alexis has worked for a bunch of wineries in the last four years: Lanson, Ruinart, Moët & Chandon, Château d’Esclans, Tantalus (NZ), Printhie (AUS) and now Xanadu (AUS). He’s met a bunch of folks through his experience and recently met Genevieve Mann from Western Australia’s winery, Corymbia.

The first thing Alex highlighted was the label designed by graphic designer Emma Mann, and he suggested I look into it myself.

Art, nature and science in one

At first glance, the labels look minimalist and calm. Clean white, soft colours, a floral shape that feels gentle and almost familiar. From a distance, you’d just say: “Nice flower.”

“Corymbia” is the scientific name for the Marri Tree flowers: fluffy, “pom‑pom” blossoms, often white with a lime‑green hue. I have never seen or smelt one in real life; just another reason (amongst the hundreds I already have) to get myself to the Antipodes.

Look closer, and the flower turns into something else. Corymbia’s labels are actually polar graphs: a data visualisation disguised as a blossom. Twelve petals for twelve months and 365 Marri tree flowers stemens for each day of the year, mapping what the season did in terms of temperature and rainfall against the long‑term averages. It’s the weather, drawn as a flower, and put right on the table. These are the forces that stress and shape the wines.

Because each label is built from that vintage’s actual numbers, the flower never repeats. The outline shifts, swells, thins out. Just like the wine in the bottle, each blossom is a one‑off snapshot of that season.

Reading the label starts at “12 o’clock”. Each tiny string radiating out represents the average temperature of a single day. There’s a line in red, somewhere around 2 o’clock: that’s harvest day.

Then there are the dark green slices starting from the centre; the monthly rainfall and averages in millimetres. Behind the daily averages you get the monthly average temperatures, so you can immediately spot anomalies, spikes, stress points. The kind of events that might favour or damage a vineyard.

In other words, you’re not just looking at a pretty flower. You’re looking at the season itself. You’re looking at the conditions that made the wine. Watching the short video tells it all: it is impossible to pretend wine is, or should ever be sold as, “always the same”.

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My take

In wine, we happily talk about soil structure, elevation and place. It’s comforting: hills don’t move, limestone doesn’t suddenly disappear, “this slope” is nearly permanent. We talk much less about what actually changes the wine just as much, and often more: the weather.

Focusing on the static bits of terroir can be a little lazy, or at least very convenient. It’s easier to explain “chalky soil” than a growing season with three heat spikes, one hailstorm and two weeks of rain right before véraison. But if you care about why a wine tastes the way it does, weather is where the story really lives.

That’s why I love Corymbia’s labels. They are smart, classy, informative and connected with nature. A single image that can speak to almost everyone. If you are just label‑shopping, you see a modern, elegant flower. If you want to go deeper, there is a whole seasonal narrative waiting for you.

Label debates never stop:

• “Is it too busy?”

• “Does colourful mean cheap?”

• “Should a French wine keep a classic label?”

There are no universal answers, because people come to wine with completely different levels of knowledge and curiosity. Corymbia’s labels don’t punish you for knowing too much or too little. They invite you in. And, most importantly, they start conversations about weather, about climate, about why no two vintages are the same and why that’s the point.

For me, they’re a reminder that wine is always a collaboration between nature and people: one throwing clues, warning signs and gifts; the other trying to read them and respond. Corymbia just chooses to print that exchange on the front of the bottle.

It really is art, nature and science in one.

In Part 1, we left sustainability with growers, where it often boiled down to self‑preservation: keeping soils alive and turning vineyards into workable assets for whoever comes next. This second note moves one step down the chain into the winery, where the pressures look different: energy management, labour, regulation, and that small matter of making wines people still want to drink. I’m sticking with Rioja and a couple of producers trying to make “sustainable” mean something practical in the cellar rather than just another hipster magnet term on a label.

By the way, if you haven’t read the first “On the Fly” on sustainability yet, I’d start there as it lays out the grower’s view before we step into the winery in this note.

The Winemaker point of view

It’s surprisingly hard to find sources that cleanly separate what belongs to the grower and what belongs to the winemaker when they talk about sustainability. Most serious frameworks, from California to New Zealand and the UK, tend to bundle “winegrowing” and “winemaking” together as one continuum, from soil to packaging, which is fair enough on the ground but quickly blurs who is responsible for what. That blur is already part of the problem: if we cannot tell whether we are talking about decisions in the vineyard or in the cellar, it is easy for each side to assume the other is carrying the weight, and almost impossible to explain that to curious drinkers without losing them.

Put simply, for a winemaker, sustainability means designing and running the winery - from grape intake to packaging - so that resources, people and finances are managed with minimal damage and maximum resilience, allowing the house style and business to last decades, not just a few vintages.

_{Perplexity and I having fun re-imagining Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”. Nearly got the handshake right…}

What winemakers actually care about

• The whole chain: vineyard + winery

Still, winemakers who take sustainability seriously look at the whole chain: how grapes are grown, how they’re processed, how water and energy move through the cellar, how glass and packaging are chosen, and how all of this lands on people and margins. On paper it’s logical. In practice, plenty of ‘sustainable’ wineries barely know what’s happening in the vineyards that feed them, especially at scale.

Programmes from the US to Australia now talk about ‘winegrowing’ rather than winemaking, a deliberate move to keep vineyard and cellar tied together. In practice, that means tying vineyard decisions (yields, cover crops (*), spray regimes) directly to the style they want in the cellar, redesigning winery processes so they waste less water and energy, and treating HR, health and safety, and community relations as part of quality rather than a separate compliance exercise.

• Resources in the cellar: water, energy, waste

Once grapes are in the building, sustainability turns into pumps, presses, tanks, chillers, hoses.

• Water: low‑flow fixtures, better cleaning protocols, and, where rules allow, recycling cleaning water without trashing hygiene.

• Energy: efficient refrigeration and pumps, better insulation, smarter scheduling to dodge peak tariffs, and renewables when the numbers stack up. In Rioja I discovered Fernández de Piérola, where a single wind turbine generates enough electricity to run the winery, with roughly half the power sold back to the grid; a very literal example of how “sustainable” energy decisions in the cellar can show up both on the P&L and on the landscape.

• Waste: re‑using or valorising pomace and lees (compost, distillation, cosmetics), cutting product loss during transfers, and getting serious about single‑use plastics in hoses, gaskets and lab gear.

This is partly about footprint, partly about not getting mugged by water shortages and energy spikes every few years.

• Carbon and packaging

Glass and logistics do a lot of the damage. A big chunk of wine’s footprint sits in the bottle and on the truck, not in the fermenter, which is why packaging comes up so often when you read through sustainability guidelines.

I’ll take logistics apart in Part 3, you know what to do.

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The International Wine Challenge now puts packaging alongside farming as a core sustainability lever, with lighter bottles, alternative formats and smarter design all on the table to cut emissions. Berry Bros. & Rudd tell drinkers the same thing in plainer terms: if you care about sustainability, you have to look at water, plastic and carbon from vineyard to transport, with bottle weight and format obvious places to act. So winemakers who actually care are pushing for lighter glass where the brand can take it, more standard shapes to pack tighter and break less, alternative formats for the right wines (BIB, cans, kegs, refillable glass - not something BBR sells by the way… just saying), and shipping patterns that don’t involve driving fresh air around the world in half‑empty containers.

• Quality, consistency and economic survival

None of this holds if it undermines wine quality or the economics of the cellar.

Producers who stick with sustainability tend to present it as a way to:

• improve fruit balance and cleanliness, so there’s less firefighting in the tank

• reduce operating costs over time (water, energy, breakages), which buys room to ride out bad harvests or slow markets

• strengthen their price–quality equation because they are not dragging unnecessary cost and risk through the system.

The US and New Zealand case studies I found are full of examples: wineries that invest in energy‑efficient kit and water recycling end up cutting both bills and emissions, and talk about sustainability in the same breath as quality and long‑term viability. In that sense, sustainability becomes a way to keep making the wines they want at prices their markets will accept. And that is perhaps what talks to consumers, which will be the last part of this series.

• People and community

As we saw in the vine‑grower focus, this is also the part of sustainability that still surprises me most. It should be obvious: wine is made by people, and those people are changing at every level, from cellar teams, lab techs, drivers and hospitality staff to local neighbours who often end up as the consumers.

The Wine Institute in California defines sustainable winegrowing as “environmentally sound, socially equitable and economically viable”, and its programme materials talk about conserving resources, protecting the environment and enhancing wine quality for vineyards and wineries - a three‑pillar view that puts workers and communities in the same frame as water, soil and energy. New Zealand’s industry programme is even more explicit, describing sustainability as “the continuous pursuit of equilibrium between economic, social, and environmental variables” and defining it as delivering excellent wine “in a way that enables the natural environment and the businesses and communities involved, to thrive.”

Translated into daily life, that means better control of chemical exposure, fewer heat‑stress days in the cellar, clearer progression and training instead of endless churn, and a deliberate approach to noise, traffic and visual impact so the winery reads as an asset, not a nuisance.

Measurement and credibility

The winemakers who are serious about this want numbers. And I like that a lot. I’m writing this to try and make sense of the true value of the term “sustainability” in wine, not to write a scientific paper with graphs and tables, so what follows - and the example I’ve picked - is deliberately worded to stay away from spreadsheets while still taking measurement seriously.

Industry guidance tends to start with “measure, then move”: calculate emissions, track water and energy use per litre of wine, work out where packaging sits, then draw a plan. Certification programmes, from Sustainable Winegrowing Australia to various climate‑protection schemes in Spain, are really just a way of turning that into a common language, with audits to keep everyone honest.

The point isn’t the logo on the back label. It’s being able to show the team and your growers that decisions are doing what they are supposed to do.

The Cosme Palacio & winemaker Jackson Brooke example

Now, anchor this in one place: Cosme Palacio in Rioja Alavesa, part of the Entrecanales Domecq group, with Australian winemaker Jackson Brooke in the cellar.

The historic tension with growers

In Rioja, as in most regions, grape contracts have traditionally paid growers per kilo or tonne. More kilos, more money. Fertiliser regimes, pruning choices, green harvest decisions; all of it gets pulled toward volume.

Sustainable viticulture, using cover crops, lower nitrogen, fewer synthetics, lower buds, usually dents yields in the short term while building soil and resilience over time. For a grower on a weight‑based contract, that reads like a straightforward pay cut.

So you get a structural clash:

• the winery wants healthier soils, fewer residues, more resilient vines and better fruit

• the grower is paid to maximise tonnes, not resilience.

Talk of sustainability sounds very noble; the contract still says, “I pay you for weight.”

Jackson’s move: pay for how, not just how much

Jackson’s vision, as he’s outlined when we met, is to change what the winery pays for.

Instead of a flat rate per tonne, his logic is to pay more for grapes from vineyards farmed under agreed sustainable practices like cover crops between the rows, reduced herbicide and systemic use, lower but better‑targeted yields, and to back that up with longer‑term, more secure c8 ontracts for growers who commit.

This mirrors a wider shift: pay farmers for better practice, step by step, with real incentives rather than warm words. Sustainable Winegrowing Australia and cross‑sector platforms like Bonsucro sit on the same logic

Transposed to Rioja Alavesa, Jackson is simply turning practice into a price signal. Growers who invest in soil, accept yield hits, and cut back inputs stop doing the winery a favour and become the partners the bodega values most and pays accordingly. Sustainable practices stop being a moral add‑on and become a rational way for growers to improve their income and secure their future.

^{Jackson Brooke introducing the winery’s ethos to our group.}

Why this is winemaking strategy, not just ethics

Seen from the cellar door, this is not a CSR project; it is winemaking strategy.

By paying for farming rather than just mass, Jackson is:

• securing fruit from vineyards that are more likely to cope with hotter, drier, more erratic seasons

• raising the standard of raw material - balance, freshness, phenolic ripeness - so he can make more precise, more detailed wines with fewer corrections

• reducing the winery’s dependence on high‑input systems whose costs and side‑effects are going one way

• giving Cosme Palacio a structure and story that separates it from peers relying on exhausted soils and purely transactional relationships.

Cover crops and more diverse swards are not just “nice for biodiversity”: the agronomy literature is clear that they build soil organic carbon, improve structure and water infiltration, and support microbial communities that help vines cope with stress. The winemaker’s self‑interest here is obvious: better‑buffered vines mean more reliable fruit and fewer disastrous vintages.

He is effectively buying time for soils to recover, vines to adapt, and the house style to evolve with the climate, instead of fighting that reality vintage by vintage.

A new contract between winery and grower

Underneath this sits a new type of contract between cellar and farmer.

It needs:

• an agreed definition of “better farming” that pushes the use of cover crops, reduction of herbicide, enhance canopy and soil practices, and get proper soil or biodiversity metrics

• shared risk: the winery carries part of the yield loss via higher prices or volume guarantees; the grower shares in the quality and brand upside

• a longer horizon: multi‑year deals that give growers the confidence to invest in new kit and new habits

On paper it’s a sustainability framework; in practice it’s the shared rulebook that keeps both growers and winemakers on the same page.

My take

As I progress in my research, I am getting a clearer definition of what “sustainability” is, at least on the production side of things.

Winemakers who care work this way: they keep good fruit coming off living soils, run a cellar that isn’t haemorrhaging cash on water, energy and waste, build long‑term relationships with growers and teams who want to get better with them, and use just enough data to know whether any of it is actually doing something.

They’re not interested in a bit of green gloss that leaves grape contracts, cellar work and packaging exactly where they were, in shrinking “sustainability” down to a single badge - organic, biodynamic, natural, low intervention - as if that settled anything, or in quick wins that hard‑wire fragility into the system, whether that’s heavy bottles, thirsty kit or brittle grower relationships.

We’ve already seen that for vine‑growers, sustainability is first and foremost self‑preservation. Winemakers have the luxury of choosing suppliers, but if they genuinely want to make sustainable wines, they have to choose fruit that’s been grown that way too.

Both sides have to line up: growers and winemakers need to understand what each has at stake, work out how to meet each other’s expectations, and do that while riding out demand swings, economic shocks and shifts in how people buy and drink. There are growing efforts to build standards and common frameworks for that coalition – in Rioja and far beyond – but unless they translate into wines and stories drinkers can actually recognise, they stay inside the trade.

“We’re all in it together,” Jackson said over lunch. “That includes you, the retailers.”

He’s right. Because none of this reaches drinkers unless buyers, importers and retailers choose to back those growers and wineries and actually sell the story. But before we get to that buyer/importer/retailer view, we need to talk about the people who move the wine: hauliers, logistics, transport. That’s Part 3.

You might have noticed “cover crops” with a little (*). That’s your signal to dive into the Mini‑Wiki‑Winy‑Moo and have a quick read, enjoy it, ideally after you’ve hit subscribe:

Rien de tout cela n’est ce que j’ai envie de voir sur une étiquette. C’est ce que notre organisme de régulation exige au UK. Et presque rien n’apporte une vraie valeur à la personne qui achète effectivement la bouteille. Elle sait déjà qu’elle achète chez Perfect Cellar. Quelle importance pour elle que son vin provienne du lot 43/1220 ?

Aucune, ou presque, du moins pour elle.

C’est de la bureaucratie animée par de bonnes intentions, mais qui a un coût pour quelqu’un - le producteur, l’importateur - et ces centimes se transforment en euros dès que l’on parle en palettes ou en containers. Tout ça, sans aucune valeur ajoutée dans le verre.

Ce qui fait vraiment le client marquer une pause, cliquer, ou prendre une bouteille en main, c’est la manière dont le vin a été fait. Les termes “bio” et “biodynamique” sont désormais suffisamment lisibles pour la plupart d’entres eux : moins de cochonneries dans le vignoble, et parfois dans la cave aussi.

Mais qu’en est‑il du vin “durable” ?

J’écris ceci parce que, même aujourd’hui, je ne sais pas vraiment ce qu’est un vin durable, comment il est produit, ni ce qu’il coûte réellement à produire.
Je sais en revanche que le mot “durable” est très en vogue et largement utilisé. Je ne suis pas certain, en revanche, qu’il soit réellement demandé par les buveurs, plutôt que par le reste de la chaîne qui les précèdent. Dans mes lectures, je suis tombé sur des définitions qui incluent ou excluent, selon les cas, des pratiques plus familières rangées sous le parapluie de la durabilité : lutte raisonnée, agriculture biologique, biodynamie, faible intervention, vin naturel. Si tout cela désigne des choses différentes, quelles chances a le consommateur moyen de s’y retrouver ?

Cette note est ma tentative de comprendre ce qui fait qu’un vin est “durable”, si cette durabilité tient jusqu’au verre, et qui, au fond, la réclame vraiment. Six perceptions, depuis six maillons de la chaîne d’approvisionnement, en commençant par le tout début : les viticulteurs.

Pour un viticulteur, la durabilité consiste à gérer le vignoble de manière à ce que les ressources naturelles, les travailleurs et l’entreprise puissent tous prospérer aujourd’hui, sans réduire la capacité du vignoble à produire des raisins de qualité demain. Sustainable Winegrowing Australia le formule clairement : « Les pratiques durables aident à préserver la terre et à la transmettre dans un meilleur état, créant de la valeur et de la sécurité pour les générations à venir. » Je retrouve quasiment la même définition dans des sources américaines, britanniques et françaises, ce qui laisse penser qu’il existe désormais un consensus global sur ce que la durabilité signifie pour les viticulteurs.

Ce qui compte pour les viticulteurs dans la durabilité

• Santé des sols, des terres et des écosystèmes

Les vignerons qui adhèrent à des démarches de durabilité placent systématiquement la résilience des sols et des écosystèmes au centre. Le cahier des charges de Sustainable Wines of Great Britain, par exemple, fixe les standards au vignoble explicitement autour de la « santé des sols, de la biodiversité et de l’empreinte carbone », faisant du sol et du vivant le point de départ de la pratique durable (comme indiqué sur le site de WineGB). C’est parfaitement logique : la terre reste la source du revenu d’un viticulteur.

• Réduction des intrants chimiques et environnement de travail plus sain

La volonté de réduire les intrants de synthèse repose à la fois sur la santé au travail et sur la santé du paysage.

Un article de Forbes définit la viticulture durable comme une méthode qui « donne la priorité à la gestion responsable de l’environnement, à la responsabilité sociale et à la viabilité économique », incluant « l’usage d’engrais verts, le compostage, la lutte intégrée et la réduction des intrants chimiques ». Une courte fiche explicative britannique de Tannin & Oak souligne que les vignobles durables s’appuient sur des ressources renouvelables et accordent une attention particulière à l’énergie et à l’eau, tout en assumant l’héritage des traitements chimiques lourds et de leurs coûts sanitaires et environnementaux.

Autrement dit, la durabilité vise ici autant à protéger les personnes qui travaillent dans les vignes qu’à protéger les sols dont elles dépendent.

• Eau, énergie et résilience climatique

Les vignerons qui pensent en termes de durabilité adaptent activement leurs vignobles et leurs chais à la volatilité climatique et aux tensions sur les ressources.
Le même article de Forbes donne un exemple concret en citant un responsable export d’Alpha Estate (un producteur grecque) : ils « utilisent de l’eau recyclée pour le nettoyage, ont installé des panneaux solaires et un éclairage LED, et compostent les déchets organiques », et ont « réduit le poids moyen de leurs bouteilles en verre de 20% » en cinq ans pour diminuer leur consommation de ressources. Des supports de formation du projet européen Green Vineyards expliquent que « les viticulteurs peuvent réduire la vulnérabilité de leurs vignobles aux extrêmes climatiques grâce à des mesures d’adaptation », en insistant sur la prise de conscience des risques climatiques et les ajustements correspondants en matière d’irrigation, de gestion de la canopée et de pratiques culturales.

À mesure que le changement climatique reconfigure les vignobles, c’est un domaine que je suis particulièrement curieux de voir évoluer.

• Qualité, sécurité des rendements et survie économique

La survie économique est explicitement intégrée à la façon dont les vignerons parlent de durabilité.

Le même responsable export cité par Forbes résume leur démarche durable comme le fait de « répondre aux besoins des générations actuelles sans compromettre ceux des générations futures, tout en assurant un équilibre entre croissance économique, protection de l’environnement et bien‑être social », en précisant qu’ils s’alignent sur des standards formels. Un guide professionnel canadien de Farm Credit Canada affirme que les pratiques durables améliorent l’efficacité, préservent les ressources et renforcent la qualité des produits, en les présentant comme un élément central de la stratégie d’entreprise plutôt que comme un geste philanthropique.

En d’autres termes, quand les vignerons parlent de durabilité, ils parlent surtout de survie économique à long terme, habillée dans le langage du souci environnemental et social.

• Personnes, travail et communauté

Les cadres modernes de la durabilité intègrent explicitement le travail et la communauté comme un pilier, que de nombreux viticulteurs considèrent désormais comme faisant partie intégrante de la résilience de leur domaine.

Le Sustainable Vineyard Roundtable explique que son “Sustainable Vineyard Practice Survey” comporte « 24 questions, la moitié sur les travailleurs et l’autre moitié sur la viticulture », mettant ainsi les travailleurs sur un pied d’égalité avec les pratiques culturales. Dans une synthèse de Decanter sur la durabilité “360°”, des acteurs américains rappellent que la durabilité « ne se contente pas de prendre en compte les pratiques agricoles, ce que font essentiellement le bio et la biodynamie, mais inclut aussi les personnes, les ressources humaines et les questions de justice sociale. Et la bonne gestion d’entreprise, que nous appelons “prospérité” dans le cadre de durabilité. »

Ce que le monde du vin continue largement à ignorer, c’est la culture. Pas la culture de la vigne, mais la colle du quotidien qui fait tenir une équipe. On sent assez vite quand un vigneron a intégré la durabilité dans la manière de faire tourner le domaine : son site a une page « Notre équipe » et il y parle de son personnel avec un vrai sentiment de fierté.

Des signes que les vignerons y voient “la bonne chose à faire”

Il existe de nombreux indices que les vignerons considèrent le fait de devenir plus durables à la fois comme une attente et, de plus en plus, comme la bonne chose à faire.

• Bordeaux - l’office de tourisme régional indique qu’« en 2020, 75% du vignoble avait adopté une démarche environnementale certifiée » et que Bordeaux représente « plus d’un quart des exploitations HVE au niveau national » pour l’ensemble de l’agriculture française.

• Angleterre & Pays de Galles - le premier Sustainability Impact Report de WineGB précise que le programme Sustainable Wines of Great Britain couvre déjà « 43% de la superficie totale en vigne au Royaume‑Uni » et que « 9 répondants sur 10 (91%) donnent la priorité à la gestion durable de l’enherbement du vignoble » (engrais verts, limitation des herbicides, réduction du travail du sol, etc.).

• Nouvelle‑Zélande - le Sustainability Report 2025 de New Zealand Winegrowers indique que, sur la base des données 2023/24, 127 vignobles et 30 chais déclarent mesurer et gérer leurs émissions de gaz à effet de serre via une certification vérifiée, preuve que le suivi des émissions devient une pratique normale pour les domaines sérieux.

Ma Conclusion

À mes yeux, la durabilité pour les viticulteurs est fondamentalement un acte d’auto‑préservation : une façon de protéger leur terre, leurs moyens de subsistance et leur communauté afin de pouvoir continuer à produire du raisin dans un monde en mutation. C’est aussi une forme d’auto‑préservation au sens où elle permet de maintenir viable, dans la durée, leur statut de viticulteurs, de sorte que leurs enfants puissent continuer à travailler et posséder la terre, et peut‑être même produire du vin à leur tour.

Alors, la viticulture durable est‑elle une réalité ou un simple coup de marketing ? Vue du côté des vignerons, la réponse paraît assez évidente.

Prochain point de vue, les producteurs de vin. Pour ne pas manquer les 5 autres articles, vous pouvez vous abonnez gratuitement.

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• “Can you add ‘Wine of USA’ on the back label?”

• “You need to add our details as ‘Importer: Perfect Cellar, London’.”

• “It looks like you don’t have a batch number; can you add one, please?”

None of this is what I want on a label. It is what our governing body requires. And almost none of it adds any real value to the person actually buying the bottle. They already know they are buying from Perfect Cellar. How much does it matter that their wine came from batch 43/1220?

It doesn’t, to them at least.

It is bureaucracy with some good intentions that still costs someone - the producer, the importer - and those pennies become pounds once you are talking pallets. All that, for no added value in the glass.

What does make people pause, click, or pick up a bottle is how the wine was made. Organic and biodynamic are, by now, legible enough for most drinkers: less crap in the vineyard, and sometimes in the winery too.

^{Perplexity and I having fun re-imagining Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”.}

But what about “sustainable” wine?

I am writing this because I still do not really know what a sustainable wine is, how it is made, or what it truly costs to produce.

I do know that the word “sustainable” is hot and heavily used. I am less sure it is actually in demand with drinkers, rather than with the rest of us in the chain. In my reading, I have come across definitions that sometimes include and sometimes exclude more familiar practices under the sustainability umbrella: lutte raisonnée, organic, biodynamic, low‑intervention, natural. If these are all different, what chance does the average wine drinker have of sorting them out?

This note is my attempt to figure out what makes a wine “sustainable”, whether it stays that way all the way to the glass, and who is really asking for it. Six perceptions, from six points in the supply chain, starting from the very beginning: vine growers.

For a vine grower, sustainability means managing the vineyard so that natural resources, workers and the business can all thrive today without reducing the vineyard’s ability to produce quality grapes tomorrow. Sustainable Winegrowing Australia puts it plainly: “Sustainable practices help nurture the land and pass it on in a better condition, creating value and security for generations to come.” I keep finding almost the same definition in US, UK and French sources, which suggests there is now a global status quo on what sustainability means for vine growers.

What vinegrowers care about in sustainability

• Land, soil and ecosystem health

Growers who sign up to sustainability schemes consistently put soil and ecosystem resilience at the centre. The Sustainable Wines of Great Britain scheme, for example, sets vineyard standards explicitly around “soil health, biodiversity and carbon footprint,” making soil and living environments the starting point for sustainable practice (as found on the WineGB website). It makes perfect sense: the land is the source of a vine grower’s income after all.

• Reduced chemical inputs and healthier working environments

There is a strong occupational‑health and landscape‑health motive for reducing synthetic inputs.

A Forbes piece defines sustainable viticulture as a method that “prioritizes environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and economic viability,” including “using cover crops, composting, integrated pest management, and reduced chemical inputs.” A short and sweet UK explainer from Tannin & Oak notes that sustainable vineyards lean on renewable resources and pay close attention to energy and water use, while also reckoning with the legacy of heavy chemical spraying and its health and environmental costs.

In other words, sustainability here is as much about protecting the people working in the vines as it is about protecting the soil they rely on.

• Water, energy and climate resilience

Growers who think in sustainability terms are actively adapting vineyards and wineries to climate volatility and resource constraints.

The same Forbes article gives a concrete example, quoting an export manager from Alpha Estate: they “use recycled water for cleaning, have installed solar panels and LED lighting, and compost organic waste,” and have “reduced the average weight of [their] glass bottles by 20 percent” in five years to cut resource use. Training materials from the EU‑funded Green Vineyards project say “winegrowers can reduce the vulnerability of their vineyards to weather extremes through adaptation measures,” stressing awareness of climate risks and corresponding changes to irrigation, canopy management and soil practices.

As climate change reshapes vineyards, this is one area I am especially curious to watch evolve.

• Quality, yield security and economic survival

Economic survival is explicitly folded into how growers talk about sustainability.

The same Forbes‑quoted export manager defines their sustainability ethos as “fulfilling the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations, while ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care, and social well‑being,” and notes they take guidance from formal standards. A Canadian industry guide from Farm Credit Canada argues that sustainable practice increases efficiency, conserves resources and improves product quality, framing it as core business strategy rather than philanthropy.

In other words, when growers talk about sustainability, they are really talking about long‑term economic survival wrapped in the language of environmental and social care.

• People, labour and community

Modern sustainability frameworks make labour and community an explicit pillar, which many growers now see as part of running a resilient estate.

The Sustainable Vineyard Roundtable explains that its Sustainable Vineyard Practice Survey has “24 questions, half on labour and half on viticulture,” placing workers on equal footing with vineyard techniques. In Decanter’s overview of “360°” sustainability, US advocates note that sustainability “not only… consider[s] your farming practices, which is really what organic and biodynamic do, but it also considers the people, HR and social justice aspect. And the proper business management, which we refer to as ‘prosperity’ in the sustainability framework.”

One thing the wine world still tends to ignore is culture. Not the romantic stuff, but the day‑to‑day glue that holds employees together. You can usually tell when a grower has built sustainability into the business: their website has an “Our people” page and they go on, quite proudly, about their staff.

Evidence that growers see this as “the right thing to do”

There are plenty of signs that growers see becoming sustainable as both expected and, increasingly, the right thing to do.

• Bordeaux - the regional tourism board reports that “in 2020, 75% of the vineyard had adopted a certified environmental approach,” and that Bordeaux accounts for “more than a quarter of HVE companies at the national level” across all French agriculture.

• England & Wales - WineGB’s first Sustainability Impact Report notes that the Sustainable Wines of Great Britain scheme already covers “43% of the total UK vine hectarage,” and that “9 in 10 (91%) of survey respondents prioritise sustainable vineyard floor management” (cover crops, avoiding herbicides, reduced tilling, etc.).

• New Zealand - the 2025 New Zealand Winegrowers Sustainability Report states that, based on 2023/24 data, 127 vineyards and 30 wineries reported measuring and managing their greenhouse gas emissions through verified certification, reflecting how emissions tracking is becoming normal practice for serious growers.

  ---

My take

My take is that sustainability for vine growers is fundamentally an act of self‑preservation: a way of protecting their land, livelihood and community so they can keep growing grapes at all in a changing world. It is also self‑preservation in the sense of keeping their status as vine growers viable in the long term, so their children can continue to work and own the land and perhaps even produce wine.

So, is sustainable viticulture a real thing or just a marketing coup? From the grower’s side of the fence, the answer looks pretty obvious.

En parallèle, la presse spécialisée explique combien de changements ont été apportés par rapport aux éditions précédentes : on change ceci, on change cela… Mais deux choses ne changent jamais : le lieu est déplorable et l’événement en lui‑même est… eh bien, c’est précisément l’objet de cette note ; on ne sait pas ce que c’est.

On y reviendra dans quelques lignes, mais d’abord laisse‑moi planter le décor de la montée en pression, puis de ce premier ressenti en arrivant sur place.

Tout commence pendant les mois froids de janvier. En tant qu’acheteur, tu te fais inonder d’emails de Vinexposium (Paris, surtout dans mon cas, et un peu Hong Kong), de Barcelona Wine Week, de ProWein et de Vinitaly. Puis, de temps en temps, le LWF débarque avec ses grandes annonces.

Au fil des mois, l’excitation monte à l’idée de visiter le London Wine Fair : « Ce sera plus grand qu’avant. » Ou « Nous aurons un focus fort sur les vins britanniques, sous la bannière “Host Nation”. » Ou encore « La direction a changé, le salon aussi. »

Ça y est, c’est le jour J.

J’ai raté le lundi mais j’ai bloqué le mardi et le mercredi pour le salon.
Il me faut entre 100 et 120 minutes pour y aller – oui, j’habite à Londres – mais je reste positif : il fait beau et ensoleillé, et ça fait du bien de sortir de ma misère de tableurs. J’ouvre Google Wallet, je trouve le QR code pour imprimer mon badge.
Tout est aussi fluide et simple que promis dans les différents emails reçus.
Je récupère mon badge, mon sac banane rempli d’insuline est contrôlé ; j’entre.

Sentiment soudain de déception.

Quand je pénètre dans la magnifique salle principale d’Olympia, je me sens soudain vidé. Toute cette excitation s’évapore d’un coup, remplacée par une envie pressante de rentrer chez moi. Deux raisons m’en empêchent : 1) j’ai mis une éternité à venir ; 2) j’ai promis de passer voir quelques personnes qui ont voyagé de bien plus loin que moi.

Le London Wine Fair n’a pas changé du tout.

Pire, il ne répond pas aux grandes attentes créées par leur marketing malin.
Où est cette immense zone Host Nation ? Elle est coincée dans un coin, minuscule. Quelques domaines sont représentés, mais rien n’est organisé de manière à vraiment mettre en valeur la diversité des vins produits dans le pays.
On trouve côte à côte des gens du Kent, du Dorset, du Norfolk… Aucune grande carte pour montrer où chacun se situe, afin que les visiteurs comprennent mieux les implications de la localisation et la façon dont les choix de vinification sont influencés par des éléments comme la géographie ou la météo.

« On a l’impression que le salon n’a pas de stratégie claire. » m’a dit l’un des exposants assis sur son stand.

Je suis totalement en phase avec ce constat. Le salon donne l’impression d’avoir juste essayé de remplir la salle avec quiconque acceptait les prix exorbitants des stands. Certains exposants m’ont ouvertement partagé la structure de coûts ; honnêtement, on a l’impression qu’ils se sont fait voler : « Mon petit stand ici, c’est environ £3 000. Celui‑là » – en pointant du doigt un grand stand dix mètres plus loin – « coûte environ trois fois plus cher parce qu’il est plus grand et placé au centre. Aucun n’a d’électricité ; les organisateurs facturent 80 £/jour en plus, par prise. »

D’après les médias, le salon a attiré plus de 10 000 visiteurs. Impossible de savoir s’il s’agit de visiteurs uniques ou d’un mix avec des retours ; j’y suis allé deux jours, est‑ce que je compte pour une visite ou deux ? Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui m’interpelle, c’est que cela fait une somme assez conséquente pour toucher un public relativement restreint.

Les visiteurs étaient déçus eux aussi. « Je viens ici tous les ans et je ne comprends toujours pas pourquoi », me confie un acheteur. « À la rigueur, je peux y voir des clients et des fournisseurs, mais franchement, c’est une expédition depuis notre bureau londonien. ». Rassurant de voir que je ne suis pas seul. Sur un stand, je rencontre un sommelier italien venu de Naples pour découvrir et mieux comprendre les vins anglais, qu’il imagine comme la prochaine tendance en Italie. « C’est tout un voyage, mais ça vaut le coup. J’ai goûté beaucoup de vins anglais et j’en apprécie la qualité, même si je ne suis pas sûr de pouvoir dire ce que j’ai dégusté ni d’où venaient les vins. » J’ai rencontré Federico sur le stand de Virginia Wine, où j’ai passé presque une journée entière.

Si tu as lu mes précédentes notes “On the Fly”, tu sais pourquoi ; tu trouveras un lien ci‑dessous si ce n’est pas le cas.

Défauts et réussites

Parce que je n’ai pas envie de passer pour ce grincheux quadragénaire français que je ne suis pas, je veux lister quelques points que j’ai trouvés bons, prometteurs et, comme je reste français et un peu râleur, quelques petits défauts.

1. J’avais un agenda et j’ai réussi à m’y tenir.
   Ça veut dire soit que je deviens bon à ce jeu‑là, soit qu’il n’y avait pas assez de choses intéressantes pour me distraire, comme ça a pu être le cas à Paris ou Barcelone.

2. Cela dit, la techno proposée était lourde et assez laborieuse à utiliser ; j’ai fini par me rabattre sur les mails et calendriers Outlook.

3. Je suis peut‑être français, mais j’adore et je soutiens toute boisson produite au Royaume‑Uni, tant que la qualité est là, évidemment.
   Voir de petits domaines mis en avant, mais aussi des brasseries de bière et de cidre ainsi que quelques spiritueux, c’était une bonne chose.

4. J’aurais juste aimé que les organisateurs fassent preuve de bon sens et déplacent les crachoirs (*) de la zone No/Lo vers la zone BRW/LDN, s’ils en manquaient…

5. Côté vin, c’était mieux diversifié dans le sens où le salon ne donnait pas l’impression d’être centré sur l’Europe centrale, le Caucase du Sud ou l’Asie centrale. La présence de Wine Japan et de Virginia Wine apportait un contraste très bienvenu.

6. J’ai assisté à un masterclass – sur Virginia Wine – et j’ai été satisfait de l’organisation et de la facilité d’accès. Court, efficace, avec suffisamment de contenu pour saisir les styles, l’échelle et la philosophie de vinification de l’État. Mais c’est peut‑être simplement dû au duo d’intervenants, qui était brillant.

Tu auras sans doute remarqué que j’ai mis en gras, suivi de (*), le mot « crachoirs ».
Les abonnés payants ont droit à deux choses vraiment précieuses : l’accès au Mini‑Wiki‑Winy‑Moo, le seul glossaire de termes du vin compréhensible par tout le monde, et du très chouette merch en remerciement pour leur soutien.

Abonne toi: free tshirt et plein de fun

Et donc ?

Est‑ce que je reviendrai au LWF ? Oui. Mais la vraie question, c’est : « Est‑ce que j’y retournerai dans un cadre professionnel ? ».

Depuis quatre ans, la motivation principale, c’est de voir des partenaires et des amis. Je me rappelle du temps, à mes débuts à Londres, où le LWF était “International” et une occasion pour les sommeliers d’apprendre, de découvrir de nouveaux produits et de vraiment passer un excellent moment entre collègues.

J’ai mentionné que j’avais un agenda de travail cette année pour le salon. C’est, encore une fois, lié à l’article dont je parlais plus haut, où je pose la question : « Et si l’avenir du vin était américain ? ». Eh bien, il semble que le marketing, les RP et la volonté sincère de présenter le fruit de leur travail sur les marchés européens – à la fois parce qu’ils sont fiers de ce qu’ils produisent, mais aussi parce qu’ils se soucient des retours de leurs homologues qui font du vin depuis des siècles avant même que leur pays n’existe – soient très vivants.

Mon agenda professionnel m’a été pratiquement fait sur mesure par Anna de Virginia Wine et Ben de Lightwell Survey, un domaine de Virginie que je surveillais depuis plus d’un an. Un plan, de la proactivité, une communication solide, un stand qui attire l’œil et qui est auto‑explicatif avec une immense carte de l’État. Une bande de personnes extrêmement enthousiastes, généreuses de leur temps et vraiment heureuses de parler de là d’où elles viennent et de ce qui les rend si spéciales. Tout cela pourrait être nous, la Grande‑Bretagne, sur notre propre salon du vin, mais encore une fois, ça ne l’était pas.

Je ne prétends pas avoir toutes les réponses, mais quelques évidences sautent aux yeux depuis le plancher. Commencez par rendre “Host Nation” impossible à rater : un grand hub britannique, une énorme carte, des sous‑zones clairement définies et un parcours de dégustation simple pour que les visiteurs n’aient pas à deviner ce qu’ils ont sous les yeux. Faites en sorte que la tech serve ce dispositif – prises de rendez‑vous, alertes, plans – plutôt que l’inverse. Et si le salon veut vraiment défendre les producteurs nationaux, offrez aux domaines et producteurs de boissons de GB un tarif réellement préférentiel, qui les incite à venir en nombre, plutôt que de les pousser à réfléchir à deux fois avant de s’inscrire.

Alors, c’est quoi le plan, London Wine Fair ?

Je ne le fais pas souvent, mais si tu aimes un bon petit coup de gueule de temps à autre, tu peux toujours t’abonner.

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