SSAW Collective Journal: July 2024

 

The SSAW Collective is a community of chefs, florists and growers committed to an ethical way of working with seasonal produce. Their monthly journal articles focus on change makers and innovators, and we are honoured to have had our founder contribute their July entry. The following article can be found on the SSAW Collective website.

 

I’m new to this world of sustainability. I haven’t studied courses or degrees on it, let alone worked in it. Wine has always been my thing. I’ve always been completely enchanted by the alchemy of it all. How one can take the humble grape, ferment it, and have it become what it becomes. In recent years, however, I’ve found myself obsessing less about it all. I no longer have the same enthused euphoria I once had when I’d seek out and geek out about wine. These days, I find myself reaching for a cold beer after a long day, sooner than I would a glass of wine (admittedly, I’m writing this in a pub in Bath whilst settling into a quiet moment with a pint of Guinness). I digress, let’s get back to the point.

 

Wine has taken on new meaning for me. It was once all about the wine. The liquid in the bottle. And to be fair, it should always be about the wine, right? That’s the starting point. Perhaps it’s the natural evolution of thought on a subject you’ve invested your life’s energy into, but something has caused me to look and dig a bit deeper into our practices in general surrounding wine; the way we farm it, the packaging we use, the way we serve and communicate it, and fundamentally, what the impact it has on our way of living.

 

'Wine is fundamentally linked to farming, and has always had the enviable privilege (and responsibility) of being able to communicate those practices via this ‘unnecessary’ product.'

 

You see, we don’t need wine to survive as a species. It’s a luxury, something magical and wonderful we get to revel in and celebrate with and find comfort in. It is also an agricultural product, lest we forget. It is fundamentally linked to farming, and has always had the enviable privilege (and responsibility) of being able to communicate those practices via this ‘unnecessary’ product. It’s one of the few things connected to working the land that takes us on a deeper journey beyond just the raw crop. That presents a golden opportunity to capture an audiences’ attention and share ideas and curiosities surrounding it.

 

It was after several years of working in the wine trade that Wasted Wine Club came to be. I’d worked on all sides of it: I’d made it, poured it, sold it, marketed it. I kind of felt like I’d seen it in all it’s different guises. And then Covid hit. Weirdly, that little blip on the radar served as an incubator for many ideas that people neither had the time nor bandwidth to entertain prior to the world coming to a total standstill. I was visiting a winemaker in South Africa who, whilst tasting through wines in his cellar, pointed out that he had three barrels of Cabernet Franc leftover from a previous vintage that he hadn’t bottled, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it. The wine was still delicious, but he just had too much of it, and it hadn’t been used. It got me thinking: how often did this circumstance of excess wine happen? And what ended up happening to it?

 

The more I asked around, the more I realised that this happened far more often than we ever heard about. Excess wine was always floating around cellars, whether that was because of a bumper crop, or an experiment that never made it to market, the reasons were endless. Ultimately, there wasn’t much at the winemakers’ disposal as to how to work with or manage that excess. Either it was blended away, sold for bulk, or in the worst cases, poured down the drain.

 

They say good ideas are created as solutions to unaddressed problems. So, I asked more questions: why couldn’t we take this wayward wine, collaborate with the producer on a custom bottling, and create a sustainable solution for working with the excess by minimising this ‘waste’? We could champion the wine and the producer, celebrate where it’s come from and what it is, and bring it to an audience who is eager to engage with and embrace products that have a more emotional connection to something. In a world where we are constantly confronted with corporate brands and mass-produced products, people are now wanting to shop smarter, support small businesses, and ultimately, feel good about their consumer choices. Again, wine isn’t a necessity, so perhaps we could make it just that little bit easier to pull a bottle off the shelf, should there be some good being done at the same time.

 

'Wine isn’t a necessity, so perhaps we could make it just that little bit easier to pull a bottle off the shelf, should there be some good being done at the same time.'

 

Truthfully, Wasted Wine Club wasn’t started with the intention of it being a sustainable brand. Perhaps there was some kind of altruistic spirit at its core at day one, but this passion project was more of a creative outlet, that slowly snowballed into a full-scale wine label, and has unintentionally become one. It’s been an eye-opening journey into a conversation that I once skirted around or felt perhaps wasn’t worth the effort. Then Wasted Wine Club came along, and everything changed. It’s fun and flirty and brimming with energy, that leaves me inspired to think bigger. Of course, it's still about the wine, but I feel like there is a lot more to discuss beyond just the wine in the bottle these days.

 

Sustainability sometimes gets put into little pigeonholes. Is this organic? How much does the bottle weigh? Is the packaging recyclable? What are the labour conditions like? The thing I’ve realised since stepping into this world is that we need to be considering sustainability in a far more holistic way. It’s multifaceted. All these factors are important and carry gravitas. I’m not sure who gets to carry the sword and orb and create the hierarchy of ‘this trumps that’, but I have certainly come to believe that we need to embrace it all. Because it’s all important.

 

'We can’t carry on with the status quo, because the status quo is no longer.'

 

I think business owners and leaders should all be changing the way they think about the world, and how products and services are existing in it. We can’t carry on with the status quo, because the status quo is no longer. The decisions we make have huge ripple effects, and my thinking is that we have a responsibility now, in this moment, to show up and make smart, selfless decisions, in order for the future to exist in some kind of harmony. It’s not easy. It’s expensive. It’s stressful. It takes courage. But at the end of the day, we should embrace the platforms and opportunities we have, and hopefully the cumulative efforts of our generation can make a big difference for future ones.