Wine and the Environment
Food Miles….is an expression that you will be hearing a lot more of in the future.
It is a term which refers to the distance food/wine is transported from the time of its production until it reaches the consumer.
It is one criteria used in assessing the impact that the production of food has on the world environment.
The further that food,or wine, has to travel to reach the consumer, the more resources it consumes and the more negative effect it has on the world environment.
In the interests of sustainability and also freshness, several Melbourne restaurants have introduced a policy of sourcing all their produce within a 200 km radius of Melbourne.
This policy also extends to their wine purchases.
In Western Australia there is a Buy West campaign which exhorts people to,wherever possible,only buy goods produced in WA.
At Mistletoe we thank you for making the decision to purchase wine grown and made in New South Wales.
In the current economic environment we should all be endeavouring to buy Australian Made whenever we can.
When you are next contemplating purchasing wine, we ask that you seriously consider supporting the Australia wine industry by buying primarily Australian grown and made wine.
When you purchase wine from Mistletoe you are supporting a 100% Australian family owned business that is located in a rural community.
We live and die by what we do at Mistletoe and are not supported by any off farm income as many hobby/trophy wineries are.
There is a lot of romance and mystique that surrounds the wine industry but at the end of the day our industry is rural based agricultural business.
The dollars you spend with us go to our loyal grapegrowers and flow into our regional economy through our loyal staff and our vineyard workers,grapepickers,agricultural suppliers,truckdrivers,the people who work on the bottling lines and in packaging,agricultural supplies etc.
Those dollars then help support other regional based businesses, in turn, creating employment and cementing the fabric of those regional communities.
The creation of this employment slows the move of younger people to the cities which would add pressure to housing ,transport and all the other expected services which are in most cases already stretched.
Australian wine is one of the very few commodities that is produced 100% in Australia.
The dollars you spend on Australian ( Mistletoe) wine stay in Australia helping to secure the futures of many including our children and grandchildren!
There is a new catch cry that we should all be thinking about if we are serious about the food / wine purchasing decisions we make that can have a direct negative effect on the environment.
“ Think globally, buy locally”
We also ask you to think about the differences in buying wine direct from a grower producer such as Mistletoe as opposed to buying from one of the major liquor store chains which are owned by either Woolworths or Coles.
The dollars you spend directly with a wine producer,such as Mistletoe, go straight back into rural and regional communities not to institutional shareholders or overseas.
Sustainability.
At Mistletoe we do our very best to practise sustainable viticulture by engaging in farming methods which have the least possible environmental effect.
We use natural fertilisers, minimal,or no irrigation,and as many natural products as we can to produce our wine grapes.
We are in the process of heavily mulching our vineyards to reduce weed growth and to save moisture loss due to evaporation.
We use minimum till practises so the soil is not ravaged and plant fodder crops mid row to mulch back into the soil as vegetative matter thus helping to promote beneficial microbial growth and in turn richer and better soils.
The best thing about this approach, from our perspective, is that the grapes grown in this way make better wine.
Enjoy!
