Sustainability

Sustainability has been a fundamental part of the New Zealand wine industry for well over 20 years. Over 96% of New Zealand’s vineyard area is Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand certified.

Ongoing commitment to sustainability

Over the past 12 months, NZW has implemented of a range of strategic and operational initiatives, intended to refocus and reinforce our industry’s commitment to sustainability.

These have included: • The appointment of a General

Manager Sustainability in

September 2019 and subsequent structural changes to the

Environment Group at NZW;

•The launch and ongoing delivery of the Sustainable Winegrowing

New Zealand (SWNZ) scorecard review project;

•The refocus on six core areas of sustainability: water, waste, pest and disease, climate change, people and soil.

•The decision to implement a phased withdrawal of organophosphates from the Spray Schedule;

•The decision to close the SWNZ

Continuous Improvement pilot and launch the Sustainability

Guardians programme; • Adopting key environmental industry health indicators of sustainability;

•Setting a climate change goal for the industry to become carbon neutral by 2050 and implementing a climate change work programme;

•Re-confirming the goals, objectives, and performance indicators of the

NZW biosecurity strategy.

Taken together, these initiatives signal a growing momentum that will take our sustainability initiatives to a new level. Collectively, they help to protect and enhance the reputation of New Zealand wine, and act as a key differentiator for our product as the industry recovers from the impacts of COVID-19.

Climate Change

Improving the relevance of SWNZ

Over the past nine months, NZW and two Scorecard Technical Advisory Groups have been working to streamline the SWNZ vineyard and winery scorecards, around the six focus areas. This work seeks to strengthen the industry’s reputation for sustainability while improving the relevance of SWNZ for members’ businesses. The new scorecards are expected to be delivered by November 2020. These revised scorecards will help to ensure SWNZ remains a world-leading sustainability programme, with an increased focus on quantitative data. u

People Pest and Disease

6 FOCUS AREAS OF SUSTAINABILITY

Soil Water Waste

CHURTON VINEYARD

Spray Days

Over 900 people attended Spray Days workshops throughout the country in 2019. This popular education event was also held in an online forum in May 2020, through a webinar and ‘question and answer’ session on preventing grapevine trunk disease. This session was a great reminder of the ability of the team to deliver technical information in a simple and applicable manner in a virtual format.

The resurgence of COVID-19 in August has meant that the 2020 spray days programme will be delivered online. We hope to return to the regions with this key event during 2021.

Importance of independent certification

Independent certification is a key element of SWNZ’s international reputation, helping to protect the industry from potential accusations of greenwashing. 792 audits were undertaken in the 2019 season, split between 642 full site audits and 150 desk-top audits. Moving forward the impact of COVID-19 will lead to major changes in the way audits will be conducted, with remote audits, virtual connections, and a focus on education coming to the fore.

Growing emphasis on the impact of climate change

Over the past year the Board has taken several steps to highlight the importance of the risk posed by climate change to the New Zealand wine industry, including setting a challenging goal for the industry to become carbon neutral by 2050.

To commence our journey towards this goal we have engaged Toitū Envirocare to assess the industry’s current carbon production footprint, and to develop guidance around the key sources of emissions in the winery and on the vineyard. The results of this research will provide a benchmark on current industry performance and should be available by the end of the 2020 calendar year.

This work will complement the inclusion of specific climate change questions in the SWNZ scorecards and further work to promote best practice through the Sustainability Guardians programme. In addition, NZW has joined the Toitū Envirocare Carbon Reduced Certification Programme. This will help us to learn how we can manage the organisation’s impact on climate change and pass these learnings on to members.

“If I had to pick one wine country that was greener than others it would be New Zealand, where many producers follow a “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra.”

JANE MACQUITTY, THE TIMES UK

Organics - Great wine is in our nature

Organic winegrowing in New Zealand continues to go from strength to strength. At vintage 2019, New Zealand had 111 certified organic grape growers and 73 certified organic wineries, ranging from artisanal family operations to large companies with multiple organic sites.

Meanwhile, market enthusiasm for New Zealand organic wines is strong. By popular demand, Organic Winegrowers New Zealand (OWNZ) ran an even bigger week of events for this year’s Organic Wine Week in September 2019, with member wineries participating in retailer tastings, in-store promotions, masterclasses and winemaker dinners in New Zealand and overseas, while social media hummed with activity. OWNZ also continues to run grower education events, with a series of regional seminars on cover crops attracting record numbers in the spring.

A soil monitoring project by OWNZ yielded further positive results for organic production this year; when researchers revisited the Organic Focus Vineyards eight years after the beginning of organic conversion, they found encouraging results for soil quality, in research co-sponsored by the Bragato Research Institute. OWNZ and NZW continue to work in collaboration to grow the New Zealand organic industry.

Biosecurity - Building an industry of biosecurity champions

Maximising the effectiveness of the New Zealand biosecurity system for members remains the key goal of NZW’s biosecurity activities. Over the past year our primary focus has been promoting member participation in biosecurity. 2019 marked the initiation of the Being a Biosecurity Champion programme, which works with contestants in the Young Viticulturist competition to help them develop biosecurity plans to mitigate risks on their own sites. Similarly, 2019 saw the launch of the first wine industry “biosecurity week” involving a range of initiatives aimed at increasing biosecurity awareness, with both programmes returning in 2020.

The Biosecurity Team continues to work in partnership with government through the Government Industry Agreement (GIA) for Biosecurity Readiness and Response. This year the industry has reaped the rewards of this ongoing work, with brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) detections at the border significantly reduced from previous risk seasons. This reduction was in part due to stricter regulations at the border governing the importation of goods from high risk countries; an excellent result for the industry. In addition, by the end of 2020 NZW expects to sign two additional GIA agreements with the crown and other industry bodies. These agreements will see the development of: • A response plan that sets out how

New Zealand would respond to an incursion of X.fastidiosa, the bacteria responsible for Pierce’s

Disease one of our most unwanted pests; and

•An agreement to introduce a plant producers' biosecurity scheme that will help to manage the risk of an incursion through the commercial plant nursery pathway.

Both these agreements will help to mitigate the risk of a significant incursion, building industry capability to manage biosecurity risk.

The Biosecurity team made the following submissions to Government on behalf of members:

•Submission on the proposed

Standard for Offshore Facilities

Holding and Testing Plants for

Planting submitted 29/7/2019

•Submission on the import health standard Prunus Plants for Planting submitted 7/8/2019

•Submission to EPA on 18/9/2019 regarding Giant Willow Aphid

Biological Control Agent