Climate Talks by Porto Protocol

This was the first of a series of talks in partnership with The Regenerative Viticulture Foundation!

In this Climate Talk we will be decoding and exploring the concept of managing ecosystems, with vineyards at its core.

This also represented the launch of our project “Living Vineyards”

Within the New York Climate Week, Porto Protocol, in partnership with the New York Wine & Grape Foundation (Boldly NY), bring you various players and countries to discuss the topic: Saving Every Drop: Water Management and Conservation Strategies in Wine Production.

During this Climate Talk we will identify the major challenges in the use of water throughout the production cycle of grapes and wine in our warming climate. During this conversation, we will analyze the importance of efficient use of water and explore the best technologies and practices available in the vineyard and the winery.

Within the New York Climate Week , Porto Protocol, in partnership with the New York Wine & Grape Foundation (Boldly NY), bring you various stakeholders of the value chain to discuss the topic: Seeding the Future: Building Paths to Sustain Wine Legacy and Production for Future Generations.

In this Climate Talk we will debate the why and the how of internalizing climate change in wine businesses: Where do you start? How does this materialize into a balance sheet? What are the fundamental changes this decision will bring into the modus operandi of the business? What barriers may one encounter? What opportunities arise from it? What are the risks? How does it affect your relationship with your stakeholders, from employees to providers? How do you address it and communicate it? How do you pass it on to your consumers? We will seek to present practical approaches to these questions by players from the industry worldwide that have decided to address climate emergency in a proactive fashion, committed to build a path to sustain their wine legacy for generations to come.

Justin Jackson (Boldly NY) will host the talk with Adrian Bridge (The Fladgate Partnership), Cecilia Pasqua (Pasqua Wines), Shannon Brock (Silver Thread).

This discussion will explore regenerative viticulture’s impact on water conservation in this engaging webinar. Learn from experts as they share strategies for saving water in vineyards. Discover innovative approaches that promote sustainable water management while maintaining wine quality. This webinar inspires vineyard owners, winemakers, and enthusiasts to embrace regenerative viticulture for a sustainable future, preserving water resources and ensuring the wine industry’s longevity.

Jessica Villat will host the talk with Elizabeth Whitlow (Regenerative Organic Alliance), Mimi Casteel (Regenerative Viticulture Foundation) and Francisco Font (Associación de Viticultura Regenerativa).

This Climate Talk is a Business Edition, in which we explore how sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand, through the voices and best practices of different representatives of the wine trade, such as importers, distributors, retailers and traders.

Steven Campbell (from Campbell Kind Wines), Melissa Monti Saunders, Master of Wine (from Communal Brands) and Dom de Ville (from The Wine Society) talk about embracing Sustainability, social impact, packaging, and the benefits in the long term.

More information here

Also available on YouTube

Dans le contexte du changement climatique, les cépages jouent un rôle important dans les solutions adaptation. Sachant que selon l’OIV, il existe 6000 cépages et que 13 d’entre eux couvrent le tiers des vignobles, est-il nécessaire de considérer les hybrides? Alors que certains ont la certitude que les hybrides vont jouer un rôle positif dans le futur, d’autres prônent l’exploration des cépages existants et de leurs clones ainsi que des recherches plus avancées sur les porte-greffe.

This Climate Talk was hosted by Mimi Casteel from Hope Well Wine with Claudia Kammann from Hochschule Geisenheim University, Hans-Peter Schmidt from Ithaka Institute and Antoine Lespès from Domaine LAFAGE as guest speakers.

In the ever-expanding ocean of sustainability technologies, you have undoubtedly heard the term biochar. Once relegated to fringe-conversations, biochar has now gained a strong foothold in mainstream academic and applied research, and its use is being studied for everything from climate change mitigation to restoration of soil carbon stores, recovery of soil structure, nutrient cycles and function, soil remediation and detoxification applications, bioenergy production, and more.

Biochar is a specific form of charcoal produced through pyrolysis, which is the conversion of organic materials (biomass) under very high temperatures (greater than 500*C) to black carbon in the absence of oxygen. This form of Carbon is incredibly durable and resistant to decomposition that it can be a long-term storage form of Carbon in soils. The production techniques used in making biochar are commensurate with its potential benefits, and anyone considering biochar should become fluent in the best practices for its production. However, given the almost unfathomable sources of feedstocks, from animal manures to thinning of forest biomes for fire mitigation, to crop residues, biochar is a very exciting topic and its potential benefits in the climate crisis are myriad.

For farmers and land managers, biochar is exciting for a number of reasons, which we will get into deeply today. Its alkalinity can naturally lower acidic soil pH, can help hold soluble positively charged cations like Calcium and Potassium, it can decrease soil bulk density in compacted soils, increase aggregation, aeration, reduce leaching, bind and sequester toxins, and perhaps most importantly (at least to me), biochar has an unparalleled potential in the campaign to rehydrate soils most at risk for desertification. I’ve seen this benefit myself, and I am really looking forward to exploring all of these topics with our panel of experts.

Wine is first and foremost an agricultural product, extremely vulnerable to climate change. Its impact is being experienced by vintners in a variety of ways, as extreme weather events, from droughts to heat waves, from out of season hail to floods, are impacting yields, phenology, wine quality and taste and vines health. Harvests have been lost and new regions have arisen because of it. 

But just as wine production is affected by a changing climate it also contributes to enhance it in a variety of ways, may it be through the choice of packaging, viticulture practices or transportation.  

In this Climate Talk we’ll seek to understand how key education institutions around the world are changing their curriculums to prepare a new breath of future vintners, viticulturists, and wine business managers to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to address the new reality they will encounter and ultimately protect the wine industry.   

GUESTS: 

HOST: 

In this podcast episode, you will listen to Anna Brittain (MD at Napa Green), Marja Aho (Sustainability Manager at Alko Oy) and Polly Hammond (MD and Founder 5Forests) representing 3 different stakeholders with tremendous experience in sustainability in wine to share their expertise and experience with the audience.

This panel was part of the hybrid event at the Instituto Politécnico de Viseu on December 13th, where we presented the results of a study in partnership with 5 wine regions that represent in total 38% of Portugal's wine (volume and area), that resulted into an "immersion" into sustainability in these wine regions.

We spoke and got to know dozens of wine and grape producers, their practices (the sustainable and not-so-sustainable ones), their challenges, and their needs to, ultimately, bring together a characterization of the status of sustainability in these regions and routes to prepare a sustainable development path for the future. We also invite you to see the documentary on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPyUNJPJY2Y