Our commitment to the environment is embodied in the closing lines of the the Digby toast and replicated on every bottle we sell: To Green and Pleasant, To England
We have scrutinised, and continue to scrutinise, the grape to glass environmental consequences of every bottle of Digby sold. Here are just some of the things we are doing to ensure the sustainability of our wines…
About 1kg of grapes goes into a bottle of Digby. During the growing season, the vines remove around 300g of CO2 from the environment through photosynthesis. Grape-growing in the UK requires relatively little addition of fertilisers, making it much greener than many farming methods.
Digby’s Hilden Vineyard hosts an array of beehives. Our bees are essential to maintaining balance in nature and yet are under threat. You’ll find that reflected in the bees motifs of our Tasting Room.
We choose our vineyard partners carefully to ensure that they play their part towards our sustainability, with one declared Environmental Business Of The Year 2019 for their county.
Unlike many wines from around the globe, our wines are vegan, as no animal derived products are used in the winemaking process. There is therefore no burden on the landscape for fish or animal products.
The biggest single contributor to carbon emissions in the production of a bottle of Digby (or any sparkling wine, for that matter) is the manufacture of the glass bottles and their subsequent transportation (both empty and full).
We have never used the super heavy bottles traditionally used in Champagne. Rather, we use 835g Ecova 75cl glass bottles from Verallia (a Saint-Gobain company), which are 15% lighter and generate 15% less CO2 to manufacture compared to traditional Champagne bottles.
Verallia’s manufacturing process can take in up to 100% recycled glass – so one bottle can literally last a lifetime if correctly recycled.
In 1990 Verallia committed to reducing CO2 emissions by 40% by 2030. Thus far, they have reduced by 28%.
Using lighter bottles not only means less material and energy in production but also lowers the CO2 footprint of transportation (see below).
Traditionally, the foils over the neck of a bottle of sparkling wine comprise a sandwich of two layers of metal foil, glued together with a middle plastic layer. These are then printed and formed into capsules for application to the bottle. We use ABSOLUTE GREEN LINE foils from Sparflex as they offer a much greener solution. Look out for the leaf on our bottles’ necks.
We use 100% natural cork closures as this allows very gentle breathing of the wine through the final stage of the ageing process. Cork farming is generally considered to be sustainable and, in fact, each sparkling wine cork has 562g of CO2 bound up inside it which the tree has removed from the atmosphere. According to Portugal’s largest producer of cork, Amorin, accounting for the CO2 caused by production, each cork is still net negative, to the tune of at least -400g, which effectively negates the CO2 footprint of the glass bottle.
We use traditional wire hoods with no additional plastic coatings
Our transit boxes for trade are made from recycled paper/pulp.
In our Tasting Room we recycle all cardboard and re-use the pulp inserts.
For consumer shipping, we use a much tougher box as they have to withstand the harsh environment of our courier networks, otherwise we suffer too many breakages which is wasteful (as well as a poor customer experience). These are made from recycled cardboard and are themselves 100% recyclable.
One of the largest contributions to the CO2 footprint of a bottle of wine is transportation. Haulage by land or air is by far more impactful on the environment than by sea, so anything we can do to minimise road and air transport is beneficial because whilst we can and do minimise the weight of the bottle, we can’t change the weight of the wine!
For our domestic UK market, the CO2 impact of moving bottles from the winery to your glass is considerably lower than that of imported wines.
For Digby drinkers around the world, our wines are always sent to other continents by sea on containers, and so the conversation is really about how it gets overland from port to drinker via the distribution networks.
We are committed to improving our environmental credentials at each point in the grape-to-glass chain. Depending on where a bottle of Digby is consumed, we estimate its footprint to be 1.2 – 1.75 kg CO2.
For all wine sold in 2020 onwards, we are planting trees to net out this gap.
Our first trees were planted on our doorstep, just outside of Arundel.
