Digby’s commitment to the environment is embodied in the closing lines of the the Digby toast, replicated on every bottle we sell:
TO GREEN AND PLEASANT,
TO ENGLAND.
We scrutinise the grape-to-glass environmental consequences of every bottle. Here are just some of the things we are doing to ensure the sustainability of our wines…
A bottle of Digby contains about 1kg of grapes and, during the growing season, the vines remove around 300g of CO2 from the environment through photosynthesis.
We choose our vineyard partners carefully to ensure that they play their part towards our sustainability, with one declared its county’s Environmental Business Of The Year 2019.
Digby’s own Hilden Vineyard hosts an array of beehives, promoting the bees essential to maintaining balance in nature.
The biggest single contributor to carbon emissions in the production of any sparkling wine is the manufacture of the glass bottles and their subsequent transportation, whether empty or full.
Using lighter bottles not only means less material and energy in production but also lowers the CO2 footprint of transportation (see below).
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%. Read more here.
Look out for the leaf on our bottles’ necks. We use ABSOLUTE GREEN LINE foils from Sparflex as they offer a much greener solution to the traditional model, thanks to:
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 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 have to use much tougher boxes to withstand the harsh environment of our courier networks and avoid waste through breakages. 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. We minimise road and air haulage where possible by transporting Digby wines internationally by sea containers.
And it pays to drink local: 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.
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 from 2020 onwards, we have been planting trees to net out this gap. The first were planted on our doorstep, just outside of Arundel.
