Over the last few posts, we’ve looked at different initiatives and certifications for sustainable viticulture in Bordeaux. But what about a broader definition of the environment? A definition that includes people, workers, suppliers, neighbours – the social responsibility of the properties. Is CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility (in French RSE – Responsabilité sociale des entreprises) the next stepping stone in sustainable certification? 

It’s understandable that vineyards would look to their natural environment first, it’s a more tangible and sometimes urgent challenge, but what next?

The people behind the product

The production and sale of wine is the number one employer in the Gironde region. 60,000 people work directly or indirectly in the sector across both urban and rural areas. The activities in and around wine have a profound influence on the local economy, society and the environment. 

The CSR definition of environment includes all stakeholders, employees, partners, suppliers, customers, neighbours, local public authorities and even future generations. The term ‘responsibility’, rather than ‘sustainability’, underlines an accountability towards all these stakeholders. 

The CIVB (Conseil Interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux – Bordeaux Wine council) have taken the same successful collaborative model of the Environmental Management System (EMS) and applied it to CSR. The technique of collaborative action, shared experience, bringing together different actors in the sector that we looked at previously, this time to reach their own CSR strategy. This support is particularly important for smaller vineyards where owner wine makers don’t necessarily have the time or support to deal with the admin constraints.

Bordeaux Cultivons Demain 

The CIVB have created their own certification;  Bordeaux Cultivons Demain. Introduced in 2020, it translates as: Bordeaux, let’s cultivate tomorrow. It is built on the ISO 26000 standard. ISO 26000 is to CSR, what ISO 14000 is to sustainable agriculture. An international standard but not a certification.

Bordeaux Cultivons Demain is a certification, audited by Bureau Verita.  It is similar to HVE in that it has three progressive levels. Upon completion of the third level, the label is granted and can be added to a wine label. 

In 2019, A pilot group of 28 companies tested the concept. They included merchants, winegrowers and a cooperative cellar with very different profiles; from 0 to 3000 employees. All already held environmental certifications.

December 2021, saw the first labels awarded to 13 companies. Wine merchants Castel Bordeaux, Grands Chais de France, Jules Lebègue, and Maison Johanès Boubée and wineries Château de La Dauphine, Château de la Rivière, Château Lagrange, Château Lapelletrie, Château Luchey-Halde, Château Rauzan-Ségla, Famille Ducourt, Vignobles Rousseau and Vignobles André Lurton. 

The programme is now open to the entire sector and over 100 companies have already signed up. The CIVB has set an objective that 30% of the volume of Bordeaux wine will be produced by CSR certified companies by 2030. 

Key concepts.

The ISO 26000 guidelines cover seven central issues: Governance, Human Rights, Labour Relations and Conditions, The Environment, Fair Practice, Consumer Issues, Communities and Local Development.

Bordeaux Cultivons Demain interprets these to cover

• Health and safety of workers and the quality of the work environment , including training and professional and talent development, supporting equality and diversity. 

• Increasing the attractivity of the region and the industry, promoting the culture of wine, encouraging responsible purchasing, making the sector’s practices and commitments better known to the inhabitants of the region, encouraging recruitment, etc.

• Communication, a sector that anticipates and is open for innovation and R&D, promoting responsible consumption, product transparency from the vine to the consumer, wine tourism, etc.

Each participating company creates their own ways to rise to these challenges. The initiatives of the first cohort, some of which are below, show the potential for innovation. 

We’ve looked at initiatives that preserve and respect the environment, these often have a social impact, almost as a by-product: they create safe and agreeable working conditions. Planting hedges and creating wildlife refuges in the interest of  biodiversity create a better local environment for workers and neighbours.

The kitchen gardens at Château Giscours and Château Phelan Segur are great for biodiversity, but employees enjoy the fresh veg too. Locals love seeing sheep in the vines, it makes a change in vineyards that are normally animal free. 

The flower garden at Château Brown (see previous post) is both an environmental and social initiative. It started with horticulturalist Pauline Rival who belongs to the social “Collectif de la fleur française“, with the aim of making flower production local and  responsible. Beautiful, biodiverse and social.  

The Ducourt Family works with Dephy Ferme, a network of experimental farms that test and demonstrate the latest equipment and techniques aiming to reduce the use of crop-protection products and improve agricultural practices that respect the environment and biodiversity. These experiments are essential to verify the techniques before they go into general use. Hundreds of winegrowers take part, pooling results and accelerating improvements and transformation of  viticulture.

Making the sector attractive 

Brand image is important to consumers, but it is also important to attract the right talent. The sector needs a wide range of skills. As well as wine production, there are cooperages, transporters, printers, oenologists, educational and research organisations and many other suppliers. Environmental initiatives make the wine sector exciting and attractive especially to younger people. Diversifying into activities such as wine tourism attracts candidates with broader skill sets, as does technical innovation in the field and cellar and in marketing.

Recruitment 

You might think working in and amongst the vines in beautiful surroundings is enough to attract workers, but for some professions (tractor drivers, sales people) recruitment is a struggle. Most people who work in wine will tell you it’s a thrilling sector to work in, with lots of passionate people, but both vineyard and cellar work is physically demanding. The physical and mental wellbeing of workers is important in retaining staff and in encouraging new employees. New ideas alongside experience is key to ensuring the future of the industry.

Training and education

Bordeaux has dynamic further education sector working with organisations such as FAFSEA and VIVEA to offer specialised training to both employees and owners, but some properties have also created their own initiatives. 

I mentioned Les Vignerons du Vivant, in a previous post, it’s an initiative created by Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier of Château Anthonic, now coordinated by Pierre Caseneuve of Château Paloumey, to not only recruit and train but also retain precious vine workers.  

Also, in the Médoc, The Vineyard School was created in 2014, to respond to the wine sector labour shortage. Led by Château Larose Trintaudon, ten Médoc châteaux grouped together to recruit, train and qualify operational staff. Staff are trained in the vine and cellars directly by the estates with complimentary ‘soft skills’ at the school. Students come from a wide range of backgrounds and ages; they follow the 18-month work-study programme and graduate with a professional qualification certificate (CQP) as a wine estate specialist, and even better, a job. 

Cap Metiers is an organisation that helps people understand what jobs are available in the region and what they involve and find their calling. They are working with the Bordeaux Cultivons Demain initiative to help young people to discover and engage with the wine trade, creating interactive tools to bring them into the world of wine, virtually. These include 360° immersive videos in cellars, vineyards and bottling plants. They have gamified the management of a vineyard during the seasons and there is even an escape game to find someone apt to inherit a vineyard! If you understand French, have a go.

Seasonal Sauternes 

Shortage of seasonal labour is a recurrent problem in vineyards with seasonal peaks of employment, none more so than in Sauternes. 13 Sauternes properties have together created a consortium to help recruit the 30 to 250 workers needed during the year. The goal is to offer employees better and more motivating working conditions and training, to make the work more interesting and improve the skills of seasonal employees. Although the priority is given to locals, they also offer a free harvest bus. They now retain 30 to 40% of more skilled seasonal workers, a huge improvement.

Attractive Innovation

Wine making doesn’t have a very high-tech image and doesn’t always attract younger workers. But it is innovative in both natural and environmental science, the bio-chemistry of wine making and ageing, carbon capture, packaging (more of which to come), marketing and communication. 

It’s the young management team at wine merchant  Jules Lebègue that is leading their vision to become the Bordeaux leader of “green” wines. 

They obtained ISO 14001 through EMS and are HVE3, organic and biodynamic certified and producing both vegan and  sulphite-free wines, working with winegrowers that committed to environmental and sustainable development. A member of the pilot group since 2019 their CSR action plan, includes a product Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to understand and reduce the environmental impact of their products. 

The 50 employees have their own ideas about improving their working environment. Listening to them creates new opportunities. They suggested creating an insect hotel and installing beehives for biodiversity and a shared vegetable garden. They initiated improved waste sorting and becoming paper-free. Workshops introduced to reduce their climate impact at work have benefited the company and the employees in their own homes.

Employee Wellbeing

The arduous nature of work in the field and the cellar can’t be ignored. There are innovations here too; pneumatic secateurs, tying machines for pruning are common and even exercise routines in the vines. Château Lagrange is testing adapted exoskeletons, tailor-made support devices to provide relief from repetitive movements and limit the development of musculoskeletal disorders. 

Brand image 

Successful communication is not just about sending messages out via social media, it’s about creating dialogue between châteaux and employees, consumers, suppliers, stakeholders and the neighbours. It is probably the key to many of the issues addressed in a CSR strategy. Consumers with questions and complaints can be a great source of inspiration rather than simply a source of irritation.

Wine tourism is a great way to communicate. On their ‘Green Tour’ Château de la Dauphine specifically makes visitors aware of environmental issues when they visit the estate. They discover the regenerative ecosystem: bee hives, wild bee houses and bird and bat shelters made from recycled wooden cases, the presence of chickens for food waste and to protect bees from Asian hornets, the permaculture vegetable garden, etc. 

Good neighbours

Wine tourism also offers an opportunity to open the doors to the neighbours through art and music festivals, farmers markets with local producers, restaurants, bars and guest rooms and gites. The vineyards of Bordeaux are intimately connected with the local population. 110,000 of the 900 000 ha in the region are under vine. The networks of towns and villages in and around vineyards means continued communication with the neighbours is important, especially around vineyard treatments. 

Protecting the neighbours 

Regional wine organisations have created ‘good neighbours’ charters with local councils  and the CIVB has created an atlas showing which plots of each vineyard are close to schools, kindergartens and hospitals. 

There’s a legal obligation to communicate before any treatments organic or otherwise, are used in the vines. There is a legal distance to respect that varies as a function of the product being used  and an obligation not to spray in school hours. Since spring 2021 the BVE 33 App (“Bien vivre ensemble”, or “Living well together”) tells neighbours and walkers when spraying has been carried out or is in progress. 

Heritage 

Many chateaux are known for their architectural beauty, it’s part of the region’s heritage, a heritage that needs protecting. Locals might be proud of this heritage, but  large vineyards can seem cut off from the villages and people around them. There is a perception that wealth stops at the chateau gate. Despite the fact 56% of wineries in Bordeaux are small family-owned properties, it’s a hard image to shake but it needs to change. The chateaux need the local workforce more that the locals need the châteaux. 

Château Paloumey works with the local district council to open their world to primary school pupils. The chateau cultivates a plot specifically so the children can come and experience viticulture, to increase understanding and respect for the role viticulture in the community and who knows, inspire future vocations.

Eat and drink local

Not all communication is negative or warns people away. The #Bordeauxlocal movement, launched in 2020, brings actors together to raise a positive profile of the region as a whole and the wine sector in particular. It’s a collective endeavour to encourage and promote local consumption. 

Chateau Luchey Halde is in a unique situation to communicate and work simultaneously on two of these fronts: education and neighbour relations.

The château is part of the National School of Agricultural ngineering of Bordeaux Science Agro BSA and unique in that it is in an urban setting, saved from the urban sprawl across the northern Graves in the 1970s as it was military training centre and was never built upon. Working with local Town hall they are creating a market garden on land made available by both the property and municipality. Produce will be used by canteens in local nurseries and schools. It’s an economically profitable and environmental responsible model of urban agriculture and also gives BSA students a living laboratory to study agroecological solutions for minimum environmental impact. 

Perfect partners 

Negociant Maison Johanès Boubée is working with two local companies, Raisinor distillery and transporter Veynat in a transport innovation. They are fuelling tanker trucks with bioethanol from grape pomace, these trucks collect bulk wine from vineyards and deliver it to their bottling plant.

Château de la Dauphine in Fronsac is one of the first CSR Bordeaux cohort. They  consider the process gave them a new insight. ‘’We have made a lot of progress over the past eight years on the environment, safety, well-being at work, etc. We were undoubtedly missing a building block: greater involvement for our partners. Many of them are already well on the way, but we didn’t always know about it or we didn’t talk about it. Now we will move forward together and continue to make progress.” 

High tech traceability 

They are also in partnership with Carrefour Group, Caves de Rauzan and Terre de Vignerons, to create a blockchain for a Carrefour Organic wine. Through a QR code on the bottle, the consumer can access information on the winegrowers who grew the grapes and the cooperative cellars that made the wine. An initiative that both communicates with the consumer and empowers their partners through the supply chain. 

Fair Trade

‘Organic is great, but organic and fair is better’ is the Vin Bio Equitable philosophy. Covering quality, environmental, social and economic sustainability, the Charter was created by INTERBIO Nouvelle-Aquitaine, a regional interprofessional organic association. It includes wine makers, cooperatives, merchants and the chamber of agriculture. The consumer is guaranteed  organic wine from an environmentally certified vineyard, the wine is tested for residual levels of pesticides and blind tasted for quality. It also has a social guarantee, that of protected workers, transparent communication and ensuring a sufficient return for the winemaker on the product. All identified by their logo. 

Bigger than Bordeaux 

In 2010 Les Vignerons Engagés created the first French sustainability and CSR certification for the French wine industry. It is similar to Bordeaux Cultivons Demain in that it is based on the ISO 26000 standard, but it is exclusive to Wine Cooperatives and covers the whole of France. 

The Association includes 6000 winegrowers and employees covering 31,800ha across eight wine-growing regions, they estimate they sell one bottle every five seconds. The certification is audited and assessed by AFNOR. In Bordeaux Les Caves de Rauzan are members. 

B Corp: People, plants and profit 

Of all the global initiatives in CSR, the most highly regarded is B Corp. Certified B Corporations are leaders in the global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy. 

The Certification guarantees that a business is meeting high and verified standards of performance, accountability and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and inputs. 

B Lab measures the company’s entire social and environmental performance, and the results are publicly visible on B Lab’s website.  

Companies are required to undergo the verification process every three years, aiming towards continuous improvement. 45 wine companies are B Corp certified worldwide. As far as I’m aware no Bordeaux vineyard is yet, but please contact me if you know otherwise. The closest I’ve found is Aquitaine based low-no aperitif company La Société des Vieux Copains, with their  Folle Envie and Archibald Brand. They were B-corp certified in 2019. 

1% for the planet 

This is a different approach, it challenges companies to donate 1% of their turnover (not profit) to environmental philanthropy. According to their website only 7% of corporate philanthropy goes to the environment. 1000 French companies currently participate in the initiative, including a few wine companies.

In Bordeaux, Pierre Jean Larraqué vineyards is signed up. They own and run three Bordeaux vineyards but also source wine across 57 appellations of the region for export.  Domaine Bonabaud in Blaye, also HVE 3, donates as does ethical wine merchant Ethic Drinks who source wines across France to blend and bottle in Bordeaux. 

Not exactly wine, but related, is cosmetic company Caudalie who also contribute. Their products are based on wine extracts and saw the light of day in Bordeaux at Château Smith Haut Lafitte, a pioneer of bio-precision viticulture.

HISA, the Bordeaux environmental NGO, mentioned in several posts for their collaboration with Bordeaux vineyards, are one of the recipients that 1% contributors can choose to receive their donations. Their projects include  Château Lestrille, Vignobles Fayat and Château Clinet.  

The potential for innovation in CSR is as exciting as it is diverse and challenging. Embarking on this adventure is an opportunity to examine ethical values, to discover how they can pursue economic performance but not at the expense of their social, societal or environmental impact. How can they move towards a durable and more responsible corporate model?  How can they offer great wine, promote responsible consumption (more of which in a future post), preserve and develop the heritage of Bordeaux wine whilst looking after their workforce? Bordeaux is rising to the challenge.

In the next post I’ll look at how sustainability is at the heart of some of the latest wine cellars in Bordeaux.  Please sign up here to receive future blog posts delivered directly to your inbox. 

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