our roots — Climate Positive wine

The roots of any good wine are in the vineyard. When I started making wine in California a decade ago, harvests were still on the kind of schedule they had been on for the previous 30 years. But with each successive year, droughts became more severe, harvests started earlier, and wildfires torched vineyard lands with increasing regularity. I realized that I had the responsibility and the opportunity to do something about it, and that’s why I started Protector Cellars. A winery that would actually be CLIMATE POSITIVE.

CLIMATE POSITIVE means that we go beyond carbon neutral, and actually have a net positive effect on the environment by pulling more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than we put in. So how do we accomplish this ambitious goal?

The obvious place to start on this mission was in the vineyard. Typically, about 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to a bottle of wine are produced in the vineyard. Certified sustainable vineyards go through a rigorous certification process, much of which revolves around environmental stewardship. By reducing electricity, water, pesticides and fossil fuel consumption, vineyards are able to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas output. That’s why all of our grapes come from certified sustainable vineyards.

The next and most notable target is the glass bottle. Roughly 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to a bottle of wine are purely due to the production of the glass bottle 🤯 (that’s the “mind-blown” emoji, for the uninitiated). To make matters worse, glass is super heavy, so transporting it around uses a lot of energy, it’s delicate, so you have to pack it with a bunch of cardboard, and it’s cheap to produce, so even though it can be recycled, it almost never is. By using cans, we reduce the packaging portion of our emissions by over 60%.

Then comes the really fun part. We partner with organizations that plant trees around the world, to capture more carbon dioxide than we produce in the entirety of our operation. In addition to sequestering carbon dioxide, these trees help provide a source of food and income to struggling communities, which has a multiplier effect by making these communities less likely to cut down existing trees for wood and agriculture.