On The Estate »SustainabilityThese days, everyone wants to be green. But at Palliser, we’ve never thought that we have a choice. We figured out early on when you’re in the business of wine, you rely on the quality of the land. |
“Having external quality standards to compare ourselves to is hugely beneficial. ISO, CEMARS, they all give us a benchmark from which to do better.” Pip Goodwin, Associate Winemaker & Environmental Officer » Pips Bio» Pips Blog posts |
It’s simple. Palliser Estate is about producing wines of the highest quality through environmentally sustainable practices. We don’t make a song and dance about it. We want to be a leader in sustainability because it makes sense for the land, for our people and for our business.
“Sustainability is a journey. It’s not like you wake up one day and go ‘hey, we’re sustainable now!’ and you can stop working on any initiatives. We need to keep finding new ways of making our environment better.”
Pip, Associate Winemaker
Since 2000 we have a produced a triple bottom line report. This examines our results and new initiatives in three key areas of sustainability – environmental, social and economic.
Since 2008, this report has evolved into something we’ve called the ‘Journey to Sustainability’. Maybe it seems like just a superficial name change, but to us it’s made it more realistic. It’s a reflection of our realisation that sustainability is not something that you work towards, it’s something that you work on.
If you really care about sustainability, we feel you need to be constantly on the lookout for new tools and technologies, and new ways of making our land, community and finances more sustainable in the long term. So the Journey to Sustainability reports not on an imaginary ‘end game’ but on our progress.
We have a comprehensive environmental sustainability policy that sets out our objectives. Each year we develop an environmental plan outlining the specific targets and projects we will undertake to help achieve these objectives and we are upfront about what we’ve accomplished in our sustainability reports.
At Palliser, we want to create value from our business for our stakeholders. They’re not just our investors and employees, but members of our local community.
So we employ 23 permanent staff from the community. We have an ongoing relationship with Martinborough School, creating as well as being the primary sponsor of their Computer Trust. We have made donations to many local charities including the Te Omanga Hospice, Martinborough Health Centre, Martinborough Squash club, Peter Blake Leadership Awards, Relay for Life, Outward Bound Trust, Catwalk Trust, Wairarapa Bush Rugby, World Indoor diving championships, Wairarapa regional swimming championships, Property Brokers charity golf tournament, WWF Earth-hour launch event 2010 and NZBook month.
All types of sustainability are interconnected, but at Palliser we know that all sustainability culminates in the numbers.
If you don’t invest in the environment, you won’t have a quality product. If you don’t have a quality product no one’s going to buy it. In an industry that is seasonal-dependant and capital and labour intensive, Palliser has run at a profit since 1991. For us, that speaks for itself.
