Sustainability

Vineyard Management

We manage our Vineyards sustainability to ensure the long term health of our precious vines, including the quality of soils they grow in, and the nutrients and water made available to them.

Some of the key management initiatives we employ to do this are as follows:

• Regular Sustainability Meetings to formulate, implement and review our vineyard management strategies as a team.
• Regular soil and petiole analysis to determine soil & vine health, and check for any nutrient deficiencies.
• Additions of soil nutrients and fertilizers as required, with an emphasis on increasing organic inputs wherever possible. (eg; seaweed extracts, organic manures, composts and mulch).
• Increasing the amount of cover crops planted between the vineyard rows each autumn (and thereby reducing cultivation). These cover crops provide a multitude of potential benefits, including increasing nitrogen and organic carbon levels in the soil, increasing the amount of beneficial microorganisms at the roots, improving soil structure, improving soil water retention, minimizing soil compaction and erosion, and attracting beneficial native insects.
• Use of undervine cut-off ploughing to remove grasses and weeds, to reduce the amount of herbicides required.
• Composting our grape waste from harvest, for re-use as composted mulch on our vineyards in Spring.

The fact that Tyrrell’s has so many old vines that have been producing quality wine grapes continuously for so long now (36 percent of our vines are more than 50 years old and 11 percent are more than 100 years old) is a good indicator of the sustainability of our vineyard management practices.

Energy

A central pillar of our environmental management program has been efforts to minimize our energy usage by improving efficiency, particularly when it comes to cooling and refrigeration, which is by far the largest consumer of energy in most Australian wineries.

• We run a very economical refrigeration system that maintains cooling-water temperatures of between 6°C and 8°C; many wineries run a refrigerated-brine system that recirculates the cooling liquid at temperatures a few degrees below zero.
• The cooling water is recirculated by four variable-speed-drive pumps, which are far more efficient than normal pumps, providing a 60 percent energy saving.
• We’ve upgraded the air conditioners and air-cooling units in our warehouses and barrel sheds so that they are more efficient, only running when absolutely necessary.
• We’ve spray-coated the main winery roof with heat-reflective paint, which greatly reduces the temperature within the building, thereby significantly reducing the load on our refrigeration plant.
• In mid-2015, we installed a 350kW solar power system to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity. The system now generates about a third of our total electricity consumption, resulting in an average saving of 445 tonnes of CO₂Emissions per year.
• In 2018, we installed low-energy LED lights throughout the winery and other buildings, which reduced the amount of energy we consumed for lighting by 72 percent and total electricity usage by ten percent.
• In order to reduce the energy cost associated with transport of our wine, in September 2009, we started our ‘Bottle Lightweighting Initiative’. We switched all of our high-volume lines, which accounted for about three quarters of our total production at the time, to innovative super-lightweight bottles that were 28% lighter than their predecessors. Since then we have changed the majority of our other wine ranges over to lighter bottle weight alternatives, thereby saving a considerable amount of carbon emissions in the bottle’s manufacture and freight.
• We’ve stopped using cardboard carton dividers in our more commercial wine ranges to minimize the amount of packaging used.

And all of this work is paying off. Since we launched our EMS program in 2009, up to the end of 2023 we had achieved the following energy reduction results:

• A 46 percent reduction in our greenhouse gas emissionsper litre of wine produced, from fuel and electricity usage
• A 62 percent reduction in ourtotalgreenhouse gas emissions (tonnes CO2) from fuel and electricity usage
• A 10% reduction in our Total Energy Cost per Litre of Wine Produced
• An average saving of over 390 tonnes per year of greenhouse gas emissions from energy usage since the installation of our solar power system in 2015

Water

Water is an increasingly precious resource and at Tyrrell’s we treat it as such. Throughout its history, Tyrrell’s has maintained a culture of using dry-grown vineyards wherever possible – about 90 percent of our vines are unirrigated – so our water usage is low and we don’t have to worry about salinisation of the land, which is often a consequence of irrigation.

• We collect all of our winery waste water and then treat and re-use it to irrigate the paddocks around the property.
• We’ve upgraded our wastewater system so that it runs far more efficiently and with significantly less odour produced.
• We regularly analyse the wastewater as well as the soils onto which its sprayed.
• We monitor and record our fresh water usage.