Swedish wine buffs are snapping up bottles of Eighty Acres, a carbon-neutral range from Clare Valley winery Taylors Wines.
Taylors was the first wine company in the world to develop a carbon-neutral range, and Swedish consumers, who are traditionally very interested in products with a conscience, are embracing the offering with the most enthusiasm, figures show.
Systembolaget, the government-owned chain of liquor stores and the only store allowed to sell alcoholic beverages that contain more than 3.5 per cent alcohol, has stocked the range since Easter.
Three and a half years ago, Eighty Acres received a limited listing for its chardonnay in Sweden and 1000 cases sold out within eight weeks.
Taylors Wines export manager and master of wines Neil Hadley says that on the back of this success, the wine maker sought a permanent listing. When Systembolaget released a tender specifically seeking carbon-neutral wine from Australia, Taylors made its move and four of its wines were listed for sale in Sweden.
“Since Easter they’ve been selling at a rate of knots, especially our red which has been a real hit with Swedish consumers,” Hadley says. Taylors is sending another shipment this month.
The Eighty Acres label was launched in 2007 with the wines crafted to reflect the growing trend towards lighter, fresh styles of wine, and interesting varietals and blends.
Just a couple of years later, the company decided to create a 100 per cent carbon-neutral line of wine, and Eighty Acres was chosen.
That involved a rigorous process based on the international standard for lifecycle assessment (ISO14044), Hadley says.
“In early 2008, we decided to do the work to measure the carbon footprint of a wine and go through process of mitigating that and neutralising that,” he says.
That involved a thorough audit using international standards of the vineyard – grape vines suck carbon from the air, but carbon is released during wine fermentation – the manufacture of herbicides and pesticides and other material inputs, electricity, glass production, shipping and transport, the retail environment and even its final journey to someone’s home.
Hadley says glass production, rather than the transport of the product, was by far the biggest contributor to carbonemissions.
The next step was to reduce the winery’s footprint, so it moved to lighter-weight bottles, which are a third lighter than the standard bottle. The winery was still left with a residual carbon footprint that it had to neutralise so it looked to voluntary emissions reductions (VERs), also known as carbon credits.
Taylors’ VER investment is in the protection of virgin rainforest in Tasmania, which has been verified and audited by the Australian government.
In 2009, at the end of a two-year journey, Eighty Acres could finally make a carbon-neutral declaration, and it has been doing so now for five years.
According to Hadley, the popularity of Eight Acres in Sweden tallies with research the company commissioned there that found consumers had a 30 per cent increased propensity to purchase a wine that was carbon neutral.
In comparison, Australians have a 20 per cent increased propensity, though consumers here are still embracing the trend. Hadley says Eighty Acres has been well supported by Woolworths.
Now that Taylors has been through the carbon-neutral process with Eighty Acres, it is repeatable across its other labels.
All things come at a cost, however, so Taylors will need to be sure that consumers are prepared to pay for that, Hadley says.
Though it’s not wildly more expensive for Taylors – just 10 to 15 cents more per bottle – it represents a lot of working capital when multiplied across all of its wines, he says.
“We’ve chosen to do the work to figure out how to make this happen and we are using communication, marketing and distribution of our wines to develop a consumer bedrock of interest so once they are ready to move, so can we.”
The subtle approach
Taylors Wines has found that consumers don’t want carbon-neutral proclamations displayed too prominently on their wine bottles.
“We’ve found consumers do want to know, but they don’t want it forced down throats,” Taylors Wines' Neil Hadley says.
“We found that particularly in Australia, people don’t like being told too forcefully – they don’t want to be hit around the head with it.”
For this reason, he says, Eighty Acres displays a subtle icon in green ink on its label, so it’s not the focal point of the branding.
