A new foundation is launched to provide a focus for helpful information. RVF no longer stands exclusively for La Revue du Vin de France in a wine context!
One of the biggest challenges facing the wine industry (indeed, any industry) is to get a collective grip on what sustainability really means. It goes way beyond simply defining the word and, as many are now beginning to realise, real sustainability goes way beyond what any single certification aims to do or can achieve, whether organic, biodynamic, carbon neutral, BCorp, or Fairtrade (or the myriad other certifications out there).
Now is surely the time not just to sustain, but to regenerate. The basic premise of regenerative agriculture is that soil health underpins life itself, and that it is only by beginning with the soil, which has been catastrophically degraded across the globe by anthropogenic pollution, that we can address the damage to the earth’s ecosystems.
Stephen Cronk, an Englishman in Provence, faced that very question when, after 10 years of producing négociant rosés under his Mirabeau label, he finally bought his own vineyards in 2019. Chemically farmed for years, the soils were exhausted, denuded of organic life, and the vines needed to be propped up with artificial fertilisers. Even before the sale was complete, the transition to organic farming began, but he quickly realised that it was going to take much more than simply following organic regulations to bring the soils and the entire property back to life. Organic certification, he said, ‘was just doing less of the bad stuff’. At the same time, Cronk, first and foremost a businessman, recognised that there had to be a way to do this without it crippling the business in any way.
Cronk started searching for help. ‘I couldn’t work out how to learn to farm the way I felt I should be farming.’ He felt an increasing sense of urgency as his research led him to realise that ‘things are getting pretty close to be unable to change; we need to move quickly’. Then somebody sent him an article written by Eric Asimov in the New York Times about regenerative-farming champion, Mimi Casteel.
There were pictures of sheep and ducks and wildlife on the farm, and Cronk thought, ‘I like the look of that because’, he said smiling, ‘it was a vineyard’. So 18 months ago, Cronk, Casteel and Jesper Saxgren (a Danish eco-consultant who specialises in permaculture, sustainable development and environmental management) started talking on Zoom calls. ‘We basically realised that there wasn’t a great resource for wine farmers like me to learn how to become regenerative. So [Saxgren] said, “Let’s create one. Let’s create a resource where people can come and learn from others … can learn how to take those baby steps.” And here we are today.’
The ‘here’ Cronk was referring to was a packed room in 67 Pall Mall, London, where the launch of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation (RVF), ‘a new UK-based charity with global ambitions’, took place on 28 March 2022.
Cronk, in a manner unexpectedly quiet, unassuming and modest for someone who runs a pretty mean brand-marketing machine, proceeded to give a thoughtful, heartfelt and well-considered frame of context for why the RVF had been formed and what they hoped to achieve. I’ve snipped some salient quotes from his inaugural speech below:
‘As you know, we’re at a critical point on this planet, a tipping point, in terms of biodiversity loss, degraded soils and climate change … We, at a species level, ceased to be hunter gatherers 12,000 years ago. We learned how to farm, we learned how to create communities, we learned how to specialise … We started to modify our natural environment through cultivation, irrigation, deforestation … Recently, we’ve become even more ruthless and efficient, at farming in particular. And particularly since the Second World War, we’ve seen the adoption of commercially available pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilisers, enabling us to become even more effective at eliminating competition, diseases, predators and so on.
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