Sustainable development: Erosion case study on Palliser Estate

Palliser Estate Wines managing director Richard Riddiford has a motto: "The single biggest market driver is your passport to trade."

With sustainable development increasingly becoming a worldwide catchcry, Riddiford's motto is pertinent to all New Zealand industries. His Martinborough-based vineyard and winery produces and exports ultra premium wines to 18 countries. Turnover: $4 million.

Riddiford believes there cannot be quality wine without a quality environment - loamy free-draining soil and sun-baked hills are an integral part of the mix.

"We simply realise that the environment is our most important asset, everything we do must aim to protect that asset," says Riddiford.

"If we tamper with the soil or alter the climate we don't have a business."

Along with seven other New Zealand vineyards, Palliser Estate has developed a group Environmental Management System (Living Wines) to monitor environmental impacts. Their work includes:

* Recording and controlling winery wastes to determine environmental effects and reduce impacts through annually reviewed targets.

* Ensuring packaging materials are recyclable or bio-degradable.

* Promoting environmentally sustainable methods of pest, disease and weed control.

* Complying with ISO 14001 by setting and annually reviewing policy statements, performance objectives and targets by senior management.

The company is also an active player in the NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development's Zero Waste Project.

British supermarket chain Tesco has warned Australasian winemakers that they must be able to demonstrate to consumers that the wines they are buying do not harm the environment in which they have been produced.

Tesco has raised issues such as: Salination of waterways - a big problem; green grass; water becoming a scare resource - as is happening in some major New Zealand grape-growing areas; and lack of regard for national flora and fauna.

Living Wines has initiated two specific measures. Rather than spraying insects, the group is encouraging native fantails to control the fruit flies around vines and buildings. It is also planting manuka to attract native parasitic wasps, which help control caterpillars on the vines.

About $267.5 million will be spent by the Department of Conservation this year on the protection and preservation of native species. A small army of paid and unpaid conservationists also wage daily war on the predators and alien invaders that threaten biodiversity.

But the department would dearly love more money, conservation organisations struggle with funding and the sheer scale of the problem. There will always be a question mark over just how much city-dwelling New Zealanders are prepared to pay to preserve their natural heritage.

But the department can do only so much.

Says Riddiford: " The global market today demands that products traded internationally are produced in a sustainable manner.

"We can never be complacent but above all we are entirely weather dependent and cannot risk the possibility of altering our soils."

Riddiford takes the view that if winegrowers adopt environment policies, belong to Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand and adopt a zero waste policy they will be able to protect premium prices for quality wines.

He believes New Zealand's status as an environmental oasis is under threat if we continue with many of our practices - as industries and as a country.

"The reality is that in a country of almost 4 million people, with the same land area as the UK, we have attained our image by default.

"If we had almost 60 million people [the same as in the UK] in New Zealand and continued with our environmental practices, then the riches of a clean, green land would disappear very rapidly."

* Palliser Estate Wines biodiversity study was published in the 2002 Business & Biodiversity Handbook for Corporate Action.