Drinking Sustainably with NOTWASTED
We sat down with Elliot the founder of NOTWASTED, a wine delivery service with a difference. Instead of simply just selling wines, NOTWASTED is dedicated to informing it’s community about the world of natural wines and highlighting the interesting stories of other forward-thinking creatives.
Interview by Sasha Wardrop
Hey Elliot, thanks so much for chatting with me! So why did you start NOTWASTED?
So, I actually worked in a completely different industry and I just became really passionate about natural wines and wanted to explore it further.
What I really loved about the industry was the happiness and energy it brought to the table and the community of small-scale wine makers. These makers are going against the grain of where the industry is going on a conventional scale – to bigger and more mass-production wineries. Instead, a lot of these winemakers are making wine in their back shed, often not even growing the grapes themselves and really focusing on their craft and impact of the place on the wine rather than achieving a certain profile. So, it’s really exciting to be able to support them on their small business journey.
I also noticed that no one was kick-starting the conversation about sustainability as a reason to consume natural wines. It was more because natural wines tasted better or because it is better for your health. No one was focused on the impact of the farming and the positivity natural wine making can bring to influencing new farming practices.
That’s such a good point, we as consumers are increasingly focused on sustainability in all aspects of our consumption but wine/alcohol is a relatively unexplored area. Could you explain why sustainability is important when it comes to wine making?
What is really important when talking about sustainability is the agricultural side of wine making because right now biodiversity is one of our generation’s biggest challenges. In conventional farming, not only is there a whole range of pollutants that runoff from soils into our waterways due to farming fertilisers, pesticides, and fungicides, there is also soil exhaustion. Soil that has had the same crop planted year on year on year and hasn’t had the chance to re-generate with the nutrients that occur with natural biodiversity in a field. In terms of soil health, this becomes a real issue because if we are overworking our land in 50-60 years there will be very little land to work with and we will end up clearing more forests to make way for more farming land, it’s a never-ending cycle.
Taking this one step further, vineyards are the world’s biggest monoculture. We see areas full of vineyards, where the land is just homogenous rows of one species, which is the opposite of what biodiversity promotes and how we should be farming.
So, being such a huge product that people consume each year, it’s a responsibility that we should take more seriously. If we are willing to farm this monoculture there needs to be elements of supporting biodiversity through that.
So, how do your wine makers create wine more sustainably?
The winemakers we work with create their products with minimal intervention in mind. They place an important focus on rejuvenating soil for soil health to ensure longevity of the land. In order to promote biodiversity, they encourage other plants, weeds, and life to live amongst the vines. All of these things are really important to promote, not just in viticulture but across a whole bunch of farming.
So that’s why we are super excited and advocates of that side of natural wines. We want all the wine markers we work with to have that emphasis on regenerative and sustainable farming practices.
That’s so interesting I never really thought about it like that. Typically, when you hear the sentence natural wines, your brain goes straight to the idea of organic wine.
Yeah exactly and there is actually a lot of challenges when it comes to organic wine because it’s such a buzzword, but it doesn’t necessarily interpret to sustainable. For example, you can have a farmer that produces the fruit organically, but the actual health of the farm and the longevity of the soil may not be great because organic farming is not enough. In some cases, you’ve actually got conventional farmers that use pesticides or fungicides once every four years that have healthier ecosystems than organic farms.
So, aside from promoting sustainable winemaking, what environmentally conscious practices do you imbed into NOTWASTED?
Practically speaking we are doing things like offsetting emissions for the kilometers all our wines travel, our home/office/wine storage in Sydney is all solar-powered and for Sydney customers, we collect and re-use our delivery boxes. All the savings on reusing these boxes are donated to WWF foundation.
Beyond that, we’re constantly looking for ways to become more involved and advocate for integrated farming systems in wine and beyond, as well as trying to do more ourselves to be activists in the climate and biodiversity issues our generation are facing.
