Discover · Discern · Drink Environmentally

Think beyond the bottle.

Wine is agriculture, and how the grapes are farmed matters more than the picture on the label — or the size of the estate. Consumer choice is the fastest way to change it.

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Drink Responsibly · Drink Quality

Two books · The Sustainable Vine

Why this site exists

Wine is agriculture, and agriculture can change.

Of all human activity, modern agriculture is the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas production, to deforestation and to water consumption. Viticulture is among the oldest of those practices, and just as culpable.

It is also well placed to reverse course. This site exists to show how consumer choice can drive the wine industry to conserve and restore the earth's natural systems — by telling you what the labels mean, and which producers have earned them.

What sustainable actually means

A grower's soil-stained hands cupping a bunch of dark grapes — Among the oldest agriculture in Western history

Now available

Vines and Values

A Consumer's Guide to Sustainable Wine — Savoring Wines You Need to Know

The first consumer guide to what the green words on a wine label actually mean — and a list of the bottles that have earned them.

About the book

Where to buy · Archway Publishing · Hardcover, paperback and eBook

Sustainable wine

What the labels on a bottle mean.

Organic, regenerative organic, biodynamic, natural, certified sustainable. They are not interchangeable, and they are not checked in the same way. Here is the one-line version of each.

Read the full guide

Wine-WATCH

A sustainability rating for wineries, not for taste.

Wine-WATCH, introduced in Vines and Values, scores a winery out of fifty on how it makes, farms, ships, proves and treats people — a rating to read beside a critic's score, one for what is in the glass and one for how it got there.

Winemaking
Agriculture
Transportation
Certification
Humanity

How the rating works, in the book

Our favorites

Sustainable wines to look for.

Wines Sandra recommends, some from the pages of her book and more besides. Find one by grape, style or country, and see how each producer farms.

A bunch of ripe red wine grapes on a wooden board

Red

Big and bold through to light and elegant, grouped by style rather than by region.

See the wines

White

Fresh and crisp through to rich and rounded, across three style groups.

See the wines

A sunlit bunch of pink and gold grapes on the vine

All the rest

Rosé, sparkling, orange and fortified — everything the first two do not cover.

See the wines

A wall of bottles in a wine shop, two shoppers choosing from it

Under $20

A price cross-section of the whole list, because drinking well should not be a luxury.

See the wines

Who we are

It started with an epiphany in Burgundy.

Sandra Taylor was a young US diplomat in Switzerland when she first went looking at wineries in Burgundy. Thirty years later she has written two books on sustainable wine and writes The Sustainable Vine, a newsletter on wines grown with respect for the planet.

Before the wine: global corporate responsibility at Starbucks across the coffee and cocoa supply chains, and public affairs at Eastman Kodak. Since: the French Wine Scholar course, a Wine MBA from Bordeaux, a seat judging the Green Medal, and a column at Wine Review Online.

About us and the practice