Editor’s note: Here at The Local Rag we aim to be as transparent as possible when covering all of the amazing things to see and do around regional Australia. For this story, the author travelled to Mildura on invitation from Duxton Vineyards to find out more about its Rewild range.
I’d never been to Mildura before, despite it always being on my list of places to get to. You can get to Mildura one of two ways, you can hit the road and take on the six-hour journey along the Calder Highway, or you can jump on a plane directly from Melbourne Airport and you’ll be there in under two hours. I say plane, but it’s more a bus with wings.
Flying in over Mildura is an unusual sight. I think I expected nothing but dessert with the mighty Murray River winding through it. What I saw instead were green fields that stretched out around the regional city. The green, of course, was fields, and fields of grape vines.
I was in Mildura to find out more about Duxton Vineyard’s Rewild range of wine—it’s available exclusively at Dan Murphy’s, and BWS—and who knows, maybe sample some along the way. The team showed us their vast vineyards in region, we jumped on a harvester for a moonlight harvest, and saw how the whole process comes together at Duxton’s enormous Buronga Winery.
Check out the Rewild range at Dan Murphy’s here.
The thing that stood out most to me was the team’s commitment to sustainability. Creating the best wine possible while leaving as little impact on the area as possible. Everyone in the team works towards this low-impact way of doing business—and they recognise that while it’s not cheap to do business this way, it’s the right thing to do—but the person behind most of the initiatives is Duxton Vineyards’ Environment Manager, Dylan Klingbiel.
More and more, customers are reaching for sustainable options, whether that’s at the supermarket or bottle shop, and Rewild is a creation born out of that change in buying habit.
I caught up with Dylan to chat through the initiatives that make the Rewild wine one of the most sustainable wine options in Australia.
One of your vineyards is completely off-grid, are there plans to make this happen at all of your vineyards?
That one in particular is driven by the distance from the electricity grid as well. Financially, it wouldn’t really be viable to connect it to the grid, so we had to find other solutions.
In an ideal world, yes, we’d love to have them all off-grid or at least supplied by renewable energy, and that’s where we’re headed. To take it off-grid, you’d have to employ some form of energy storage. And that’s still, from a financial point of view, sometimes quite difficult to get across the line. From our perspective, we’re really trying to source locally and responsibly. We could go out and buy cheap batteries out of China, but we don’t really know what that supply chain looks like.
The site that we took off-grid, we purchased Australian-made and owned batteries, which are quite a lot more expensive than anything from the international market, but we felt it was the right thing to do.
When linking it back to our renewable journey, I think we’re more likely to install solar and then source via a power purchase agreement or through a retailer, and then they certify when it comes from a renewable source. It might be a wind farm or a solar farm elsewhere, but we purchase that power through a retailer from those sites. There’s definitely an opportunity that we need to chase on-site, but as you know, with solar, that only covers daytime hours and we’ll still have that nighttime load that we’ll need to cover.
Energy costs are going up as everyone knows at the moment. This could drive uptake from a business perspective into the renewable space because making those business cases for solar and batteries more attractive. The return on investment is starting to look a lot more attractive.
Water conservation is key in your area, can you explain some of the initiatives you use?
As you saw on the ground (I visited Duxton’s vineyard in Wentworth), that site there is a great example of a site that has probably had really good management techniques employed over a long period of time. And we’ve validated that through some soil sampling. The dark-coloured material cover, that’s the spreading of the grape marc that’s been reprocessed and composted and then spread back into the vineyard. It’s a very good example of the circular economy or circular use of a byproduct of wine. We’ve potentially spread anywhere from 600 to 1,000 tons of grape marc compost every year for five years on that site.
In terms of improving soils, it’s always been seeded with a cover crop. The cover crop then leads to minimal tillage. You manage out competing weeds by planting a favourable species. Some really obvious benefits there are that your soil structure stays well intact and you’ve got an increased organic load or soil carbon in that soil by maintaining a good solid soil structure and not tilling it and releasing that carbon to the atmosphere.
That particular site showed some really significant soil carbon levels in comparison to some of our other farms that probably haven’t employed the techniques to the scale and volume in terms of spreading rates, and the consistency with cover crops. The data that we’ve found really validated that. Those management methods will result in increased soil carbon and will result in water savings because the water-holding capacity of the soil will be so much better with that increased effort.
Your water mostly comes from the Darling River, how do you minimise impact there?
The fish screen really has become the primary filter almost as such it’s keeping the material from the river system in the river. In historical traditional agriculture, we would have a filter set that sits in the middle of the farm that gets dirty quite quickly and you’re constantly cleaning it, sort of back flushing it with water and then that water is basically a waste. We’ve significantly reduced that backflushing requirement because we’re doing that back at the river and keeping that water in the river. We’re looking at how else can we roll it out further onto other sites.
What kind of creatures can you find in the Darling River?
From a native point of view that there are a number of species in that system. As the river systems progressed with the latest flood event we’ve seen a massive increase of non-natives like carp. Everything we can do to try and protect the natives is very critical. And some of those being, your Murray Cods, yellow bellies, and even some smaller, lesser-known fish like gudgeons and that sort of thing. And then also shrimp and yabbies and other species that stay in that river system. I think it’s really important that we do everything we can. As an extractor of that natural resource to keep them there and support those populations. Because they’ve got a battle themselves in the competition with the booming carp populations.
What are you doing to support biodiversity in the area?
I think the fish screens link to that, that’s just another piece of the overall broader biodiversity. Some of our sites are quite large, we’re talking thousands of hectares, and a lot of that is native vegetation. We are quite keen and bullish on protecting that and then also enhancing it. Our Euston vineyard, which is approximately 5,000 hectares, has about 2000 hectares of remnant or native vegetation. And we’ve added to that while planting area that was previously cleared for a broad acre, um, activity for agriculture in the past.
We’ve gone through and used a combination of native tube stocks that are seeded and grown in a nursery. And then we’ve done some direct drill seeding as well. We’ve rolled that out across 70 hectares, over a three to five-year period. And then it doesn’t really stop there. You can’t just plant and forget, We’ve irrigated the tube stocks to get them established and then you’ve also got to protect them from native and non-native species to allow them to establish.
A lot of that’s been done through fencing. We’ve put in hundreds of kilometres of multi-species fencing to keep them out. We want to control the number of animals like kangaroos, pigs, goats, and wild dogs. In the past, we’ve done some trapping regimes for things like pigs because the populations do tend to get quite outta control.
How do you make your packaging as sustainable as possible?
When we sat down and did our overall sustainability strategy, we wanted to have that sustainability lens over every component of the package. Not only just the glass bottle but the cap, the label and the cardboard. All of the cardboard (that we use) is recycled cardboard and it’s FSC certified which was a big one for us. So that’s the cardboard that the six-pack of a Rewild product sits within, and the labels were sourced from waste sugar cane.
We went a sugar cane option and it was a waste product anyway. The caps themselves are made from recycled aluminium rather than a raw aluminium product. It’s a big conversation around, not only in Australia, but around the world in terms of the carbon intensity of a product like glass. So the lighter and the more recycled content of the glass bottle, the less carbon-intensive it is to manufacture. That was another thing that we really wanted to push the boundary on and work closely with some of our suppliers. We want the lightest option possible (glass) on the market that isn’t gonna compromise quality.
Next steps for us, it’ll be working closely and basically partnering with those key suppliers and saying, “Hey, if you’ve got any solutions that push the boundary. We are open to trying that.” If there is a lighter-weight bottle that comes out, we’ll be throwing our hat in the ring for that. If the team that create the caps can have an increased aluminium recycled content or even an alternate cap type, that’s I guess where we head next. And then also touching on other alternatives to glass. We’re looking closely at pouches. There’s a lot of data internationally that highlights that pouches can be one-fifth in terms of the amount of carbon per product type. They’re the sorts of things that we are actively talking about on a weekly, or daily basis in terms of planning for the future.
This interview has been edited and cut down from its original format.
