We are delighted to announce that Domaine Sainte Rose has been awarded the status of Haute Valeur Environnementale (HVE), which is the highest level of environmental certification for agricultural businesses. This is a voluntary scheme implemented by wine estates or farmers, which aims to identify and promote practices that are particularly respectful to the environment. Sainte Rose joins only 1500 agricultural businesses in the entirety of France who have achieved this status.
The HVE certification is based on four key themes, which aim to minimize the pressure of agricultural practices on the environment (air, climate, water, soil, biodiversity, landscapes). The key areas are as follows:-
- the preservation of biodiversity (insects, trees, hedges, grass verges, flowers, …);
- the safe storage of vineyard products and implementation of a more organic spray programme;
- the management of fertiliser use;
- the management of water resources.
The vineyard team at Sainte Rose have been working towards this certification throughout 2019, so from the 2019 vintage onwards, you will begin to see the HVE logo included on our back label. The presence of the logo on our wines aims to indicate to our valued customers the effort we have made to engage in this system and to protect the environment.
At Sainte Rose, most of our standard practices were already compliant with the HVE requirements, but we are phasing out the use of all herbicide sprays and have improved our vineyard product storage facilities in line with their requirements. In addition to this we have recently planted 80 olive trees on what had been a vacant piece of land, with a view of increasing the biodiversity at the Domaine.
