Dedicated to Better | Environmental factor
Environmental Factor – When choosing Bosman wines, you are making a sustainable choice. That choice means that you can enjoy great wines that are not only made well but are produced considering our precious natural resources. Now that is something to be proud of.
At Bosman Family Vineyards, we consciously adopt practices that will conserve our resources, reduce waste, facilitate growth and promote regeneration.
START WHERE YOU ARE
Sustainability has long been a watchword at Bosman, but we are constantly trying to find new and better ways to save energy and conserve our environment. We spent a great deal of time last year calculating our carbon footprint so that we have solid baseline information about where we are spending what resources. Now we have the tools to track our performance and can look at ways of saving efficiently.
USE WHAT YOU HAVE
Bosman is situated in Wellington at the lower end of the Bovlei, along the banks of the Kromme River. Instead of pumping water directly out of the river and up the slopes of the Groenberg to irrigate our vineyards, we source water from the upper reaches of our farm to allow gravity to distribute the water through the vineyards. With Wellington being sunny, our cellar roof and the rooves of all our warehouses and offices are covered with solar panels producing 350kW of electricity.
DO WHAT YOU CAN
- A large dam catches our winter rains to use for irrigating our vineyards in the summer.
- Drip irrigation has replaced our evaporation-heavy overhead sprinklers.
- Compost and mulch are made from superfluous vines and cuttings from our vine nursery.
- A reed bed purifies the water effluent from our cellar and is used to irrigate the vineyards.
- We are constantly eradicating alien vegetation: a herd of goats munches any alien brave enough the resprout on our Wellington farm, while our Hermanus farm (www.bosmanhermanus.com) has been awarded WWF championship status for its efforts to encourage the regeneration of fynbos.
- We have stopped the use of harmful chemicals and built a compost tea plant where we brew our own compost to feed our vines.
- In addition, companion planting between the vine rows has created a natural ecosystem in the vineyards where plants, animals and insects work together to produce healthy grapes.
- Instead of using chemical herbicides to control the weeds and cover crops, we have sheep to trim the vegetation between the vine rows.