Our approach to addressing climate change has three key pillars. First, we have a long-standing commitment to calculating and offsetting our carbon emissions through our Carbon Neutral program. However, we recognise that offsetting alone won’t solve the climate crisis. That’s why we also focus on reducing our direct emissions and have initiated our own carbon sequestration project to capture and store carbon on Cullen land.

The first step in this journey is to calculate what these emissions are, this is what’s called a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory.

Cullen wines have been calculating it’s GHG inventory for nearly 20 years, beginning in FY2006 with the “Men of the Trees” program associated with Carbon Neutral, a WA based Carbon consultancy. Since then, we have evolved our three scope GHG inventory according with industry standards and now it conforms to ISO 14064-1.

Scope 1 is the direct emissions related to business activities; this is the fuel we burn. An example of this would be diesel burnt in the tractors used in the vineyard.

Scope 2 is the fuel we pay others to burn for us, so called indirect emissions, for Cullen Wines this is only the fossil fuels burnt by the grid electricity providers here in WA.

Scope 3 are the emissions related to both the upstream and downstream value chain associated with our products. Some examples of this is the gas burnt to create the bottles we use (upstream) and also the fuel burnt by a vehicle delivering our bottles to customers throughout the world (downstream).

Over this journey we have purchased and retired Carbon credits equal to our inventory for every financial year.  Carbon credits are permits that allow companies to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by funding projects that reduce or capture an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, such as reforestation or renewable energy initiatives. The majority of these credits have been purchased in the Yarra Yarra diversity corridor with is a revegetation project in the mid-west of Western Australia. More information can be found here. The purchase of these credits was intended to fund the planting of this corridor, enabling carbon sequestration over the coming decades. To address the fact that the carbon benefits would be realised in the future, Cullen Wines also retired an equivalent amount of credits from renewable energy projects overseas.

Beginning in FY23 Cullen Wines underwent the transition to the Climate Active certification system. Climate Active is an Australian Government program that certifies businesses and organisations as carbon neutral that provides a consistent and transparent process for industry. All inventories and offset purchases must be disclosed on their website.

Cullen Wines also understands the fact that we cannot simply offset our way of the climate crisis, it is but one arm of our three-pronged approach to sustainability. The other two being emissions reductions and our own carbon sequestration project.

To see how large this effect was Cullen wines undertook an in-house soil sampling program from 2014 to 2019 looking at our land under vine and what we found was extremely unexpected. We found an average increase in SOC of 1.9% which equates to an average of 3.67 tons of CO2 being sequestered per hectare per year.  This was real amounts of atmospheric CO2 being up taken by the plant leaves and being deposited in the soil via the plants root systems to feed symbiotic microbes. 

Because of this finding we began working with a soil carbon consultancy called ‘Carbon West’ to begin a soil carbon project on our pastoral and viticultural lands. This soil carbon project was established in 2021 and is ratified by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) with on-going information available here: https://cer.gov.au/schemes/australian-carbon-credit-unit-scheme/accu-project-and-contract-register/project/ERF165682. Through this project we will sow mid-autumn and late spring multi-species cover crops of up to 12 different species. There is also a commitment to obtain native seeds as they become available and/or practicable. These cover crops are then crimped and left to decompose, providing a thick mulch layer that improves soil health and water use efficiency. Through the registration of this ERF project, any increase in SOC will become a publicly tradable Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). Cullen Wines hopes to have its first round of ACCUs generated by 2027, and in the interim real work is being done in the vineyard and significant Carbon has already been sequestered.

See the video below for Andy, Cullen Wines Production Manger, speaking about the lightweight bottle initiative.