Turning cleaned water into wine
A sustainable water project travelling through Howard Vineyard in the Adelaide Hills is delivering water cleaned by native plantings and wetlands.
Winery owner and winemaker Tom Northcott is making sustainability a natural partner to his wine business, utilising cleaned wastewater to enhance production across his Adelaide Hills property.
Howard Vineyard has been working alongside other landowners and the Mount Barker Council on the Springs to Summit project of the Hills Biodiversity Program, clearing exotic plants along the Mount Barker Creek and making space for native revegetation.
Northcott said, as well as increasing biodiversity, the almost decade-long program was now delivering to landholders cleaned wastewater that would otherwise go unused.
“We just tapped into that cleaned water for the first time this year and it’s a huge improvement in use of [the stormwater flowing down the creek],” he said.
He called it a “very rare win-win situation” where the reuse of the water will enable the winery to increase the volume of wine it can produce as well as water lawns, in turn helping to build its hospitality offerings.
“This increases the revenue that our business generates and means we can hire more staff and continue to grow.
“It’s sustainability with a business aspiration and both are benefitting from that investment.”
Northcott won the Sustainable Leader Award at the InDaily 40 Under 40 Awards last year.
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Implementing sustainable practices, he said, was about making “small, steady improvements over time”, such as reducing any plastics attached to their products.
In this instance, one of the real challenges is the plastic inside the top of the screw caps.
While his team are yet to come up with a solution, they have made an almost imperceptible improvement to the packaging of their biggest seller, sparkling wines.
“There used to be a plastic tear tab on the inside of the foil, and we’ve recently moved that to 100 per cent foil, which is fully recyclable,” he said.
They are also working on increasing the recycled cardboard in their packaging from 60 per cent to wholly recycled, and then ensuring all those boxes are recycled again.
Howard Vineyard is currently working on their Sustainable Winegrowing Australia certification, which is done at the vineyard, winery and packaging levels.
Effectively, it would just formalise what his winery already does, as he has been a member of the national program since 2021; finding time to do the paperwork is holding it at bay.
The last 12 months have been incredibly busy, with the business growing in what Northcott called “a very tricky wine industry and hospitality climate”.
“Having a really good, high quality, but also high value proposition in our business has really supported that growth,” he said.
“I think our wines represent great quality and value [and] both of those are important things for consumers at the moment.”
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Demand is strong: both Semillon Blancs are sold out, while several of their other wines are almost there.
“It’s a really fine balance in making the right amount of wine – trying to have a buffer for a bit of growth, but also you don’t want to carry, particularly, the aromatic, crisp white wines for too long, as they can get a bit old and tired.”
In the past year, the winery invested in plantings of Cabernet Franc and Pinot Gris at their second location at Mount Barker.
They also saw their first, comparatively small harvest of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from blocks affected by the 2019/2020 bushfires.
The fire damage to the Chardonnay plantings in these blocks was consequential – one in eight vines died and had to be replaced, while those that could be salvaged were “cut off at the ankle” and regrown, said Northcott.
Pinot Noir Chardonnay is their most popular wine by volume, made in the traditional French Charmat method, pressure tank fermented on lees.
This year, they also released their Amos Méthode Traditionnelle Blanc De Blancs No. 2, a premium champagne-style sparkling aged on lees and bottle fermented for three years.
The intention is to add another year of cellaring with each vintage until six years is the standard and they have built up a catalogue of museum release wines. The current release is the 2021.
This harvest should result in around 350 dozen bottles and Northcott said they will increase that by another 50-100 dozen each year.
“It’s not a big output, but in that premium category it’s exciting to know we’ve got that sparkling laid down for 2032.”
Howard Vineyard has just been announced as a wine partner, alongside Grant Burge Wines, for the InDaily 40 Under 40 Awards.
The program helps to bring attention to a new, younger generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders in the state.
Nominations for the 2025 awards close on Monday, 17 March.
