19th Annual RAS President’s Medal
Royal Agricultural Society of NSW’s 19th Annual Presidents Medal Winners
Brokenwood Wines has been named the winner of the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW’s prestigious President’s Medal, recognising excellence not only in product quality but across all aspects of business performance. Selected from six national finalists, Brokenwood was praised for its leadership in sustainability, innovation, resilience, governance, and community impact.
Sustainability is more than a buzzword at Brokenwood – to them it is about looking after people and communities, protecting the land that the wines come from and running a business that can stay strong for the long haul…
Kate Lorimer-Ward
2026 RAS Presidents Medal Judge
Climate Change
It has long been recognised that climate change represents the biggest risk to the global wine sector. We must act now in a co-ordinated and unified way to put adaption & mitigation strategies in place to reduce the emissions that cause climate change across the entire wine production and supply chain.
Brokenwood Wines has committed to adopting the Australian Grape & Wine sector’s, Emissions Reduction Roadmap which highlights the opportunities we can collectively take to decarbonise and drive action. We’ve been reporting our scopes 1 & 2 emissions, but more recently have been investigating our scope 3 emissions to establish our whole-of-business carbon footprint.
It focuses on reducing emissions within our areas of control by 2030, where there is realistic opportunity for the sector to reduce its emissions by over a third (42 per cent) by targeting emissions generated in the vineyard, in the winery and throughout the supply chain.
The sector’s journey to net zero by 2050 will require collaboration and partnerships across our sector and other industries, integrating emerging technologies and greater emissions reduction performance from high-emitting supplier industries. This includes glass manufacturing and transport sectors & as a last resort may require offsets to achieve net zero by 2050.
The Australian wine sector’s Sustainable Winegrowing Australia allows producers to track their progress in adoption of sustainable practices & enables emissions data to be captured. Brokenwood Wines has been a certified member of Sustainable Winegrowing Australia since 2021.
Sustainable Winegrowing Australia (SWA)
Brokenwood Wines is a certified member of Sustainable Winegrowing Australia (SWA). We have made significant improvements in energy efficiency, waste management & recycling as well as in our Vineyard Management practices. We are also embarking on improving our Waste Water Treatment in order to obtain water of irrigation quality to re-use on our Vineyards. Currently, all of our owned and managed Hunter Valley Vineyards are SWA certified, with a view to increase this moving forward.
Our vineyards sustainably certified under SWA are;
Graveyard, Oakey Creek, Tallawanta, Mistress Block, Verona
Biodiversity
Our Graveyard Vineyard is one of four demonstration sites selected to be part of the National Ecovineyards Program in the Hunter Valley region with a Biodiversity Action Plan enhancing soil health and planting native insectary corridors to increase functional biodiversity in the Vineyard. We have planted some native insectary corridors & mid row cover crops to try and enhance biodiversity & promote resilience in the Vineyard & reduce our chemical usage.
Native plantings include;
Bursaria Spinosa, Wallaby Grass, Hakea, Acacia, Prickly Tea-tree
Recyclable Packaging
Brokenwood Wines is a signatory to the Australian Packaging Covenant & is committed to achieving the 2025 National Packaging Targets, which provide a framework for collective, national action on waste management, recycling and resource recovery for our product packaging. They are:
– 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging.
– 70% of plastic packaging being recycled or composted.
– 50% of average recycled content included in packaging.
– The phase out of problematic and unnecessary single-use plastics packaging.
APCO Annual Report & Action Plan’s;
Cooking with Sustainability in Mind
Under Lorrae’s expert guidance, sustainability at our Cellar Door extends beyond wine production and into the kitchen.
At The Wood Restaurant, our menus are thoughtfully designed to showcase fresh, locally sourced produce, supporting regional suppliers while reducing packaging waste wherever possible. Our functions menu follows the same philosophy, carefully planned to meet customer needs while minimising food waste.
We are also mindful of our environmental footprint in the kitchen. The majority of our organic food waste is processed through our on-site worm farm, with the resulting vermicast returned to our kitchen gardens to nourish the herbs and edible flowers we use in our dishes.
Energy Efficiency
We’ve done a lot of work around improving our energy efficiency onsite by upgrading our refrigeration plant and supplementing our onsite energy usage with a 99kW Solar PV array, this has reduced our energy usage by 23%.
Installation of LED Lighting across the entire site is estimated to produce savings of up to 70% of our entire lighting bill. The install was completed in December 2019.
Strive 4 Sustainability Scorecard
With more and more travellers searching for responsible tourism options, we decided it was important to show you how we are striving for tourism sustainability.
Thanks to support from Destination NSW, we took Ecotourism Australia’s Strive 4 Sustainability Scorecard for a snapshot of where we are up to on our sustainability journey by assessing our practices across the four pillars of sustainability: sustainable management, environmental impacts, cultural impacts, and socio-economic impacts.
The criteria are based on Ecotourism Australia’s globally recognised, best practice criteria for sustainability in tourism. Scorecard responses are assessed by a trained sustainability assessor within the Ecotourism Australia team before a personalised score is provided. The score is based on the information provided, and evidence or examples of how a business applies sustainability principles in practice helps raise the overall score.
Brokenwood’s Laboratory & Sustainability Lead
Lorrae St Vincent
When it comes to Brokenwood’s mission towards sustainable winegrowing, Lorrae is our go-to girl. An irreplaceable asset to the Brokenwood team, Lorrae is responsible for ensuring that we implement sustainable practices across all areas of our winery.
‘I look after chemical analysis, quality control, label integrity, waste management, water usage, kitchen sustainability, land and soil management practices,’ Lorrae lists. ‘I coordinate sustainability on-site in all departments. It’s a big job, but so rewarding.’
Any questions or enquiries in regard to sustainability, feel free to contact her.
