If you’re like me and most humans, you probably like to sip or cook with wine every so often – ok frequently ???? BUT have you ever considered what happens after you finish the bottle? Your wine has the potential to do much more than you think.
Meet Proud Pour. I first met Brian and his team at Edible’s Food Loves Tech event this past November. Amongst many very cool vendors, Proud Pour was one of the businesses I found most interesting. They are all about the triple bottom line, meaning their business and products focus around people, planet, and profit – an admirable operational model especially because it is so focused on two very important elements of our ecosystem: oysters and bees (and grapes, of course)!
When you buy a bottle of Proud Pour Pinot Noir, every bottle replants bee habitat and wildflowers on local farms, which benefits both native bees and honeybees, the local ecosystem, and farmers. Similarly, when you purchase a bottle of their Sauvignon Blanc, every bottle restores 100 oysters back to the wild!
So why are oysters and bees the focal point of the business? Oysters and bees are super important for our ecosystem for a variety of reasons:
- The New York Harbor has lost over 99% of its wild oyster reefs, which are the foundation of the ecosystem. Most estuaries in the U.S. have lost 90%+ of their wild oyster reefs. This is bad news, because just one live oyster is capable of filtering 50 gallons of water in one day! The filter feeding behavior of oysters can buffer against environmental degradation caused by human induced activities, but disruption of the filter feeding by oysters can lead to a decrease in the elimination of organic matter, which could increase mortality for other estuary animals such as fish. Plus, Oyster reefs can play a crucial role in carbon sequestration because CO2 is one of the ingredients that shellfish extract from the ocean to manufacture their shells!
- Bees provide us with invaluable pollinating services they provide us with helped produce over $19 billion worth of agricultural crops in the U.S. alone; that’s estimated to be one-third of everything we eat! The honeybee is an important domesticated species from Europe – but also critical to our 3,600 species of bees that are native to North America. Our native bees don’t make honey, often live along (no hives or queens!), and usually burrow in the ground to make their nests. They pollinate our ecosystems and are critical for pollinating New World crops, like squash, watermelon, and blueberries. And like the honeybee, they’re in serious trouble. The restoration efforts Proud Pour supports helps farmers have a healthier pollinator population.
-
- Oyster shells adorn the wine bottle
-
- Organic, sustainable, and vegan wine oh my!
- The Mendocino County (CA) Sauvignon Blanc restores 100 wild oysters per bottle. These wild oyster reef ecosystems are critical – they’re a habitat like coral reefs, they filter water (30 gallons of water per oyster per day), and they help prevent erosion from storms.
- The Oregon Pinot Noir restores 875 wildflowers per bottle around local farms, which makes 90 sq ft of bee habitat.
- Read more about the wine profiles
- Wherever you buy their wine, they support local work. Their Projects page always features the latest news.
- To date Proud Pour has restored almost 7 million oysters and over 800,000 sq ft of bee habitat!
- Great news for the beer drinkers: up next is a Pilsner for sea turtle rehabilitation! And as Brian told me, then lots more fun stuff to come, which I can not WAIT to see!
Found in
foodandwine, organic, sustainable, wine