How Regenerative Agriculture works:

ROC certification embraces a triple bottom line approach to putting people, planet and profit on an equal footing. Regenerative organic farming is a fully organic (no synthetics used) system that rebuilds depleted soil and soil life using diverse cover crops to cover and nourish all of the soil while minimising and eliminating destructive practices such as ploughing, cultivation, weed killing and the use of synthetic chemicals in the vineyard or winery.

 This is achieved is by maximising the percentage of the time and three-dimensional area devoted to growing diverse cover crops within the vineyard. By employing many different species of different shapes and heights, the amount of photosynthesis occurring in our vineyard is multiplied exponentially.

 Plants use about 2/3’s of the carbon-rich sugars they produce from photosynthesis for growth, while the remaining 1/3 is used to “trade” for plant-ready nutrients delivered by carbon-hungry fungi and bacteria in the root zone. These sticky exudates also bind the soil together and help prevent erosion.

 As the micro-organisms defecate and die, much of the carbon stored in their bodies (about 50% of their dry weight) then gets spread throughout the soil profile. Every kilo of carbon added to the soil increases the soils’ ability to hold water by 4-5 litres.

 Then, when the winter/spring cover crops (we grow, beans, peas, clovers, radish, barley, ryecorn, safflower, poppy, alyssum, lupin, vetch, medic, sub-clovers, ryegrass, fescue and more) are terminated using a roller in late spring, they create a thick mat of carbon rich food for the soil microbes to eat over summer while keeping the vineyard cooler and moister than in vineyards that are mowed like golf greens.

 As the root systems of these terminated annual plants die off, they also release nitrogen and carbon as food for soil life as well as leaving behind billions of pathways for air and water infiltration deep into the soil.

 Simply put, regenerative farming uses photosynthesis to create the energy required to encourage more abundant and diverse soil life than other systems in agriculture.

 The Results:

 Although we only started exhaustively testing soil in all of our blocks in 2022, we sequestered as much carbon between 2022 and 2024 as we did over the 19 years prior to 2022. Said another way, we have “sped up” the soil biology by a factor of 9 using energy supplied by the sun which resulted in offsetting about 18 years of all of our Scope 2 emissions (including bottling and distribution) in just the last two years. We can now say Inkwell is carbon negative across our business since its inception in 2003.

 In a region where 6-10 fungicide sprays of sulfur and / or copper per year are the average for organic producers, we have only sprayed our vines four times in total over three seasons with copper only being sprayed twice. Industrial / conventional / sustainable farming systems all permit synthetic sprays in addition to sulfur and copper. In disease prone 2023-24, the vines were so healthy that we didn’t need to spray fungicide at all.

 The Wines

 While obvious in hindsight, we have found that healthier vines and fruit also make better wine. Despite back-to-back-to-back heatwaves and drought during 2025 harvest, the sugar and PH levels in our grapes just ticked along slowly while most grapes around us spiked in sugars and pH.

 One of the biggest reasons that regenerative farming matters to the resulting wine is because excessive sugars lead to high alcohol wines that require dealcoholizing machines and grapes with too high pH require substantial additions of tartaric acid to make the wines stable. These corrections are the norm in winemaking in warm and hot wine growing regions. At Inkwell, we don’t employ any of these approaches.

 To top off all this wonderfulness, regenerative growing yields all or more of the flavor with less alcohol. Our wines rarely top 14% alc/vol and frequently are in the 12’s and 13’s – even reds! At Inkwell, we believe that the grapes should do the talking, not the 60+ approved additions in the winemaker’s cupboard.

 As the years have progressed, we have noticed that our wines keep improving in flavor intensity and structure while being less full bodied than is typical in our region. We believe in wine that compliments and enhances well-prepared food rather than dominating it. And, the folks who really pay attention to all of this are noticing - Halliday’s Wine Companion rated us as a Red Five Star winery for the first time this year (we were Black Five Star prior).