SUSTAINABILITY · TRANSPARENCY
We planted almost 10,000 trees. Here's exactly where they are.
We can tell you exactly where every one of them is, the same way we tell you exactly what's in your glass.
Wines Direct
·
5 min read
We've planted almost 10,000 trees, and we can tell you exactly where every one of them is. That matters to us, because provenance is the whole thing at Wines Direct. We can tell you the family who made every bottle on our shelves, the village it came from, and who put it in the bottle. When we started planting trees, we wanted the same: a name, a place, and proof you can check. So that's what we built.
Who actually plants them
The trees are planted by Eden Reforestation Projects and independently verified by VeriTree, so the numbers on this page are stood over by someone other than us.
Most of them are mangroves, planted along Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, in Kilifi and Kwale, two counties on the east coast of Africa. Mangroves aren't a random choice. They're one of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet; they shelter fish nurseries and protect coastlines from storm surges; and they're planted by members of the local community on fair wages, real jobs, on the ground. The planting sites are secured in writing with local government and protected in perpetuity, so the forest that goes in stays in.
Every tree is GPS-tracked, geolocated, and monitored through its first few years, the window when survival actually matters. We get certificates every month, with numbers we can check.
Small local families, careful work, protected land, independently verified. If that sounds familiar, it should; it's exactly how we choose wine.
9,792
Trees planted and verified (and climbing)
Planted by Eden Reforestation Projects
Verified by VeriTree
The same standard we hold our wine to
We built this business on one line: we know what's in your glass.
We know it because we know the producer families personally, and the wine is estate-bottled by the people who grew the grapes. We can point to every step, right back to the vineyard.
So when it came to planting trees, we held it to the same standard we hold a wine to: a name, a place, and proof.
Being honest about it
We'll be straight with you: planting trees doesn't make us carbon neutral, and we're not going to claim it does. Shipping glass bottles around the world has a real cost. The trees are a good thing we do on top of the work, not a way to cancel it out.
The trees are a real, verified thing we're proud of, 9,792 of them as I write this, and climbing. But the environmental work we care about most is quieter and harder to photograph: backing small growers who farm with minimal intervention, and buying from families who work their land carefully because they live on it.
The trees are the part you can see. The sourcing is the part that matters most.
Almost 10,000 and counting
Here's how it works: orders over €50 power our tree-planting projects, on us. And if you want to plant more, you can add trees to your order for a small charge at checkout; plenty of you do. It's built into how the shop runs, part of the business, not a bolt-on.
And this morning we switched on something new: pulling plastic out of the sea, same partners, same live count. Twelve bottles so far. Twelve. That's nothing yet, and we're not going to pretend otherwise; but it's real, it's counted, and you'll watch that number climb the same way you can watch the trees.
We know what's in your glass. Now we know where your trees are.
View the live VeriTree ledger →
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