The ethical drinker: Putting people first is key to making great wines

Great wine starts in the vineyard, or so the saying goes. Although undoubtedly true, what it fails to acknowledge is that people are equally vital to greatness. Can any wine truly be considered great if the people who help produce it aren’t taken care of first?

Wine businesses large and small shape the communities around them. Economic instability has a direct impact on those businesses, and therefore on the workers and families who depend on them.

In South America this rings especially true. Last December, Bodega Norton – one of Argentina’s oldest and largest wineries, founded in 1895 – went into administration, weighed down by more than US$40 million of debt after years of Argentine inflation and falling wine sales.

It’s a reminder that a winery’s workers and the communities built around it are exposed to instability just as much as vines are to climate hazards, and that the social side of sustainability isn’t only about what a company chooses to give to its employees, but what happens to people at every stage of the company’s lifespan.

Treating the wellbeing of workers and their communities as more than a corporate add-on has never been more crucial. And some producers are putting them front and centre.

Julia Zuccardi of Bodega Santa Julia in Mendoza says her grandmother, who founded the business, always believed that ‘to make a good wine, you need good people’.

‘My grandparents always understood that our activity was about land and people,’ she says.

Many of the estate’s vineyards are in remote areas with little access to education or healthcare, so the family built their own on-site schools for workers’ children, as well as adult-education centres, where qualifications lead to wage increases.

The provision of nurseries and daycare was non-negotiable, too: ‘My grandmother knew we needed to make it easier for women to balance professional life and family life,’ Zuccardi says. ‘They haven’t had to choose between motherhood and work – they get both at the company.’

It benefits the business as much as its people, she adds: ‘At the end of the day, it’s also us who wins, because we’ve been able to keep very talented women working at the company.’

There’s a preconception that large companies can’t be truly sustainable. Santa Julia and Zuccardi Valle de Uco, the family’s other winery, together employ almost 1,200 people. The scale is enormous: total production is about 25 million litres per year. Arguably it’s this scale that has allowed such meaningful investment in people.

Yet Zuccardi makes a pertinent point: ‘We can do sustainability at this scale because we started when we were very small, so it became cultural; it’s part of the company’s culture.’

The idea that a workforce is stronger when women aren’t forced to choose between family and career also shows up in Chile’s Maule region at the female-founded Caupolicán cooperative.

Here, Fairtrade premiums have funded a primary school library and university bursaries for local families to take advantage of.

At Chile’s Viña Undurraga, social sustainability puts people alongside land and heritage. For its Terroir Hunter Araucania Pinot Noir, the winery buys grapes from indigenous Mapuche families who planted vines in Malleco, paying a fair price, helping to manage the vineyards and returning a share of the bottles for the families to sell under their own name. It recognises who the land belongs to.

There’s no single template for protecting the people and communities a winery touches, but identifying the impact – be it positive or negative, social or environmental – on the local community is the responsibility of wine businesses of all sizes.

That responsibility should also be shared along the supply chain, to distributors and retailers, who can ask producers the right questions, and in turn share the answers with consumers, so we can make informed decisions about what ends up in our wine rack.

Sip to make a difference

Bodega Santa Julia, Family Reserve Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2024

A full-bodied red perfect for pairing with simple midweek dishes, Bodega Santa Julia, Family Reserve Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2024 (£11 Waitrose) is plump and juicy, layering blueberry fruit onto plum, vanilla and spice, all tied together by a soft and silky finish.

As well as coming from a winery that is a role model in how it looks after its employees, this was one of only 35 wines to be named a Value Gold in the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards.

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