Episode 4
Transcript – Episode 4: The Old Vine Registry: one-year-on
The Old Vine Conference Podcast.
Introduction by Sarah Abbott MW:
Hello and welcome to the Old Vine Conference podcast. I'm Sarah Abbott, Master of Wine and cofounder of the Old Vine Conference. This episode is a recording of a webinar we hosted in June 2024, marking the first anniversary of the Old Vine Registry, the world's most authoritative record of living historic vineyard sites. During the recording, you will hear Alder Yarrow, Project Manager of the Old Vine Registry, and me discuss how the registry has evolved since its inception in 2023. And we explain the three year plan to keep it growing, and we reveal our milestone target for 2027. So grab yourself a glass of delicious old vine wine, sit back, and enjoy the episode.
Sarah Abbott MW:
Welcome everybody. My name is Sarah Abbott and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this ‘one year on’ Webinar for the Old Vine Registry. Just before I hand you over to Alder Yarrow, who is the manager and really the driving force behind the Old Vine Registry as it is today, I just wanted to highlight the original and very pioneering work that gave us the Registry. So the Old Vine Registry started as an Excel spreadsheet that was set up by Jancis Robinson MW over a decade ago. She was inspired by the visionary work of old vine practitioners such as Rosa Kruger, in particular in South Africa, and then Jancis Robinson and her team, including Tamlyn Currin and amazing volunteers such as Benjamin Roelfs, they basically maintained and called for submissions for this increasingly unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. And one year ago, thanks to the advocacy of Jancis Robinson, the support of Jackson Family Wines, and of course, the incredible support and tech savvy knowledge of Alder Yarrow, we were able to launch the Old Vine Registry, which took the information from the spreadsheet. Got it thanks to the help of some fantastic software developers who Alder knows very well, and we were able to put it online. So that was one year ago. And the purpose of this webinar is to highlight what's been achieved, where we are, where we want to go, and also to launch what we think is a really exciting campaign, where we want to get to 10,000 registered vineyards within three years.
So I'm going to hand it over to Alder and my colleague Belinda. I just want to say, Belinda, while you're here, thank you so much for all your support and putting this together. If you do have any queries, anyone, any follow up questions, please do get in touch. Belinda, would be delighted to give you any further information that you need. And, of course, for any issues about the database. Any questions, Alder is your man. But Alder, I'm going to hand it over to you. I'll let you take it from here.
Alder Yarrow:
Okay, well, thanks, Sarah. And thank you, everybody who's tuned in to see what's new and happening with the Old Vine Registry. So, as you said, it's been about a year since we launched, which is very exciting. When we started, the spreadsheet that I inherited had around 1800 lines of vineyard data in there, some of which had to be deleted because they were messy and incomplete. And then we got a bunch more information as we were busy building the site. But when we launched exactly one year ago, we had 2200 vineyards representing 29 different countries. And in the time since then, we've added a little more than 1000 vineyards. 49% growth in the number of vineyards in the records. 3279 to be exact. Although we did get a new one from Spain this morning. So this afternoon will be 3280, representing 36 different countries. So added seven countries in that time period. Albania, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Peru. Some of them have a single vineyard per country or a couple of vineyards per country. But nice to see that growing. And we've managed to do a whole bunch
of different things and enhancements to the database, which we can talk about in today's conversation. One of the interesting things about the registry is just the scope of what it includes now. And rather than bore you by reeling things off, I thought I'd put some things up on the screen. We have 591 different individual grape varieties represented, although that number has to be taken with a slight grain of salt because some of those are synonyms. Most representative grape varieties are Zinfandel. Thankfully, California has stepped up and contributed an awful lot of vineyard records to the database. Isabella, which is a variety many people don't know about. It's a hybrid labrusca and unknown vitis vinifera combination that happens to be planted very extensively in Moldova, of all places. And the folks from wines of Moldova were kind enough to literally give us a record of every old vine vineyard they had in the country.
And so we now have something like 280 vineyards of Isabella registered. Old vine vineyards of Isabella registered. So that popped Isabella high to the top. Likewise, we got a great contribution from the folks in Armenia who gave us a ton of old vine vineyards, although I think we're still not...just sort of scratching the surface a bit. In Armenia, there are plenty more, I think, to be recorded. But many of those obviously, are planted with the native grape, Areni Noir there. And so that has brought Areni Noir to be pretty represented in the database. And California is also responsible as well for a lot of Carignan, thanks to the old vine field blends in Sonoma and Lodi and other places. Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot noir, Grenache, Riesling, and Chardonnay, perhaps not unexpectedly, represented in the database. And then, of course, this incredible panoply. This is one of the great things about the world of wine, and in particular the world of old vines of grape varieties that just pop in and out, right? So we've got a vineyard with Ophthalmo in it, and a vineyard with Argadora and Dorado and various things. So I had to, in fact, cut this list short. Cause it could have gone on for another screen of just different varieties that we have only once in the database. We have not stood still in the sense that all we're doing is not just adding vineyards to the database, we're also making enhancements to the website. And one of the big ones, speaking of grape varieties, that I'm really proud about is we have essentially established the world's greatest dictionary of grape variety synonyms and implemented it on the website, so that when you search for Mourvèdre, you also get vineyards that have been registered as containing Mataro or Monastrell. So you can now search for any particular grape variety that you're interested in seeing, whether old vine vineyards appear with that grape variety, and it will pull in all of the other vineyards that have synonyms of that grape variety in that. That may sound like kind of a geeky, minor technical thing, but it was actually really difficult to do. The developers had to work very hard to figure out how to make this happen in a way that didn't slow the site down to a crawl. And obviously, an awful lot of work went into compiling all these synonyms, which I was able to do thanks to people donating sources of information from around the Internet and the industry. So that's a pretty big addition.
Some other smaller additions that we've made to the site over the year, we've implemented the ability to collect latitude and longitude, and where wehave that for individual vineyards, we're using that to link out to Google Earth. So you can actually literally now see a satellite view of any vineyard that we have a latitude and longitude for, where we've just recently added an elevation field to the database. We haven't even brought that forward to appear on the front end yet, but we need to separate out a bunch of data that we have. But we will be able to now show elevation if we have that for a vineyard and soon be able to search on that. We have, as many of you know who are familiar with the Registry.
One of the, I think the coolest things about the Registry is we have a button on the individual vineyard page that says find wines from this vineyard. And originally, as we launched the site a year ago, it was set up to simply do a query at Wine-Searcher on the name of the vineyard in Wine-Searcher. And a lot of times that generated exactly the results that you were hoping for. But sometimes it doesn't. And so in the occasions that it doesn't, we now have the ability to manually override the destination for that link. And so if we can find the wines on Wine-Searcher, we can ensure that that link actually takes you to a place where you can, you can purchase those wines. We've put a count of vineyards and total hectares on the homepage.
We've enhanced the metadata of individual pages to allow them to appear better in search results. We now have a proper privacy policy. We have a very extensive, frequently asked questions that has all sorts of information about submitting vineyards and how the Registry works and how to search works and things like that. So we have been very busy and hopefully making it more and more useful as a tool to everybody over time.
Things that we plan to do in the future. Elevation, as I said, we're going to bring that forward and make it possible for you to browse by elevation down at the bottom of the homepage. We've got this view, vineyards by country or by age, and we hope to be able to add grape variety to that so that you could literally click in and see all the vineyards that have a particular grape variety in them. And that's a little different than searching on that grape variety. One of the important things to remember is that this is really set up as a search engine. And so when you search for a grape variety, it's searching all the different fields in a given vineyard record, not just the varieties listed, but also any of the other fields. And so sometimes, depending on what you're searching for, you'll get results where that particular word is mentioned somewhere else other than the field that contains grape varieties, for instance. And so when we have these browse by functions, those search only the specific field that you're interested in. So we'll be able to give people a functionality to be able to look by an individual grape variety.
We hope to also, over time, be able to offer statistics. As the registry grows and as we get more complete coverage in different regions and countries around the world, it starts to become very interesting for us to be able to show comparative statistics in regions and countries about grape varieties, about different appellations, et cetera. I think we'd also like to add, over time, more of a parametric search. So, as I said, right now it's a fairly generic search. If you type the word France into the search engine, you're going to get, of course, all the vineyards that live in France, but you're also going to get any vineyard that happens to mention in the notes field that the cuttings came from France. And so that is what it is at the moment, we hope to build a more advanced parametric search so that you could specify the given specific fields that you're interested in searching in the database, so you could really drill down and find the specific things you're looking for. As some of you know, we have the ability for people to put photos of vineyards on pages, and I'm really heartened to see that people are going through the effort to do that as they submit vineyards, which involve uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons as a sort of third party neutral, publicly sourced host for those photos. And as we get more of those, I think it's going to be particularly interesting to be able to showcase those on the site. So I hope to be able to build a page where you can, if not browse the Registry by photo, at least see some of the interesting images that we've got and use them to drill down into individual vineyards. So that's some of the stuff that we're going to be working on over the coming year.
Sarah Abbott MW:
So we absolutely do have Chenin Blanc on the register. I love the fact that your slide, with a little snapshot of some interesting things, immediately provoked some sort of benign grapevine patriotism from the country that just happened not to be on there. Can I just reassure you, we do have some really fantastic old vine Chenin vineyards registered.
Alder Yarrow:
We can show that to people.
Yeah, we do. And also, we do actually have an amazing collection and registration of Turkish vineyards. That's thanks to the great work with the Turkish Heritage Vineyards project, which has been led by Umay Çeviker, and Gözdem Gürbüzatik who I believe are online. So well done for that. And I think it's just worth highlighting that this is the early stages of a true crowd sourced project. So we're not yet at the stage where we are comprehensive. So it's like a really, like almost beautiful curiosity shop at the moment. So we have clusters of information where we have really good information and deep information. We know, for example, that Spain is probably under-listed.
Alder Yarrow:
Oh, yes.
Sarah Abbott MW:
And that phenomenon is very much why we wanted to launch this initiative, to really get everyone motivated with our big, hairy, audacious goal, to fill in the gaps of our coverage. So I'll hand back over to you, Alder, and you can take us through this.
Alder Yarrow:
Yes. So, yes, the big, hairy, audacious goal. We thought, all right, we've made a very good start of it, but what would be the stretch for us if we really wanted to say, how would we get to someplace really significant? We thought, okay, 10,000 vineyards. And my estimation, which is based on nothing at all, really, other than my anecdotal intuition, is that there are probably 30 or 40,000 old vine vineyards out there in the world, at least. But why not shoot for ten? So that's more than triple the amount of vineyards that we've got now in the next three years. So that's what we decided to do. We want to register, hit the 10,000 mark by June 26, 2027. And in order to do that, we are going to give away fabulous prizes. So we are launching a contest today that we're calling The Heritage Vine Hunt contest. And we are going to give prizes to individual people, private individuals, who submit the most new vineyards to the old vine registry over the next three years. So we're going to give away prizes in year one. So a year from now, we'll see who submitted the most vineyards, and we'll give prizes to the first, second, and third place winners. We'll do that again in 2026. And then by June 26, 2027, the individual who has contributed the most number of vineyards across those three years will win the grand prize. And the way you enter this contest is very simple. You just submit vineyards to the registry. And I can talk a little bit about how you would do that. But the idea being we need to encourage people to submit a vineyard, so old vine vineyards, 35 years old, planted in 1989 or earlier, and we need to gather that information. One of the things for you to remember is that we're like Wikipedia, right? So the information that we have is only information that has been collected by me, by, you know, by Jancis and team in the ten years prior to inheriting the spreadsheet through the contributions of people like Umay Çeviker and some of the other folks that Sarah has mentioned, who I know are on the call. And so we need people to send us information. Some of you know the story of Steven Pruitt, who is the guy who is responsible for something like 30% of all of Wikipedia. We need to maybe, if not, find Steven Pruitt for the old vine registry. Find several of them who are willing to go out and do the research. It's not that hard. And Mike can talk a little bit here in a moment around why and how you would do that, but we need people who are willing to donate to this resource and help build it up to be the resource that it could be.
So let's talk about prizes, though, right? So the grand prize winner, we are going to give an all expenses paid trip to a future Old Vine Conference somewhere in the world. So we'll buy you a plane ticket, fly you to...I am choosing Campagna, because we've got this beautiful old vine picture behind Sarah. We'll fly you to Campania, put you up in a hotel. You'll get to attend an Old Vine Conference, pay for your meals, you know, and depending on where you are in the world, that could be 2000, $3,000 worth of travel. So that will be the grand prize. You also get a lifetime membership to the old vine conference. We're going to send you six of Jancis's beautiful wine glasses, a full set of wine maps from Venice, and a copy of my book, which is almost out of print now, so becoming a bit of a rarity. But I thought I would throw that in there just for, for fun. So at the end of each of the first years of year one and year two, the first prize winner in that will receive a two year membership to jancisrobinson.com, a two year membership to the Wine Scholar Guild, a year's subscription to the World of Fine Wine magazine, a bunch of books from the Academie Du Vin Library, and the year's individual membership to the old vine conference. Second prize is a couple of Jancis's beautiful glasses and a membership to the old vine conference. And third prize is membership to the Aldvine Conference. So in addition to these fabulous prizes, of course you're going to get bragging rights, and we're going to say your name a lot on social media and on the website and things like that. And we're very, very excited to raise your profile and announce your contributions.
And so we want to help you win. I want to help you win. I'm here as a resource to help you do that. And I've got lots of ideas, including just giving you an idea to Sarah's point that we're just in the beginning stages of this, where we really need some work. So we have zero vineyards from Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Belgium, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cape Faraday, Egypt, Iran, Israel, blah, blah. You can read that list. Somebody go out there and find us our first old vine polish vineyard, some old vines in Ukraine. I know a lot of people are paying attention to Ukraine these days for obvious reasons. Well, let's dig up some old vines there. There are also regions that we know have amazing old vine vineyards that we have lousy coverage of. Right. Rioja. We have seven vineyards from Rioja in the database, right? There must be hundreds. And so, you know, Châteauneuf-du-pape seven vineyards. How many old vine vineyards are there in Châteauneuf-du-pape, maybe a thousand. So Beaujolais, obviously lousy with old vines. We've only got 14. No old vines... Chablis, Only two. Switzerland vineyards, one from Lebanon, two from Santorini. Basically, all the vineyards in Santorini are ancient, right. Five from Tokai. We've got champagne. Eight. Only 19 in Canada, Austria, only seven. So plenty of green fields for anybody who wants to go out and do some research.
And doing this research can come in a lot of different forms. One way that would be perhaps incredibly easy for somebody to do it, and this is just an illustration of one, would be to go to SellerTracker. And if you go to CellarTracker and you search for Chablis Vieux right. There's a little way for you to summarize those search results by wine. You get a listing of 258 wines listed in CellarTracker from Chablis that are labeled VIV. And all you have to do then is say, all right, well, where is the Google Domain Louis Michel & Fils? And see if they've got information on their website about how old that particular vineyard is and how big it is. And boom, you've got a vineyard entry into the old vine registry. And so there's an infinite number of examples like this where somebody who wanted to spend a little time and who wanted to win that fabulous Old
Vine Conference field trip could, through a combination of Google and CellarTracker, go in and find hundreds of vineyards, literally to add to the registry. You do that by going onto our website and submitting. There's a web form on the website that allows you to submit an individual vineyard. However, anybody who's quite serious about participating in this contest will probably want to do it via Excel as well. And so there's a link to download an Excel spreadsheet there which you can then fill out the vineyard information in and send to me@oldvineregistrymail.com. but just as a reminder, what qualifies for the registry is a vineyard that's 35 years or older. Please don't divide a single vineyard into 40 blocks and try and game the system by making one vineyard into 40. We reserve the right to combine vineyard blocks into a single vineyard record.
Although there may be very good reasons for separating vineyard blocks. For instance, they're both planted at different ages, right? Or, you know, one has got, you know, there's a distinct block that's on one side of the road that's got, you know, more Vedra in it and a distinct block on the other side of the road that's got something else. For the most part, try and help us keep the registry truthful and accurate. So also don't go off and make up information. We're going to obviously have to verify every submission that comes in. So try and keep, keep things honest. And one thing that's worth saying is that we're opening this contest to individuals. So if you are the technical information manager of the Chateauneuf-du-pape organization, you don't get to win by going in and, and grabbing your database of old vine vineyards and handing it over to us. But of course, we do want that information. So if you belong to one of those generic bodies and you are listening to this or watching this at a later date, please, we do want your information. We're not going to be able to get to 10,000 vineyards just through crowdsourcing. Almost certainly not. We're going to have to. Maybe some of you who are individuals will be able to persuade some of these generic bodies to give you that information, in which case, you know, all's fair in love and vine research. So if you can convince some organization, because you happen to know the head of, you know, wine growing in Apulia, Italy, and they have a database someplace and they can give you a spreadsheet with that information and you as an individual give that to us, that counts for you. But employees of those organizations don't qualify to be a part of this contest, but we do want your data. So if you've got it, please, please send it to us.
Sarah Abbott MW:
So Christian Martin and Patrick Houshen, apologies if I've mispronounced your surnames. So Christian says, don't you need the permission of the owner? Permission? No. In fact, Patrick, what we find happens is that all these submissions come about as a result of actually an interaction between the person who's become aware of this registry and their connection to either the owner of the vineyard or the winemaker who's buying fruit from that vineyard. And actually, one of the reasons for having a Registry like this is to deepen those kinds of connections. Of course, it is, I guess, theoretically possible to submit a vineyard and get all the information that we ask for without any kind of contact with the producer, but it would be very difficult. So the fact that Alder shows kind of a possible research, that's like a starting point for research. One of the, I think the real beauties of the old vine lens is that it connects us, as wine lovers or wine professionals, more deeply with the farming heart of vineyards. And yes, it is true, of course, we need phytosanitary controls in a lot of areas.
Absolutely. Those areas are a part of the local regulations. But I think that when it comes to this kind of vision of people trooping into old vineyards, that is absolutely not something we endorse. And the reason for having a registry is because humans value what is named, we value what is logged. And this is in the context of thousands and thousands of hectares of old vineyards being lost. And these are arcs of genetic diversity, agricultural practice and diversity, and therefore resilience. So that's the kind of the thinking behind this. And in fact, if you have a look on the Old Patrick Huchen, Vine Registry website and you look at the vineyard form, we do request information. There's mandatory information, but then there's also a request for basically more context and more information. I would hope that this initiative, the aim of this initiative is to really stimulate this kind of conversation and interactions between the people who are really enthusiastic and engaged with wine and the people who are actually growing these vineyards. Because we know that there can be a separation between the viticultural heart of wine and then the...if you like, the more the consuming end of wine.
Alder Yarrow:
Can I address this question of owner permission as well? Many of these producers have the information about their vineyards on their public websites. So that's already public information that they've decided to publish and make available out there. And so simply taking that information from their website and putting it in the registry is, I think, quite fairly within the fair use doctrine here. And we also have to remember that this website is theoretically a benefit to these producers. Right. We are, at the end of the day, sending people to buy wines made from grapes grown in their vineyards. And so we haven't had anybody complain about that at this point in the vineyard's existence. Now, what we have had, and I think it's very worth talking about, we have had some people sensitive about having their name in the database. As the owner of a vineyard, you can think of perhaps a rich or celebrity type person know around the world who doesn't want to make it known that they own a specific vineyard. That's fine. We can accept a vineyard that has an owner name as not given or, you know, withheld. Not a big deal. And, you know, we don't have to have the latitude and the longitude of the vineyard in order to submit it. Some people may, in fact, not want someone to know specifically where their vineyard is. That's fine. And The other thing that I see a question of here is around replanting. So old vines, to us are old living vines where the age of the vines is, in fact, 35 years or older. So there are plenty of examples of vineyards around the world that were first planted in 1755. We know that. We have records, but those vines were replanted again in 1899, while the age of those vines is 1899, not 1755, when the vineyard was first established. We're looking to catalog living historic vineyard sites, and it's the age of the planted vines, if those vines have been regrafted to something. But the vines themselves are still, you know, the 10 zero year old vines, those count. But anything that has been fully replanted, that resets the clock with regards to vineyard age. Also, it's worth noting that age, in many cases, is going to have to be an estimate. And so we have a flag when submitting a vineyard to allow somebody to indicate that the age is an estimate. And sometimes we have vineyards where we're like, well, we know it was planted between 1875 and 1890, but we're not quite sure in there. And so we split the difference. Sometimes we know that was planted in the 1850s, and sometimes we know, well, this guy remembers when he bought the vineyard that the vines were already seeming old. And so we're going to try and peg that vineyard's age at the five to ten years prior to the person who owns it now. We have to be approximate. That's okay. And to answer another question that I see in the chat, you don't get extra points for older vineyards. So anything over 35, 36 years old and 136 years old, it's still the same to us. So no extra points for digging up old vineyards, but you might get kudos for finding the oldest vineyard in a particular country or region. So very happy to. To give you some shoutouts for that.
Sarah Abbott MW:
And just a couple of things there. What happens if the vineyard doesn't have any official documentation on its age? Michèle Shah asked this question, actually, for example, in Barossa, they had this issue, the Barossa Old Vine Charter, one of the pioneers of the structured valuing of old vines. They realized they could triangulate data. They were driven because of the concern that they'd already lost so many old vines, and they had a real sense of regret about it. But triangulating through different types of documents, and yes, also through a kind of, like, social history and oral history, some countries are fortunate in having, through serendipity, incredibly good documentation. So South Africa and Rosa Kruger has talked about this, and actually, I think you can watch her talking about this on one of our previous Old Vine Conference webinars. Is that because of the state owned wine industry, they actually had really detailed records which they were able to use on the 35 year limit. We have adopted that because the Old Vine project in South Africa have that as their minimum. The Barossa Old Vine charter have that as their minimum. Vigno en Chile have that as their minimum. And the reason for 35 years is twofold. First of all, in most terroirs, that's the age at which, physiologically, the benefits of age, which is the woody reserves and the deeper root system, really start to become evident. If you speak to viticulturalists, many of them will highlight this. But also it's the age at which vines become vulnerable, either to being dug up, replaced. And also there's a sort of a thinking in really modern viticulture that having a senescence, a built in senescence of around 30 years for a vineyard is simply something you write off. So by taking this 35 year and saying this is an age at which actually vines can become very valuable, we're encouraging. I'm really inspired by, again, the work of the South African planting to grow old vine project, of a long term thinking around wine. And, Michèle, your point about what happens if there's no documentation?
By starting just to keep some kind of record, we're aiming to highlight that this information is important to have for this kind of. This biodiversity in the future of the wine industry. And we really hope to encourage this information to be taken more seriously. That's why we take those numbers. Sorry, I'm just laughing, Meg. That's okay. I got better and more vulnerable when I turned 35, too.
Alder Yarrow:
Yeah. In addition to great little quips, Meg also has a relevant question in the chat there, which is this difference between vineyard and block. And this is something that we've had to kind of massage and see how we go over time. So what I've tried to do is my primary orientation with the database is not to have unnecessary proliferation vineyard entries for a given vineyard. And so when possible, that means consolidation of different vineyard blocks into a single vineyard record. However, one place and way when we have clearly needed to separate out vineyard blocks is when they have literally different planting dates.
Right. We got one block that's planted in 1935 and one block that's planted in 1960. It makes sense to keep those separate. On the other hand, sometimes we have a given vineyard where there are like five or six different planting dates because it took them five or six years to plant the vineyard, or because it happened in sort of stutter step or scatter shot ages. And in many cases, what we'll do is we'll just simply take the average of those vines and say, okay, this vineyard was planted in successive stages over five or six years. And so we're going to take the midpoint of those five or six years and put that as the estimated age for the vineyard. So we sort of try to take an artful and sort of rational approach to dealing with those situations from a data entry perspective when it comes to vineyard and block and individual planting ages. Meg. And then that is, of course, reflected in the search. So if you search for a given vineyard name, you will tend to get all the different blocks that have been identified for that particular vineyard. And or in some cases, if the producer has chosen to name those two blocks distinctly differently, as in treating them like different vineyards, then those will appear as different entries in the register.
There's another great question there about, well, you know, old vines often have vines that die and then they get replanted. And so what happens when you've got, you know, mostly old vines, but then you've got a bunch of, you know, brand new ten year old vines in there, or five year old vines. That's the way the world works. Our rule of thumb, which is not a strict rule and pretty difficult to enforce without actually literally going into the vineyard and doing some pretty scientific measurements, is that a vineyard is old if 33% of the vines, a third of the vines are old vine. So if it's 85%, right, you've got some young vines mixed in. Not a big deal. As a vineyard approaches those smaller percentages we start to ask questions like, well, are the old vines concentrated in one block? And if so, maybe we can talk about that block as the thing that gets entered in the registry and discount the younger vines. Right, so if there's one corner of the vineyard, it's a ten hectare vineyard, but there's a two hectare corner of the vineyard that's got the most of the old vines, maybe that becomes what we enter into the registry and we say, okay, you know, it's the, you know, the old men of the Montebello vineyard which happens to be a small section of the Montebello vineyard that contains the old, you know, 70 year old Cabernet Sauvignon vines or whatever, right, so we can take that approach as well. But we absolutely do want vineyards that, you know, just are, you know, 80%, 90%, 60%, 70% that has been renewed with some young vines.
Sarah Abbott MW:
From Aussie about a legacy vineyard. And so pleased to have a look at Aussie's question in the chat which that if a living old vineyard has been renewed, it could also be tracked in the registry. So in Australia, for example, they're very big on legacy or heritage cuttings where, for example, new vineyards or replacement vineyards, replacement chunks will be planted using massal selections from old vines. And we know from work that's been done on the adaptation of old vines by Doctor Dylan Grigg, among others, that there is an epigenetic adaptation of old vineyards to their environment. So there's a big motivation for maintaining these cuttings. It's one of the values of old vines. We would love to find a way of tracking this and including that in our definition. And I think that I would be hopeful that we can get to that. And I think it's just worth highlighting the kind of the big prize at stake, which is that, for example, the OIV, which sets policy, wine policy throughout the European Union, for example, and has member wine producing countries all over the world, they're currently, they're looking at a study on the value of old vines to the global wine industry. And what's really telling is the OIV, which is incredible for gathering data and statistics, for example, on varietal distribution, on wine production trends, actually didn't have any information on the age of vineyards. And I think that just by starting to say, actually there is a consideration in the value that comes from planting to grow old, from having old vines the way they are arcs of diversity. Just by saying this is important and enough people think it's important to have 10,000 vineyards registered, this is when you start to actually influence policy. And if you influence policy, you can influence the attribution of resource, the distribution of resource.
So I think Alder has done an incredible job. We are aware there are gaps in the registry, but really, the more we have people saying this is valuable and we want to have a log of it, the better. And if you have any concerns at all about the vulnerability of a vineyard, you can leave out the coordinates, you know…
Alder Yarrow:
or the name of the owner.
Sarah Abbott MW:
…or the name of the owner. Eventually this kind of registry really becomes about the big picture. We would, though love, and that's one of our big aims, is to. I know and Alder's worked hard on this to be able to link the vineyard to the wine, because ultimately it's selling the wine that will allow that vineyard to thrive. And selling the wine at a price that reflects the added cultural, agricultural and qualitative value that so many great practitioners in wine believe come from old vineyards and everything they represent.
Alder Yarrow:
Yeah. So the contest is in service of that, in service of building that kind of body of knowledge and that record that can be used as a tool by consumers, by the industry, by academics, by policymakers. And so I hope you will participate. I'm 100% honest when I say I'm here to help you win. So if you want to participate, but you don't know the first thing about how to get started, send me an email@oldvineregistry@gmail.com or you can email me at my bionography address, alderaffy.com and I will happily give you a project. I will give you that list of 497 Châteauneuf-du-Pape vineyards that are listed as having vieux vines on the label. Those wines, rather. And I will send you off to go research those Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines. If you want to know who to contact at a regional body in a particular area of the world, I've got many of those contacts. I'm happy to give them to you. And you can go pester them to your heart's content to
see if they can give you a spreadsheet of vines. I want to help you be successful here, and I've got an endless series of projects and lists of things for you to go investigate, including that list of all those different regions where we just have pitiful coverage. So please reach out and I will support you in whatever way possible to help you be successful in gathering information for the contest.
I think it's important for us to talk about some of the folks that have shared information already. Obviously, there's the core of us that make up the OVR team. Myself, Sarah and Belinda, as well as Jancis Tamlyn, Benjamin Roelfe, and then our wonderful developers, Christo Spies and friends who happen to be in South Africa who have been the ones actually building and modifying the site. But we've had some people who've really stepped up in the last year to give us a bunch of data. So Amanda Barnse gave us data about all of her chilean and argentinian and south american old vine vineyards. Umay, who we've mentioned a couple times already on this call, and his organization, the heritage Vines of Turkey, gave us a whole bunch of information about Turkey. Randy Caparoso for giving us a whole bunch of information about Lodi, Giusy Andreacchio has been really working on a bunch of italian vineyards for us. Orestes Ziakas, Zach Robinson for Anderson Valley in California, Gino Filippi for down in the Rancho Cucamonga area. I think Gino's on the call, so thank you. Gino. Wine of Moldova, folks from Armenia. We have a partnership with the historic Vineyard Society in California. So anytime a vineyard is in their registry, we have an agreement. And we out of that information in the Old Vine Registry, the folks at Playmont, really interesting cooperative that's rife with old vines. And of course, our sponsors, Jackson Family Wines. There's of course, I think something like 200 other individuals who in the last year have submitted one or more vineyards to the registry. So great thanks to them as well. That's why we're at 3300 records now. But really, really quite thankful for all their help and participation. That's essentially everything that we had to share. Contest is on. Ready, set, go. But I think we have some time if people have more questions as we finish here, we can answer those.
Sarah Abbott MW:
Can I just jump in very quickly and also thank the individuals who have supported the Old Vine Registry through individual donations. And I'd just like to stress the Old Vine Registry which is hosted by the Old Vine Conference. Both of those are non profit organizations, so we generate our income through supporters, through events and tastings.
So the entire ethos of these projects, it truly is for the greater good of the industry. But I would also like to highlight, we have as well as our business members, our winery members, we actually have a growing number of individuals who believe in this and support us. You know, £10.00 is, you know, is still really valuable to us. So we don't have a list of those individual supporters. But I'd just like to publicly thank all of those individuals who are simply wine lovers, wine enthusiasts who agree that there is something valuable in this, this aspect of wine heritage and want to help preserve it.
Alder Yarrow:
Any further questions that anybody has, really happy to answer them. Otherwise, thanks for joining us for this little celebration at a year's on, and I hope the contest is perhaps inspiring to some of you. We don't need that many. We just need the dedicated ones who are willing to go out and dig up this information, and we'll get there. And of course, I'll be digging right alongside you, reaching out to these organizations and trying to convince them to give us the information that we need to improve the graduate street coverage by leaps and bounds.
Sarah Abbott MW:
Can I just say an enormous thank you to you, Alder? I mean, it's serendipity to have someone who's so passionate and invested in wine, who is also such a geek. So it's really, we're extremely fortunate. And Alder has really donated and invested much of his expertise and his time in this project. It really would not exist in its current form without you. So I just wanted to put that out there.
Alder Yarrow:
It's been great fun. Thank you.
Sarah Abbott MW:
Okay, thank you everyone.
Alder Yarrow:
Thanks very much. Happy hunting.