The Challenge
Every harvest season, vineyards pour extraordinary care into cultivating the highest-quality fruit. Yet even in the most meticulously managed blocks, a significant portion of grapes never make it to the crush pad. Weather events, canopy shading, labour constraints, selective picking decisions, and evolving market demands all contribute to fruit left unharvested. At the same time, the winemaking process produces substantial by-products - skins, seeds, stems, and lees - that typically have limited pathways for reuse.
While these materials come from one of the most valuable agricultural traditions in the world, they are routinely treated as waste.
Undervalued Resources
The wine industry generates large volumes of organic material each year. Much of it is composted, discarded, or underutilized, despite containing rich biochemical properties with potential for high-value applications. This creates a gap between what the vineyard produces and the value the industry is able to capture from it.
Environmental Costs
Leaving grapes unharvested or disposing of by-products has environmental implications. Organic waste contributes to GHG emissions as it breaks down, and the full potential of the land’s output is never realized. At a time when wine regions are navigating climate stress, drought, wildfire pressure, and rising sustainability expectations, opportunities to reduce waste and strengthen environmental performance are more important than ever.
Lost Economic Opportunity
For growers and wineries, unharvested fruit and production by-products represent missed economic value. The industry invests in farming, canopy management, irrigation, and labour for fruit that ultimately remains unused. In an era where margins are tightening and climate variability is increasing, creating new avenues for value recovery can support long-term resilience.
A Circularity Gap
Globally, the wine industry is moving toward regenerative agriculture, carbon reduction, and sustainability innovations. Yet a critical opportunity remains untapped: integrating circular-economy principles that ensure more of the vineyard’s output is put to meaningful use. Innovation in this space has lagged behind other agricultural sectors, leaving a gap between the industry’s sustainability ambitions and the full realization of those goals.
Grapevine Futures was created to address this gap - by exploring how unharvested grapes and winemaking by-products can become the foundation for eco-friendly materials that reduce waste, generate new value, and support the long-term sustainability of the wine world.