Biodiversity, bottle lightweighting, and big ideas at Château Carsin
“Nature is an asset, not a production site.” This belief underpins all activity at Château Carsin, a family-run winery and farm in the hills of Rions, Cadillac Côtes de Bordeaux. In 1990, Finnish Juha Berglund bought the estate and continues to run it today with his daughter Nea. Since 2016, all vines, fruit, and vegetables on the 16-hectare estate have been farmed organically, fostering a rich ecosystem of flora and fauna.
At Château Carsin, you’ll find almost 100 fruit trees and 10 grape varieties already in cultivation. Yet each year, the team plants new varieties of fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, and cover crops, helping expand biodiversity. The estate is also home to numerous insect hotels, beehives, birds, and farm animals. During winter, the animals are kept on the vineyards, naturally fertilising and controlling weeds.
Soil health is another major focus area for the Carsin team. They employ various techniques such as cover cropping, composting, and minimal tillage to boost soil structure and fertility. The use of natural and sowed cover crops between the vineyard rows helps increase soil carbon and improve water infiltration, as well as prevent soil erosion. This is especially important in an area such as Rions, where the rich clay soils are prone to compaction and cracking. All green waste is composted and returned to the soil, while grape marc, stems, and lees from the winery are delivered to a local distillery for alcohol production.
As in most of Bordeaux, irrigation is not used in the vineyards. In the vegetable garden, the team combines soil management practices with an efficient irrigation system to conserve water. Nea explains how they are planning to scale the current rainwater collection system and build a larger water station for irrigation and tractor washing.
The Berglunds’ philosophy extends all the way from the vineyard to the bottle. In the cellar, nature guides the winemaking process with minimal intervention. Since 2019, the team has been working on bottle lightweighting, successfully reducing weight from 550g to 405g by 2021. This reduction has resulted in approximately 15 tonnes of annual savings in CO2, or the equivalent to 15 round trips from Paris to New York.
Château Carsin shows that small can indeed be mighty. “We’re constantly finding new projects and we’re keeping ourselves busy. Every year there’s something new at Carsin,” says Nea. “Bordeaux is suffering quite a bit at the moment and as so many others, we’re uprooting a few old vineyards. I’m not planning to plant vines to replace these vineyards, but olive trees, walnuts and flower fields. We’re a small farm – but quite diverse and very proud of our biodiversity! I love to experiment with new plants and trees – we’ll see how the production will evolve in the future.”
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