Corporate Social Responsibility is a way of measuring the impact of a company on its ecosystem: our team attaches particular importance to this subject, convinced that CSR makes it possible to improve living together thanks to fairer and balanced relationships.

Without necessarily following costly and time-consuming certifications, we believe that the CSR of Château Haut Veyrac involves the following elements:
Our reason for being:
For hundreds, even a few thousand years, wine has been a cultural asset, a drink which in our societies evokes pleasure, celebration, sharing ... But we are now more than that, we are also a player in development. and the conservation of the territory recognized by UNESCO, we are the guarantors of know-how, traditions, history and culture! Our reason for being is a great responsibility.

The respect of environment
As an integral part of CSR, respect for the environment has been at the heart of our concerns for many years. In fact, from a complete diagnosis, we have established a roadmap that we roll out and that we adapt according to the results obtained, up-to-date knowledge, new technologies and our financial resources. (see Our environmental approach).

Two-way loyalty
In a sense, we wonder about our own behavior towards Haut Veyrac stakeholders: suppliers, service providers, customers, agents, traders, members, employees, communities, professional organizations… We must analyze, perhaps with the help of from an external perspective, if we behave appropriately with our various partners. In the other direction, in a small structure like ours, we often work on trust, on proximity, on our feelings. We tend to say to ourselves intuitively that if the people and the service provided suit us, it is because they are good partners who share our values. This may be true but with CSR we will further verify this good feeling either by requesting the CSR document from our partner if it exists or by auditing some key points of the partner. So and little by little; we reorient our collaborations if necessary. Of course, a subject like this is subject to a great deal of subjectivity which we must handle with infinite care to favor substance and common sense over form. This is where we touch on a particular difficulty, it is that there is not a single CSR but a CSR for each company which can vary according to its level of requirement and interpretation of such or such subject. Another challenge is the establishment of a document that summarizes our approach!

Cultivating the land and striving to limit its environmental impact is not mutually exclusive: this is what our team has been humbly trying to achieve for the past ten years, by means of several measures:

- Stop of chemical weeding in favor of the mechanical work of the cavaillon
- Preservation of natural grass in the seabed (beneficial for the carbon footprint and soil compaction but still poses a concern for water competition with the vine)
- Stop of anti-botrytis treatments, replaced by prophylaxis: stripping and disentangling of the fruiting zone, which reduces humidity thanks to better ventilation. This technique is all the more effective as we have succeeded in reducing the parasite pressure and are well helped by the increasingly lenient months of September.
- Stop of all insecticides except one made compulsory by the prefecture to fight against flavescence dorée. The others have been replaced by mating confusion (diffusers of pheromones that disturb the mating of butterflies (eudemias and cochylis).
- Integration over the years of bio-control products in the treatment of fungal diseases (downy mildew, powdery mildew, etc.) to reach 35% in 2019.
- HVE 3 certification from the 2018 vintage, and for the next
- Installation of ecological corridors (multi-species hedges) to promote biodiversity
- Test of less competitive plant cover than natural grass
- Felt test to cover the cavaillon, under consideration for the medium term
- Spraying system more efficient (spraying), more economical (products) and surely autonomous (robot, drone or static system)
- Change of rootstock and / or grape variety. Taken here on the scale of Château Haut Veyrac, we are convinced that a collective application of these measures within our densely wine-growing territory can really make a difference.

Whether based on new technologies or new cultivation methods, innovation can improve a number of processes in the vineyard and in the cellar.

Regarding here a culture, a living being for whom each year may contradict the previous one depending on the climate and the environment, each innovation must be thought through and studied in detail before being deployed on a large scale.
Château Haut Veyrac is one of "Groups 30,000", committed winegrowers who share the results of trials in a specific area. Our group is interested in plant cover in the vineyard, with the aim of limiting mechanical passages which have the following drawbacks:

- A strong carbon footprint
- An aggravation of soil compaction
- An expensive and time-consuming process

The “ideal” plant cover would allow:
- CO2 capture
- Decompaction thanks to the rooting that allows air and water to pass through the soil. This must not be competitive with the vine, especially in the dry period and, on the contrary, must bring freshness; should not go too high in the foot; must grow quickly after semi and line the ground to prevent too many weeds from developing and dirtying the cover; must be perennial or last for several years so as not to have to replant each year.

For our part, we are going to do tests on 3 kinds of essences, including one endemic that we have identified.
In terms of plant defense products, we also participated in a trial on mating disruption (the fight against cluster worm) consisting of spraying pheromones instead of placing racks in the vines. This year's result is encouraging but needs to be confirmed for the following vintage.

We are also interested in all innovations in spraying because we believe it is the key place to make real progress in significantly limiting the negative impact of treatments. There are several technologies under study and some trials underway. At this stage very early on, we are just spectators but we are ready!

Finally, innovation also has its place in the cellar, where we have experimented with bio-protection vinification from the 2014 vintage. At the time, there were few winegrowers opting for bio-protection today, all of them won over by this technique which preserves the fruit and allows to extract the best of the aromas without worrying about the timing since the harvest is protected.