For this week’s theme I thought I’d go with something very green and environmentally friendly…a bit of a longer read this week, but I wanted to feature this whole group of unique wines together and they all have such a cool story!

The former owner of Lifford Wine & Spirits, Steven Campbell, has long been a dedicated environmentalist. Not just talking the talk, but also walking the walk. Aside from having been an early importer of sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wine decades ago, long before it was cool, he was making sure our company was green too. We’ve been Bullfrog Energy powered and certified Carbon Neutral since 2005 and we’ve planted over 90’000 trees through Tree Canada. Steven even partnered with a top winery back in 2008 to create a carbon neutral, sustainably produced wine, in PET recyclable plastic bottles. Needless to say the world wasn’t ready for that yet and the brand failed within a year. But that wasn’t going to be the end of it for Steven, he has been slowly perfecting that idea ever since. We work in a carbon heavy, shipping intensive industry, and Steven's philosophy has been to try mitigate our carbon footprint as much as possible and do our part towards fighting climate change. So this project has been a passion project in aligning his environmental philosophy with his business. In October of 2019 all his efforts were recognized when York University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his life’s work as an environmentalist and wine industry leader.

The #1 lesson he learned is that above all else, the wine has to be really good: people will happy support the green initiative so long as the wine is delicious! Fast forward to 2019 and Steven has partnered with a handful of top winemakers from countries all over the world who want to participate in the first entirely carbon neutral global wine brand. He's called it 'Campbell Kind Wines' and partnered with some of the world’s very best winemakers who produce either sustainable, organic, or biodynamic wine and he labels them accordingly in a “Kindness Category” on each back label (a cute touch!). And finally each wine is certified Carbon Neutral by Carbon Zero a carbon calculation and offset firm that has become an authority in the field. So every wine is accounted for from production to delivery as carbon neutral, as well as sustainable, organic or biodynamic. Now more importantly, let’s talk about the wine.Campbell Kind Wines will feature other top producers in the future, but the first vintage featured these super star winemakers: