Warwick Wines

Biodiversity highlights:

Area conserved – 10ha.
The management of Warwick Wine Estate has realized the importance of "biodiversity" and over the past decade they’ve strived to maintain a balance between nature and wine making. Their conservation area consists of some 4 hectares of pristine renosterveld and forms part of the Klatmutskop Conservancy.


Ronald Spies, the viticulturist on Warwick for the past seven years, can be seen as the driver of all the conservation initiatives on the farm. It has always been his passion that the vineyards should be developed in harmony with the natural environment.

Although Warwick is not farmed 100% organically, one of their farming strategies is ‘’minimum intervention’’
This includes limited use of pesticides and herbicides, use of indigenous cover crops, as well as natural methods of curbing disease in the vineyards.

Their conservation area consists of some 4 hectares of pristine renosterveld. This area forms part of the Klapmutskop Renosterveld Conservancy. A further 6 hectares form a very important ecological corridor through the farm. Although this area is still infested with alien vegetation, the management will make the clearing of these areas one of their future conservation objectives.

The Klapmutskop Conservancy was established in 2004 and the five surrounding farms have shared stewardship of this project. This is a very active conservancy and the members are involved in various projects. With the assistance of the Millennium Seed Bank Project, seeds of rare and endangered species are propagated. The nursery also sells some of the species of these indigenous plants to the general public.
The conservancy is also involved in environmental education and has hosted field days and outdoor classrooms for 350 children of local schools. It has also provided environmental training, such as alien clearing and plant identification to more than 20 previously disadvantaged people.

Warwick has been very involved in all of these initiatives and will continue to do so in order to restore the unique biodiversity of the farm.