McManis has bottled their wines onsite since 2015 and has recently converted to lightweight glass. “A big push for us to switch over was the LCBO,” says Heuvel. “We knew that that was the future, so rather than just sending lightweight glass to Ontario, we converted our entire operation … When you look at the scale of our operation, it becomes a significant impact of greenhouse gas reduction just by switching over to lightweight glass.”
It takes a lot of work to get here, but for McManis, the effort is worth it. “Being a fifth-generation farming operation,” says Heuvel, “it’s important to us to be able to pass this down to our kids also ... That’s one thing that sustainability is; that we can continue farming in the fashion that we’re farming in for generations to come.”