In June 2025 we visited Elvis & Kresse, an inspiring fashion brand that makes ‘sustainable luxury’ bags out of recycled firehose, and donates 50% of their profits to The Firefighter’s Charity. We went along to find out what happens when two people obsessed by sustainability move their business to a farm in Kent, England, and plant a regenerative vineyard.
Sustainability
The answer turned out not just to be about vines, but also:
- Water cycling with a really cool system of swales and 9 ponds
- Using any available waste streams from their business and local community in their compost (leftovers from a cafe that already uses waste food from supermarkets, separating paper from foil from tea sacks from tea importers, kombucha that’s ‘gone over’)
- Sustainable building design insulated by standard sizes straw bales. This has reduced their electricity bill by an almost unbelievable 94.7%
- Using the tiny strips of fireman’s hose that are not suitable for their other products to hold vines in place
How are the vines farmed?
The vineyard has been designed completely along agroecological lines:
- The varieties are all PIWI disease resistant, so that they do not require synthetic fungicides. They have never been sprayed with a synthetic chemical
- Planting is in 3m wide rows, which are only mowed at the edges, with flowering cover crops in the middle of the rows
- High trellis wires that allow year-round sheep grazing, with easily movable electric fences to move sheep between rows to enable mob grazing
- Compost teas applied with gentle diaphragm pumps that “don’t chop up the biology”
- Diatomaceous earth to strengthen plant cell walls
- Homemade fish hydrolysate (not as smelly as you’d think)
- Trees and shrubs throughout the vines to avoid a monoculture and to enhance mycorrhizal networks
- Straw bales spread under vine as a mulch
- Subsoiling with Yeomans plough along keylines
Elvis & Kresse are collaborating with other organisations to monitor the return of biodiversity to what was a very degraded farm when they bought it. This include the RSPB for their turtle dove programme and Nature Friendly Farming.
This is a pure and brave version of regenerative viticulture that we are all following carefully!