Familia Torres: From Sustainability to Regenerative Agriculture

This case won the Silver Award at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the North American Case Research Association in Niagara, Canada.

At the beginning of 2022, when the pandemic was finally nearing its end, the challenge for Familia Torres was how to define a sustainability strategy for the future. Although Familia Torres had been working actively since 2008 to mitigate and adapt to climate change through its Torres & Earth program, by 2021 the current and future scenario presented serious challenges for the company. This had led Familia
Torres to search for new terroirs at higher altitudes to find the right balance of heat during the day and cold at night, in order to achieve a quality wine. Another strategy had been to recover local ancestral varieties, resilient to these new climate scenarios. The threat of water scarcity also loomed over the vineyards, as well as other ecological risks, such as the systematic loss of soil quantity and quality due to
erosion, which reduced its productivity.

This “beyond sustainability” strategy was presented as a hopeful one, which focused on reversing climate change from the local sphere of action and was consistent with the family motto “the more we take care of the land, the better wine we produce”. However, this promising strategy involved many uncertainties. From a commercial perspective, it was not clear how it would affect production, how it would be articulated with the commercial strategy, or whether Familia Torres: From Sustainability to Regenerative Agriculture