In an industry increasingly owned by a handful of multinational conglomerates, is staying family-run and independent still a viable business model, or a romantic one?
East and West arrive at sustainability from opposite directions, and the instinct underneath is exactly the same. In Scotland, the Stirling family has farmed the same estate for four generations and built Arbikie into one of the world's most sustainable distilleries by growing, milling and bottling everything within a stone's throw of the still: nothing shipped in, nothing wasted, every by-product fed back to the land or the cattle. In China's Shanxi province, Judy Chan took over her father's vineyard at 24 and built Grace Vineyard not by owning more land, but by earning it: patient decades spent with the roughly 600 local families who grow her grapes, on soil so good at holding water the vines have needed no irrigation in over ten years. Control on one side, relationship on the other, but both are simply people who have learned to pay very close attention to what the land will actually give them.
This session is not only about wine or whisky. It is about how family businesses can take practical first steps towards sustainability and impact from within their own heritage, operations and value chains. It asks how craft, land, community and capital can be brought into closer alignment — and how businesses rooted in tradition can help shape the well-being economy of the future.
Judy Chan and John Stirling sit down to compare four generations, two philosophies of land, and one shared refusal to rush, followed by a guided tasting of both houses' signature pours: Grace Vineyard's wine alongside Arbikie's rare Highland Single Malt.
