What is Grape Biomaterial ?

🍇 When you hear “grape biomaterial” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

If your answer is something like “a waste of good wine,” well, we get that: diverting potentially great wine into biobased wearables sounds like a crime – even if, in some ways, it is a neat encapsulation of France’s national personality and its premiere exports. 

But the truth is that our grape biomaterial isn’t actually made from siphoned wine grapes – it’s made from discarded stalks and skins and all the kinds of things you’d be less than thrilled to find lurking in your freshly-opened bottle.

It’s less a “waste of good wine,” than it is something more like a good wine’s waste.

Before grapes are picked, they’re planted, grown and expertly nurtured by vignerons passionate about cultivation. To skip that and go straight to imagery of a bountiful cornucopia of vine-plucked fruits is to do their work a disservice. After all, without their knowledge and their skills, the grapes we need would either never have been planted or left to wither and die out in the field. Neither of which works for our purposes. 

So, first and foremost, here’s to the vignerons that make it all possible. And if you’re curious as to whether that respect is mutual – whether grape growers often endowed with generations of tradition are keen on the idea of something which subverts that tradition – we assure you that the answer is not only a resounding yes, but also a genuine embrace of change. 

Planet Of The Grapes founder Samantha Mureau pins this down to a genuine love for their produce: “They are really excited by the concept, and it is so wonderful to hear their enthusiasm for the idea that their grape marc will live on and into a beautiful product that can be worn by someone,” Mureau explains, adding that, in her experience so far, “They also really love the idea that the grapes they have been looking after and nurturing throughout the year is put to good use in a really innovative way.” 

It’s something of a symbiotic relationship – traditional in its own way. After all, there’s little more time-honoured custom in any kind of farming than the wholistic, “nose-to-tail” approach. (Although, of course, no noses or tails are used in this particular process.)

But back to the harvest. How do we know that the grapes are going to make good leather? Surely just because they’re primed to make great wine – a process refined and handed down over centuries, if not millennia – there’s no guarantee that, as part of a much newer and far less tested production process, they’ll make a great material?

🔗 Keep reading and find more on the process, the philosophy, and the many matters of taste that help turn the humble grape into a true next generation material innovation https://www.planetofthegrapes.fr/en/savoir-faire