Sue and I recently returned from the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento and we noted several important themes in the meeting rooms, on the trade show floor and in our many conversations with wine industry colleagues. One significant recurring topic was sustainability, which was also on the lips and minds of the people we met last November at the SIMEI meeting in Milan. Here’s a brief report.

Sustainable Sonoma

The week  began with the announcement that the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission had received the Governor’s Award for Sustainability, California’s highest environmental honor. The group, which represents more than 1800 grape growers, set an ambitious goal two years ago — to have 100 percent of the county’s vineyards certified sustainable by 2019. Did I say ambitious? Make that very ambitious!

And yet they seem to be doing it, increasing the proportion of vineyards with third-party sustainable certification from one-third in 2015 to 48 percent this year. Overall 64 percent of the county’s vineyards have had a sustainability assessment and the proportion continues to grow. It is obvious that Sonoma County winegrowers appreciate the importance of sustainability and are making impressive progress.

Will they achieve 100 percent sustainability by 2019? That’s a big goal and complete compliance may be difficult to achieve. But who would have guessed that they could come so far so quickly. I would not bet against them.

Fred Franzia’s Lecture

The next day’s program featured a luncheon speech by Fred Franzia, the head of Bronco Wine Company and Mr. Two Buck Chuck to his legions of fans. Franzia doesn’t give many public speeches and this event sold out quickly. The room was packed with industry executives and winegrowers.  (You might enjoy this article about the speech from the Italian wine press — I love the headline “Un Irriverente Fred Franzia Scalda Sacramento.”)

Franzia’s speech ranged over many topics. He honored important figures in California wine, talked about his own family’s long history in wine, and made some pointed comments about current wine policies. He also announced the sale of the one-billionth bottle of Charles Shaw wine and Bronco’s acquisition of the Petri Wine name from The Wine Group and the return of that name to Bronco’s historic Escalon winery. Petri was at one time the largest winery in the U.S., dwarfing current world production leader Gallo.

Bronco is involved in a number of important sustainability initiatives (for example it recently received a Zero Waste Gold certification), but Franzia’s speech focused on a topic of particular importance to the growers in the audience: water. Franzia noted that many growers in the San Joaquin Valley have been slow to adopt drip irrigation technology to their large vineyards. He explained the benefits of this technology and called upon the group to be better stewards of scarce water resources.

Sustainable State of the Industry

Once again this year I moderated and spoke at the big “State of the Industry” session on Wednesday. Last year all three of us who spoke talked about the importance of sustainability in different aspects of the wine business and the topic appeared again this year, but in a different guise.

Nat DiBuduo of Allied Grape Growers found himself with the unhappy task of telling the audience that it looked like thousands of acres of vines would need to be grubbed up in the San Joaquin Valley. Why? A combination of ageing vines, unmarketable grape varieties, falling demand in the value wine category and higher profits in other crops, especially tree nuts. Not the news Nat wanted to give. He planted some of those vineyards himself and hates to see them go.

Does the perfect storm of changing market dynamics spell doom for winegrapes in the Central Valley? A restructuring is needed, Nat said, but the key is to move the business upmarket to higher quality. There is a growing market for higher quality wine made from better grapes and sustainability is part of that package, he advised. Environmental and economic sustainability are not enemies, they need to be partners in this key winegrowing region.

EcoVolt Waste Water Innovation

Sustainability has many faces and we found lots of them on the trade show floor. The Unified is the western hemisphere’s largest wine industry gathering, so it attracts a diverse crowd, including entrepreneurs working on projects to help wineries that are committed to sustainability to achieve their goals.

We saw a number of interesting products, but the one that especially caught my attention was the EcoVolt Sustainable Wastewater Treatment system from Cambrian Innovation. Cambrian is a biotech company that was spun out of MIT labs in 2006. The EcoVolt product uses a proprietary bio-electric process to remove more than 99 percent of contaminants from waste water (and wineries generate a lot of waste water), in the process producing methane gas, which an integrated co-generation process converts into heat and power. Microbes do the heavy lifting, cleaning the water and producing the gas, and innovative technology brings all the pieces together.

I was particularly interested in the EcoVolt Mini, which is housed in a standard 53-foot shipping container (see image below) and scaled for wineries producing 200,000 to 500,000 cases per year. Bigger units scaled to larger needs are also available. With so much water used in the cellar, the need for products like this is clear.

Four Faces and More

I like that Cambrian’s product addresses several aspects of sustainability — water, power, cost — in this innovative way. If the goal of a sustainable wine industry is going to be reached we are gong to need a lot of faces involved — of regional organizations, growers and winemakers beyond the North Coast and innovators both inside the wine sector and those bringing ideas from other areas.

For a long time it has seemed to many of us that sustainability was often more talk than action. Lots of people talked about sustainability, but real progress was sometimes hard to see. Have we turned a corner? Are we really moving ahead? We saw positive signs in Sacramento.