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California wine gets green standards
Frederic Larson/The Chronicle, 2004
A biologist looks for mealybugs in a Napa Valley vineyard.
California wine's efforts to go green got a big push Wednesday when the industry unveiled a certification program for its sustainable practices.
The wine industry has for years been pushing its green credentials by letting wineries evaluate their own progress on everything from less use of water to carpooling. Wineries were left to assess their own efforts under a sort of self-help quiz that offered a lengthy list of possible green efforts. But if you're a green winery by your own declaration, critics have asked, so what?
So it was a major leap forward for the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, which managed the self-assessments, to announce that wineries can now pay outside auditors to ensure that their efforts on everything from pesticide use to creating mission statements and recycling corks are up to snuff.
"It's a huge way of bringing everybody up on this thing," said Steve Smith, vice president of vineyard and grape management for Constellation Wines US and an alliance board member.
What's the importance of certification? Foremost, it allows retailers and other industry members to evaluate whether wine companies meet green standards, which in turn can guide buying decisions. As large retailers like Wal-Mart are setting sustainability requirements for their suppliers, such efforts have real consequences for the bottom line.
Right now, at least, there won't be much to see in the supermarket aisle. "This is not a consumer-facing program," said Chris Savage, director of environmental affairs for E&J; Gallo Winery, the state's largest wine producer, and chairman of the alliance's board of directors. "This is not about putting a label on the bottle yet."
But it will help provide some accountability. After taking the quiz, which assesses 227 practices, participants have to meet 58 prerequisites (view them here). Five are deal-killers, including not taking action on obvious sources of erosion and unchecked use of nitrogen on the soil.
For the remaining 53, companies must at least have a plan to make improvements within a year. A vineyard without disease monitoring must implement periodic testing; a winery without an energy audit must obtain one. Auditors have yet to be chosen, but the first should be selected next month.
Those goals are rather modest, with few specific metrics attached. Planners say that was intended to allow more companies to participate. As of 2008, 40 percent of the state's 523,000 acres of vineyard were being considered under the self-test, as were 115 million cases of wine, or 47.8 percent of the state total. However, that wine came from just 140 wineries, about 5 percent of more than 2,800 in California. About 1,500 wineries and vineyards total have taken the assessment so far.
Certification, then, should be relatively easy for most companies who opt in, including those using large-scale conventional farming.
"It really is not designed to be a high bar," said Allison Jordan, executive director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. "It felt premature to say we're going to set these arbitrary thresholds."
Under the certification program, a company hires a third-party auditor — the list is still being developed — to perform an on-site visit in the first year. The following two years of audits can be performed online.
Seventeen companies volunteered for a trial run, a list dominated by such major industry players as Gallo, Diageo and Constellation but also including smaller properties like Cooper-Garrod in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Honig in Napa Valley.
"We're encouraged by it, we're excited, but we're cautious," said Mike Sangiacomo, a Carneros grower and board member of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, which with the Wine Institute co-founded the sustainable alliance. "We didn't want this thing too far out ahead, so the growers could do these things."
Still, the current standards are so modest that some in the industry wonder whether they will have a real impact, especially in selling to overseas markets, where strict sustainability certifications like EntWine Australia have been in use for years. Several other California efforts, notably the Lodi Rules program, are already ahead — both in specifics and in conducting outside audits.
A quick look at the baseline requirements reveals the potential for tougher standards. Requirements on water use are vague, requiring only an annual test of water quality for decision-making purposes and some basic water planning. Soil fumigation is allowed so long as there's testing to ensure a problem.
As planners acknowledge, the certification will need to evolve. In theory it might run the way that the U.S. Green Building Council runs its LEED program, with projects aiming for certain status — LEED Gold, LEED Platinum and so on, and a certain number of points required to reach each level. Currently the wine certification is far simpler: You're either in or out.
Some environmental pioneers in the industry are optimistic that the big-tent approach will help bring up overall standards.
"You've got to be magnanimous," said John Williams of Frog's Leap Winery in Rutherford, an early adopter of organic practices.
But whether the wine efforts grow more teeth — and whether it will be enough for retailers and wine buyers — will be seen in time. Jon Heckman of FiveWinds International, a consultancy that helped develop the green program, said it likely will have to become more rigorous within the next few years.
"Fundamentally this program is about improving California," he said. "If you as a company trumpet yourself as sustainable when your performance is quite low, then it's up to the marketplace to call you out."
| January 14 2010 at 12:25 PM
Two Buck Chuck takes on Australia
Fred Franzia, creator of Charles Shaw, is targeting Australian brands.
Are you ready for Two Buck Chuck with an Aussie twang?
My Thirst column this Sunday considers the woes of Australia's wine industry -- and what might solve them. Now, just as the critter onslaught seems to have tapped out, a new contender is coming into the game: Fred Franzia.
Prepare for a price war. The big difference between Yellow Tail and Two Buck Chuck is about $3 ($4 if you're in California). But Franzia, whose Bronco Wine Co. created the Charles Shaw label for Trader Joe's, said today in an interview that he will unveil an Australian Chardonnay in June for half the price of Yellow Tail, around $3. It will be called -- what else? -- Down Under.
"They're overpriced and we're going to pound them for a while now," Franzia told The Chronicle. "We're taking our fight international."
In addition to his long crusade against high wine prices, Franzia has also been a master of the bulk wine market, which has allowed Charles Shaw to keep growing regardless of fluctuations in California's wine supply. But he's also trimming costs on the Australian project by using lightweight bottles that he's introducing on most brands. They will be up to 4 ounces lighter than a standard bottle, or 3 pounds per case.
Franzia caused a stir in 2007 when he announced plans to build a massive glass-container plant near the Napa airport that would reduce both glass costs and environmental impacts of shipping glass.
Those designs ran into opposition, but Franzia said today that the advantage of announcing he would produce his own glass bottles is that "everybody gets serious about providing things you want."
Next week I'll be writing about Franzia's views on wine prices in light of the weak market. But this week the focus is on Australia, which ironically is trying to distance itself from its legacy of cheap wines. Will Franzia pick up the slack?
| May 08 2009 at 01:52 PM
When bottles weigh too much
The Chronicle
Peeling back the layers on one very big bottle.
Living in a place that tends to sprout oversized wine bottles, I get immune to noticing how much these puppies weigh. To combat such things, writer Jancis Robinson (a Chronicle contributor) has been quietly running a name-and-shame campaign against heavy bottles, hoping to guilt the heavy-hitters into lightening up.
The arguments against heavy bottles are numerous, but the most obvious two are: (1) It's a waste of glass; and (2) the heavier the bottle, the more it costs to ship, both in actual cost and in carbon release. This might seem minor, but as you'll see from the upcoming example, an extra pound per bottle means an extra 12 pounds per case. It's a minor concern compared to, say, the difference in shipping Beaujolais by water vs air, but it's a hard one to justify when the expense is made for, essentially, aesthetic reasons. Some vintners believe heavier bottles look and feel more impressive, and a lighter bottle would make an expensive wine feel cheap.
You'd think that the endless drumbeat of green messages would have undone this view. But one bottle came along recently that really drives the point home.
The 2006 Retour Willamette Valley Pinot Noir clocks in empty at a full 2 lbs., 5 oz., not only due to bottle weight but also the label, fashioned out of pressed metal. The intent, apparently, is aesthetic impact. This is not about the wine, which we liked enough to award 2 1/2 stars last year. And the Retour has a helping hand from one of Oregon's top winemakers, Eric Hamacher, who makes very good wines under his own label. It's about balancing aesthetics with economy.
I have to admit my surprise at finding one of the heaviest bottles yet from Oregon, whose wine community has a distinct sensitivity to environmental issues. At a time when they are becoming a topic for scrutiny, such a heavy bottle might be cause for a wagging finger. But it's the metal label -- which apparently has to be hand-applied -- that seems to gild the lily. Doubly so because another bottle of California Pinot sitting nearby, the Williams Selyem Ferrington Vineyard, clocked in at just 1 lb., 1 oz., less than half -- despite costing about as much. One final surprise: the wine was made at the Carlton Winemakers Studio, one of the most eco-sensitive winery facilities in the nation.
I called Retour owner Lindsay Woodard for some details. No surprise -- the choice of heavy bottle and metal label (which she insists is recyclable, though it's rather solidly glued on) was deliberate. In part, the larger, more dramatic bottle was needed so the metal label wouldn't feel outsized. With a background in public relations and packaging, Woodard is no stranger to these issues.
"When you're releasing a new brand into the market, when everything is of the most exceptional and highest quality, we wanted that to reflect in the packaging," she told me. "While it is a heavier bottle, we also knew it was an important way to position ourselves in the market."
So important, in fact, that according to Woodard she sent some sample bottles out to sommeliers and wine buyers, who almost unanimously opted for the heaviest choice, which is manufactured by French firm Saverglass. This was a surprise, as most wine buyers I know are fastidious, if not fanatical, about their environmental choices.
Outsized, heavy bottles certainly send a message to the consumer -- to me, the message might be "expensive and pretentious" -- but the feedback Woodard received made me wonder if there's more education to be done about bottle weight among the retail and restaurant trade. Any sommelier who has complained of RSI surely has sentiments about these bottles.
Woodard said she might be willing to switch to a lighter bottle if the size and visual impact remained the same.
"Our hope was that this would turn a few heads, and say, wow, there's something great going on in Oregon," she said.
It certainly turned at least one head.
Just for comparison, I weighed all the other bottles on my counter at the same time, using my digital kitchen scale. The results:
- German Riesling: 1 lb.
- Spanish red: 1 lb. 4 oz
- California red blend: 1 lb. 5 oz.
- California white: 1 lb. 6 oz.
- Italian white: 1 lb. 11 oz.
Have you encountered other bottles that tipped the scales?
| April 10 2009 at 10:15 AM
A brief bah-humbug moment
We'll return to the topic of Champagne before long, but I need to take a moment to address a holiday wine tradition that really should take the year off: the greeting card.
Wineries, like restaurants, are largely in the hospitality business, which means they (usually) like to keep their customers happy. Certainly there's no monopoly among wine people to send holiday cards and gifts -- a good slice of my childhood was spent packing corporate gourmet gift baskets for my father's business, which explains the involuntary shudders I get when I see packing peanuts. But whether it's to thank their clients (and, perhaps, suggest a gift case or two) or to send a dose of cheer to we scrivening types -- persistence of memory is the key to branding, no? -- my mailbox is jammed full with cards this time of year.
Don't get me wrong: holiday cards are lovely. OK, not if they involve one of those hideous Instamatic snapshots where everyone's wearing a reindeer sweater. Or are one of those "Dear Friends" form letters that proceed for three pages to tell us of the wunnerful adventures of the sender, even if Binky got run over by a Ford Explorer last March, but otherwise it's been a year for reflection and their newborn niece is the cutest thing ever. Those suck. Otherwise, the sentiments behind holiday greetings are sweet, and it's nice to be remembered.
Except that we're heading into an economic turdstorm, the wine industry is going to soon find that the adage "liquor is quicker" holds doubly true in a deep recession and the appetite for $80 Cabernet is all but nil. Plus, after having been deluged with the presumed eco-joy of the wine industry all year -- despite all those Styrofoam shippers we keep seeing arrive -- it seems to send a confused message to send out lots of glossy, shiny cards that invoke the promise of cheer, joy, good tidings and all that. An e-mail would serve just fine, and I've gotten plenty this year that share the sentiment just fine without using postage or ink. And of course, the tiny gifts of olive oil or corkscrews or whatever are thoughtful, but unnecessary.
It seems a bit much to ask for a permanent moratorium on holiday stuff. Winery cards are actually more tasteful and stylish than most. (I was especially fond of Dominus' cardboard card a year or two ago, even more avant-garde than their winery building.) But of all years, this would be the one to save a bit of scratch, skip the cards and trinkets, and let everyone just focus on the wines. Goodness knows, we all could use a glass or three this holiday season.
| December 18 2008 at 02:02 PM
Recycling your wine corks
Lance Iversen/The Chronicle
... or you could build a coffee table.
With such focus on recycling wine bottles and reducing the weight of bottle glass (as Tara Duggan wrote about in today's Wine section), how come the cork -- an essential part of the package -- is usually just tossed away?
Now the ReCork America project, an effort sponsored by the world's largest wine cork producer, Amorim, has a deal to collect used corks at 25 Whole Foods stores in Northern California and Reno.
ReCork previously was organizing cork collections at Bay Area restaurants and wineries, collecting some 2 million corks so far. The six-month trial project, which runs through May, is projected to collect another 250,000 or more, depending on whether consumers get used to adding another item to their recycling checklist.
Amid your piles of newspapers and food scraps, you probably aren't fretting too much about your handful of extra corks. Even an avid wine lover might end up with five or seven corks per week (fewer if they're a fan of screwcaps). But ask the average restaurant server or tasting-room worker, or take a look at our own wine cellar after one of our 60-wine panel tastings. Corks pile up. And I mean pile up. An estimated 13 billion wine corks are produced each year -- 52,000 tons worth. Boats have been built from the castoffs of our bibulous ways. Read More 'Recycling your wine corks' »
| November 14 2008 at 01:20 PM
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