April 4 2007
Remember when you were a kid, awaking mid-morning, eating your cereal, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and your Dad would say something to the effect of, “I’ve been up since five, read three chapters of a book, jogged a few miles, cleaned up the garage and your Mother and I just came back from a walk.” You would look at him squinty eyed with a mixture of mock horror and admiration.
I think the wine industry is in a similar position with the green revolution that is occurring. The industry is saying to the rest of the world, “Welcome. Thanks for coming around. Pull up a chair and let’s talk or a while. I’ve been up a while and have accomplished quite a bit already.”
An embittered cynic might take a look at the absolute green revolution gripping America and stare down their nose at the Prius driving carbon neutral folks with disdain, but clearly some large scale trends are taking shape that point to not only a much greater civic responsibility in taking care of our environment, but also significant support from our business community across industries.
The wine industry, in particular, should be proud for being a beacon of responsible citizenry.
I saw a press release and an article this week that reinforced this sustainable notion—a press release from Medlock Ames and a California Farm Bureau Federation article.
Seemingly disparate ideas, but all underneath a socially-conscious umbrella, Medlock Ames (blog transparency alert: Medlock Ames is a customer of my employer) has moved their entire operation to 100% solar power and a really cool concept is coming from an organic composting company—they collect food waste, some 330 tons of it a day, and turn it into compost.
Medlock Ames is an Estate super-premium producer in Sonoma County who, in addition to making superb wines, is something of a case study for a high-end, boutique winery doing their thing with contemporary zeal, but also with a sensibility for making wine with a minimal impact to their immediate surroundings and the environment.
Operating on something of a three pillar plan between the vineyard—winery—and operations to become a completely sustaining business, Medlock Ames has incorporated green practices into all aspects of their business:
1) In the vineyard they are an organic producer inspired by biodynamic methodologies
2) In the winery they employ green practices wherever possible including gravity flow to reduce energy usage while mitigating too much intervention and handling of the grapes and wine. They also frequently use wild yeasts
3) They are energy efficient and use 100% clean, renewable energy. Their solar energy produces energy equivalent to the use of 15 acres of a mature forest and prevents 1,691, 374 lbs of carbon dioxide from being used. They also use electric vehicles and biodiesel wherever possible.
Numerous wineries engage in natural winemaking, but you have to give a lot of credit to Medlock for the foresight and desire to incorporate that green mentality throughout the business, including the installation of solar panels in the vineyard where Ames Morison notes, “Owls and Hawks are often seen perching on our solar panels.”
No word on what Medlock uses to fertilize in the vineyard, but Jepson Prairie Organics works with sister companies to collect Bay Area food waste and grass clippings and they turn it into organically approved compost.
What a cool concept. According to the article published today by the California Farm Bureau (found here):
Finicky eaters who walk away from full plates at San Francisco Bay Area restaurants and dinner tables can actually be helping the environment. More than 2,000 restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, as well as thousands of city homes, provide food scraps for an innovative commercial composting program that Northern California farmers use to grow crops.
From the Jepson web site:
These source materials create a very a diverse feedstock that includes everything from crab shells and cantaloupe skins to steak bones and half eaten sandwiches. The result is especially rich compost, perfect for reconditioning soils after harvest.
Compost made from the food scraps of San Francisco restaurants is a beautiful sight in the eyes of vineyard managers. “We are trying to enhance the soil microbial growth and by adding compost we can achieve that,” says Hale. “We can also increase the availability of nutrients in the soil for the uptake of the plant. We can do this by adding this very rich compost. Finally, we like to use organic material to increase the soil tithe and porosity.”
It’s an interesting time in the wine industry, and though the wine business is often slagged for being a step or three behind in progressiveness, it’s nice to see and recognize not only wineries and companies serving the industry that are well ahead of the curve, but also small businesses that are also proactively trying to say, “Hey, we’ve been here a while, pull up a chair and let me tell you a story.” Medlock and Jepsen are certainly two good stories to start. Let’s hope other industries take a page from their book. Recycling in all forms, ideas and otherwise, is a good thing.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit |
Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (1) | Print |
Enter your email address for a monthly summary of posts, additional news and information available only to email subscribers. Your email is never rented, nor sold to anybody else!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Design by The Blog Studio
