A UNIQUE USE FOR GRAPES
Juice Beauty farm brings sustainable, organic skin care to California’s wine country
High on a hill in the Dry Creek Valley sits a dark grey farmhouse surrounded by vineyards and fruit trees.
Similar to other properties in the area, the farm’s gate proudly showcases various growers’ association placards. But this isn’t your average grape-growing property. Perched atop the steep slope off of West Dry Creek Road in the town of Healdsburg, Calif., the sprawling 20-acre spread is home to the Juice Beauty farm.
Instead of offering a farm-to-table approach, the organic brand is focused on offering a unique farmto-beauty approach.
“When we said we were a beauty company, people got so excited. First, because it’s so unique. And second, I think, because we weren’t going to be competing with them,” Karen Behnke, founder of Juice Beauty, says of the initial reaction from the wine community to her plans for the property. “We’ve been really embraced here, which is great.”
Behnke and her husband, both longtime residents of the San Francisco area, fell in love with the area after visiting several times. Behnke, an avid cyclist, immediately fell for the quiet, hilly West Dry Creek Road and knew that would be the perfect future home of the Juice Beauty operation.
“We had realtors going up and down the road knocking on doors,” she recalls with a laugh. “To me, it’s one of the most beautiful wine roads in the world.”
But, above all, it’s a great area to grow grapes. And, to Behnke, that means a direct source of fresh ingredients for her company ’s organic beauty and skin care products.
“We have thousands of ingredients, but we will be sourcing every part of the grape here, so grape juice, grape skins, grape seed, the resveratrol from the grape, grape stem cells,” she says.
The property yields a variety of grapes ranging from table options to Cabernet, Falanghina, Sagrantino and some Merlot, Behnke says. It’s also home to 13 types of olives, which will be used in other Juice Beauty products, and a selection of fruit trees and flowers.
“There’s a whole movement to clean and natural, but a lot of what’s in beauty products would not be grown in real earth,” she says. “So, we’re trying to point out that we actually use real ingredients, real plants. And that’s what’s important to me. It’s not propylene glycol or formaldehyde or coal tar. You won’t see any of that grown or mined here.
“And that’s what is so cool to me — to bring that to life.”
Touches of the brand’s trademark light-green hue — which Behnke jokingly refers to as “Gwyneth Green” after Gwyneth Paltrow lightened the shade from its original hue during her role as Juice Beauty brand ambassador four years ago — can be spotted throughout the property and modern farmhouse.
“Everything we did ... we did it sustainably,” Behnke says of the remodelled three-bedroom, threebathroom house.
The brand partnered with organic and sustainable brands such as Coyuchi Organic Linens, The Futon Shop, Clare Paints and Restoration Hardware on the project.
“We wanted to partner with different brands that have the same eco brands that we do and create a sustainable house from top to bottom.”
In addition to fulfilling Behnke’s farm-to-beauty ambitions, branding — and the opportunity to better sell their version of healthful beauty to fans, influencers and media — is undoubtedly another draw to the farm.
“California, wellness, rich antioxidants and actual real ingredients in products,” she summarizes of the company ’s ethos. “Our roots are in wellness, so this really brings that to life.”
The property produces an estimated 50-60 tonnes of grapes, several tonnes of which will end up in Juice Beauty products, with the rest going to the vineyard’s partner wineries including Dry Creek Vineyard and Ferrari-Carano.
The acquisition of the farm, located in the heart of Sonoma County’s wine country, has presented Behnke with a formal introduction into the area’s wine industry.
“It’s really fun. We’re just learning it,” she says. “Beauty is our industry, but it is fun and we do have to do something else with these grapes — so, it’s fun.”
Along the way, she’s realized grape-growing and winemaking occur within an industry that shares a few unfortunate similarities to the battles she has faced in the beauty realm. Much like makeup and skin care products, which allow for ingredient labelling loopholes that often see suspect ingredients added to products, unbeknownst to most shoppers, the wine industry has lax labelling laws that don’t sit well with some producers.
“There are no labelling laws for wine that says anything about ingredients or style. It’s pretty minimal in terms of the requirements that you have to have,” Sara Rathbun, the director of marketing and communications at Dry Creek Vineyard, says.
Behnke adds: “It’s the same as beauty. You have to list the ingredients, but you don’t have to list how it’s processed, for instance. So, there are so many chemicals that are used in beauty products that are processed with formaldehyde.
“You’ll have everyone saying ‘no parabens’ but then we’ll look at the ingredients that people are using and the only way you can get that ingredient is with Methyl, Butyl and Propyl paraben preserving that ingredient. But you don’t have to list it if it’s part of the ingredient. You just have to list it if it’s an added ingredient. With fragrance, it could be either fragrance or perfume, there could be anywhere from 100 to 200 chemicals just in that one ingredient. And they’re mostly carcinogenic — or a more friendly way to say it ... is they are known endocrine disrupters.”
Behnke says the perfume industry lobbied so hard that it’s not even a requirement to list all the ingredients used in an elixir.
“It’s really unbelievable,” she says.
With wine, Rathbun says there can be some disturbing additives in the mix.
“For wine, it’s still very much a David and Goliath situation,” she says. “There are some big wineries, and I won’t mention any names, but their wines are just full of stuff. But you don’t know what it’s full of.”
In Canada, standardized alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, rum and bourbon whiskey are “exempt from the requirement to show a list of ingredients on the label,” according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s website. This also includes icewine.
Rathbun says if people knew what was actually going into some wines they’d be shocked.
“Nothing has to be listed. You don’t have to list anything,” she says. “Everything has to be approved to go into wine, so it’s not like you can dump a bunch of Windex into something. We have to record everything, and everything that we use does have to go through a government agency, but there is a lot of stuff out there.
“The American public doesn’t really understand some of the things, as well. So, when we get into labelling it can (be confusing). For example, we don’t do any fining to our wines, but there are popular products like Isinglass, which is fish bladders. Or gelatin. You can use it as a fining to help bring the solids down so it’s not so hazy. It kind of clears up the wine.”
Another issue, when it comes to wine growing, comes back to the grapes.
“It’s the pesticides that come in. You don’t have to list anything that was on the vineyard,” Rathbun says.
That ambiguity at the farm level is one thing Dry Creek Vineyard and other Sonoma County operations are looking to battle back against with a new sustainability pledge.
“That’s what we’re trying to do with our certified sustainability promotion. That’s a big thing,” Rathbun says. “Especially for a whole county to declare that all the vineyards are going to be certified sustainable by 2020, that’s huge. I think we’re 97 per cent of vineyards right now.”
And, the Juice Beauty farm is in on the organic mix. There was no glyphosate used on the property by it’s previous owners, which is one element that will help speed up the process to shift the property to receive its California Certified Organic Farming certification.
“And it’s all farmed by hand,” Behnke adds of the hilly terrain. “With Juice Beauty, we try to be sustainable from top to bottom.”