San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sustainability dilemma for California wine
This spring, as the first wines from California’s 2017 vintage are released — those rosés and light white wines destined for early consumption — some bottles will carry two brand-new stamps of earth friendliness on their back labels: the California Certified Sustainable logo, and the Sonoma County Sustainable logo.
These two similarsounding logos are different, mind you, from the organic label, different from the biodynamic label, and different, too, from the Napa Green, Sustainability in Practice (SIP), Lodi Rules and Fish Friendly Farming certification programs.
It’s enough to make you wonder: Has California reached sustainability certification saturation?
“Sustainability is one of those things that alternately means everything and nothing,” says Julien Gervreau, director of sustainability for Jackson Family Wines. “We’re still in the belt-and-suspenders approach, just trying to figure out what, if anything, does the consumer think of any of these certifications?”
Each of these certification programs has a unique set of objectives. Some forbid non-organic chemical treatments in vineyards. Some measure a building’s energy output. Some ask whether a winery is a “good neighbor.” One mandates that a winery farm according to the lunar calendar. Some limit the amount of sulfur added to a wine in the cellar. Most require third-party audits. All come with a cost.
Of course, it’s possible to be green without shelling out for any certification at all. Sonoma County’s Littorai, for example, follows biodynamic practices to the extreme, but owner Ted Lemon has sworn to me that he’ll never get certified. Ditto Napa’s Harlan Estate, which has long practiced organic farming.
The degree to which consumers understand any of the sustainability certifications — or care — remains unknown. “We’re doing some testing on wines that are being released nationally as well as in target markets,” Gervreau says, “just to see how the market responds.” All of Jackson Family’s estate vineyards, he says, carry sustainability certifications.
And this year, Jackson Family is experimenting with the new California Certified Sustainable logo on a handful of 2017 wines, including two that have been released already, a Matanzas Creek Sauvignon Blanc and a Cambria Estate Viognier.
Pick up a bottle, turn it over and squint. There it is, the tiny, circular stamp of environmental approval. What does it mean? The California Certified Sustainable logo is backed by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance (CSWA) and the Wine Institute, building on a code of practices first developed in 2001. Those practices — 58 related to the vineyard, 37 to the winery — include things like soil treatment and pest management, which are common to certified-organic crops too (no Round Up!), but also nonagricultural considerations, like how employees are treated.
The CSWA certification has been in place since 2010, but the bottle logo is new as of this year. At least 540,000 cases of wine from the 2017 vintage will carry the logo, according to the Wine Institute, and its cost to wineries runs on a sliding scale, from $200 to $2,000. Any bottle containing at least 85 percent certified-sustainable wine is eligible to use the logo.
Which, in California, applies to a lot of wine. “Today, 74 percent of California wine comes from a Certified Sustainable winery,” says Allison Jordan, the CSWA’s executive director. “I can’t think of another industry that’s comparable to wine in terms of its commitment to sustainability, with thousands of actors.”
Sonoma County is particularly aggressive in touting its high participation rate in sustainability programs. In 2014, the Sonoma County Winegrowers launched an ambitious campaign to become “the nation’s first 100 percent certified sustainable wine region” by 2019. So far, 72 percent of the county’s vineyards are certified, says Winegrowers president Karissa Kruse, which is why the group decided to implement their own Sonoma County Sustainable logo for this year.
“Four years in, we finally have the critical mass where a label started to make sense,” Kruse says. So far, about 41,000 cases of Sonoma County wine from the 2017 vintage have been given the green light to use the logo.
If the syntaxes of “Sonoma County Sustainable” and “California Certified Sustainable” sound confusingly similar, that’s because they are. In fact, the latter is a subset of the former: The CSWA’s certification counts toward Sonoma’s requirements (provided, of course, that the wine comes from a Sonoma County AVA), as do Lodi Rules, Fish Friendly Farming and Sustainability in Practice — each of which instates comparable sustainability requirements.
But, you ask, what about organic wine? And its especially in-vogue counterpart, biodynamic wine?
These two certification programs are a little bit different from the rest. First, because they forbid any nonorganic materials in the vineyard — no synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. (Biodynamics has its own specific, and spiritual, pedagogy, but that’s a topic for another column.)
But the larger point of distinction is that, unlike the other sustainability programs, both organic and biodynamic protocols include rules for winemaking practices — mainly, limits on sulfur additions. Only when following that rule can a bottle be labeled “organic wine” or “biodynamic wine.” A bottle may, however, be labeled “made with organic grapes” or “made with biodynamic grapes” if the farming, but not the winemaking, followed its respective protocol.
You’re not the only one who’s confused right now. A Wine Market Council study published in April suggested that consumers perceived almost no difference between the terms “organic wine” and “made with organic grapes.”
I asked representatives from both the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), which certifies organic wines, and Demeter USA, which presides over biodynamic wines, whether they worried that the preponderance of other sustainability logos on wine bottles, especially the new ones from the
Arguably, organic and biodynamic are the strictest sustainability certificates available to California wineries, and, presumably as a consequence, the least popular.
CSWA and the Sonoma Winegrowers, could diminish the power of their own. Both the CCOF and Demeter expressed the requisite appreciation for the CSWA’s work in promoting environmental concerns on a larger stage. But, wrote Demeter USA president Elizabeth Candelario in an email, “We need to connect the wine grape growing with what’s in the bottle. Sustainable does not tell you what’s in the bottle.”
The fact that Certified Sustainable includes no restrictions on the winemaking process, she wrote, “could be misleading to a consumer.”
Candelario’s response got me thinking. When it comes to sustainability, what’s more important: the participation rate, or the standards’ strictness?
Arguably, organic and biodynamic are the strictest sustainability certificates available to California wineries, and, presumably as a consequence, the least popular: CCOF certifies about 300 California vineyards and 50 wineries; Demeter, about 45. CSWA, meanwhile, counts 1,128 certified vineyards and 128 wineries.
That disparity raises the question: Have the “sustainable” gatekeepers, in their quest to get as many wineries and vineyards certified as possible, made it too easy for a winery to call itself green?
The Certified Sustainable practitioners would say of course not, and would point out that their program takes a more holistic approach, with measurements of energy output and employee welfare, than the organic and biodynamic programs.
“We found that sustainable is a better philosophy than organic,” says Marimar Torres, owner of Sonoma County’s Marimar Estate. Torres had her vineyards certified as organic from 2003 to 2016. But she adds sulfur to her wines, and felt frustrated that that excluded her from the “organic wine” label. “I kind of resented it,” she says. “We were only able to say, ‘Ingredients: organic Chardonnay grapes.’”
Torres has since switched to the CSWA program, and her 2017 Rosaleda rosé was one of the first wines to go to market carrying the new Certified Sustainable logo on its back label.
She likes that CSWA gives her more leeway to apply non-organic materials in the vineyard. For example, when her vineyards were certified organic, Torres had to use organic fungicides, which she says were “not as effective” as their conventional counterparts. “That meant you had to make about three more passes on the tractor” to spray the organic fungicides, “so the carbon footprint is a lot bigger.”
Pick your poison: more synthetic fungicides, or more diesel emissions? When you start to split the differences between all the ways to care about the planet, it can feel like there’s no way to win.
And, at the end of the day, Gevreau’s question remains: Do consumers care?
The Wine Market Council study, which surveyed 1,159 frequent wine drinkers, did show that subjects would be willing to pay a slightly higher price — in the range of $1 to $3 more per bottle — for wines that were sustainable, organic or biodynamic as opposed to wines without any environmental accolades. Twenty eight percent of respondents said that the production method would be a primary factor in whether to buy a wine.
But as long as the field continues to crowd with competing acronyms, filling wine bottles’ back labels with small, largely indistinguishable stamps of approval, it’s hard to know how effectively anyone is getting the message.
And until consumers get that message, and respond by changing their spending habits, the incentive for wineries and vineyards to go green — and to prove it with a certification — will remain based on good faith. It ought instead to be based on good business.