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Napa vintners certify green wineries

NAPA VALLEY – Napa Valley Vintners, a trade group for more than 300 local wineries, has launched a certification program for any Napa County winery that wants verification for its claims to being green.

This is part of a wider effort in business to be counted for practices and capital investments deemed to have a lighter or positive effect on the environment. It’s also meant to discount claims that such efforts are merely marketing, a tactic called “greenwashing.”

Last week, the Napa Valley Vintners held its first workshop for the Napa Green Certified Winery program with five vintners in the test phase of the program last fall talking about what it took to get certified.

Participating in the pilot have been Chateau Boswell, Cuvaison Estate Wines, Cakebread Cellars, Hess Collection and Trinchero Family Wines.

The Boswell family members were the first vintners to apply, and their 11,000-case-a-year Silverado Trail winery near St. Helena was the first in Napa County certified by the Bay Area Green Business program. Already a participant in the 4-year-old Napa Green Certified Land program, the owners of Chateau Boswell decided to certify the facility as it underwent an expansion with 11,000-square-feet of caves.

That included use of special glass in the high-efficiency lighting fixtures to allow spacing of one per 20 feet, installation of an innovative water cooling system between the cave and the winery, replacing hose bibs with spray nozzles to prevent drips and running water and changing out certain piping with NSF-certified crosslinked polyethylene, or PEX, tubing and brass components with stainless steel.

The last measure was in response to the very low lead limit for brass in Proposition 65, though some manufacturers have started making fixtures with lead-free brass.

“The whole thing about being a green business is thinking ahead,” said Susan Boswell. Solutions at the other pilot wineries included recycling of cork stoppers, using lighter-weight glass bottles and switching employee water bottles from plastic to stainless steel.

Napa Valley Vintners’ Napa Green Certified Winery program is an adaptation of the Bay Area Green Business voluntary certification program run by the Association of Bay Area Governments. The winery version takes that further by calling for more reuse of wastewater and grape waste and even more energy efficiency, especially through the use of solar power, according to a spokesman for the vintner group.

“There are not too many agricultural businesses in the nine Bay Area counties, so we are looking for something specific to the wine business,” said Terry Hall, a spokesman for the Napa Valley Vintners.

Napa County was a founding member of Bay Area Green in the mid-1990s, but dropped out for lack of funding, according to county coordinator Steve Lederer. That changed in mid-2006, when Mr. Lederer took the helm of the county Environmental Management Department, and supervisor Mark Luce, an early backer of Bay Area Green, pushed to fund the effort.

Mr. Lederer currently is the county’s coordinator for the program and its only certifier. However, the Napa County Transportation Planning Agency wants to help the county fund a half-time second certifier. Certification involves checking a business’ compliance with regulations administered by various county and local jurisdictions. Then applicants must finish a checklist dealing with the four pillars of Bay Area Green: reduction of solid waste, energy usage, water consumption and pollution.

“I get five calls a week for businesss wanting to get into the program,” Mr. Lederer said.

Currently, 13 Napa County businesses are certified by Bay Area Green. The vintners association is working on setting up a waiting list for participation in the Napa Green Certified Winery program. That’ll be needed, if the Sonoma Green Business Program is any indication.

Sonoma County currently has 25 companies in its pilot for its revamped green business program, and 200 have submitted applications or called the county’s Business Environment Alliance for details about renewing their certification under the new program, according to coordinator Laura Kim.

The new program will be based on Bay Area Green and open to all companies in the county. It is set to be finalized in the next few months, according to alliance co-chair Scott Kirk.

The county had a green business program parallel to Bay Area Green that focused on commercial printers, automotive repair shops and wineries, and 165 companies were certified. A dozen wineries also obtained Bay Area Green certification.

Solano County is set to launch its version of Bay Area Green this year too. Marin County has an active Green Business Program.

Napa Valley Vintners intends its green winery program to not only be verifiable but also help small wineries daunted by the self-assessment system of the Code of Sustainable Winegrowing Practices, created in 2002 by the California Association of Winegrape Growers and the Wine Institute.

Interest in a system of best management practices with a mechanism for verification has prompted the Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, which administers the code, late last year to start developing a third-party certification system.

Not to be outdone in claims to having the most sustainably produced wine, the board of the Mendocino County Winegrape & Wine Commission is looking into incorporating aspects of Bay Area Green and the Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance’s verification program to back up its new slogan, “America’s greenest wine region.”

Eighteen percent of Mendocino County grape acreage is certified organic, compared with 1 percent in Sonoma County and 3.4 percent in Napa County, according to crop reports.

One element of greenness Napa Valley Vintners, and frankly the entire wine industry, is grappling to create a metric for is emissions of gasses blamed for global climate change. The Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance announced last week it will be integrating a pilot version of a greenhouse gas calculator into its program starting this month.

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