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River erosion exposes bottles, eats away vineyard

GUERNEVILLE – Residents on a large bend in the Russian River just upstream and across from Guerneville were dismayed earlier this year to find whole and broken champagne bottles scattered across their beach when high river waters started receding.

On the opposite bank, sparkling and table wine maker Korbel is fretting over erosion of a prime vineyard under which the bottles were buried about 60 years ago.

Still, Korbel’s dilemma could become part of a changing philosophy among some regulators on balancing the needs of protected fish for clean and ample water and property owners who want to protect their prime land and prized vineyards along the river and its tributaries.

Pat Latimer, who moved back to the Drake’s Estate Beach area in 2006 after swimming there as a teenager in the 1960s, estimates that she and her husband, Gerard Taylor, have picked up a couple hundred pounds of necks, bottoms and whole bottles. Neighbors figure they have collected a thousand pounds all together this year.

“It’s not going to be OK to keep letting it happen,” Ms. Latimer said. “You can see all the bottles in the river. A lot of people here won’t go to the beach without shoes.”

Over the past 15 years, the Russian River has changed course and eroded an estimated 2.5 to three acres of a vineyard across River Road from Korbel’s hospitality and production facility near Guerneville, according to Bill Owens, assistant vice president of production.

During flood years, such as the deluge in January of this year, the river washes away the 20-foot-high bank and exposes a community dump that had been closed by the time the Heck family acquired Korbel Champagne Cellars in 1954.

Erosion also is uncovering a few other old dumps along with junk cars, which sometimes in the past had been placed along the bank to control the river.

“The homeowners understand that we didn’t do it, but like a lot of inheritance, we have the responsibility to clean it up,” Mr. Owens said of the battle with buried bottles.

So it’s been a regular pattern of homeowners complaining to watchdog group Russian Riverkeeper’s Don McEnhill, who contacts Korbel, which sends out vineyard workers to collect the glass.

“If they were to dig up all the old bottles, they would be digging for some time,” Mr. McEnhill said, noting that Korbel has been responsive to cleanup requests. “It’s an unstable section of the river, so digging in the high bank area would trigger high-level erosion.”

Korbel has been trying to shore up the half-mile of vineyard river frontage ever since the river started shifting toward it. Several years ago, an engineer suggested Korbel remove a gravel bar on the opposite bank to allow the river to resume its previous course.

But state and federal wildlife regulators consulted on the idea suggested Korbel go with its concept for strengthening the bank by removing vine rows and sloping the bank rather than removing the gravel.

“In general, if you remove a gravel bar it would come right back, and by removing that material from the river it can make the water go faster, which causes even more erosion,” said Dick Butler, who oversees the greater Bay Area for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The kind of bank stabilization that agency and the state Department of Fish & Game prefer over junk cars and large boulders is bioengineering, which uses water-loving foliage such as willows to fight erosion and create riparian habitat for protected fish. The erosion is a natural process that needs to be respected along with property rights, according to Eric Larson of Fish & Game’s office in Yountville.

At the same time, the fisheries service and county planners have been exploring instream gravel management that helps fish migration, first with Bohan & Canelis on the Austin Creek tributary to the lower Russian and with a proposal from Syar Industries for three creeks in the middle reach of the river. Getting trees and other plants to take hold amid high river flows is tough, but Bioengineering Associates in Laytonville has a long success record.

In fact, the firm has been kicking around potential solutions with Korbel since hearing about the winery’s plight while designing emergency erosion repairs at the Oddfellows park just upriver. No contract has been entered, but principal bioengineer Evan Engber thinks he’s had success with solutions used for a similar but smaller-scale problem at Foster’s Wine Estates’ Asti winery.