California wine gets green standards

California wine's efforts to go green got a big push Wednesday when the industry unveiled a certification program for its sustainable practices. The wine industry has for years been pushing its green credentials by letting wineries evaluate their own progress on everything from less use of water to carpooling. Wineries were left to assess their own efforts under a sort of self-help quiz that offered a lengthy list of possible green efforts. But if you're a green winery by your own declaration, critics have asked, so what?

So it was a major leap forward for the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, which managed the self-assessments, to announce that wineries can now pay outside auditors to ensure that their efforts on everything from pesticide use to creating mission statements and recycling corks are up to snuff.

"It's a huge way of bringing everybody up on this thing," said Steve Smith, vice president of vineyard and grape management for Constellation Wines US and an alliance board member. What's the importance of certification? Foremost, it allows retailers and other industry members to evaluate whether wine companies meet green standards, which in turn can guide buying decisions. As large retailers like Wal-Mart are setting sustainability requirements for their suppliers, such efforts have real consequences for the bottom line.

Right now, at least, there won't be much to see in the supermarket aisle. "This is not a consumer-facing program," said Chris Savage, director of environmental affairs for E&J Gallo Winery, the state's largest wine producer, and chairman of the alliance's board of directors. "This is not about putting a label on the bottle yet."

But it will help provide some accountability. After taking the quiz, which assesses 227 practices, participants have to meet 58 prerequisites (view them here). Five are deal-killers, including not taking action on obvious sources of erosion and unchecked use of nitrogen on the soil.

For the remaining 53, companies must at least have a plan to make improvements within a year. A vineyard without disease monitoring must implement periodic testing; a winery without an energy audit must obtain one. Auditors have yet to be chosen, but the first should be selected next month.

Those goals are rather modest, with few specific metrics attached. Planners say that was intended to allow more companies to participate. As of 2008, 40 percent of the state's 523,000 acres of vineyard were being considered under the self-test, as were 115 million cases of wine, or 47.8 percent of the state total. However, that wine came from just 140 wineries, about 5 percent of more than 2,800 in California. About 1,500 wineries and vineyards total have taken the assessment so far.

Certification, then, should be relatively easy for most companies who opt in, including those using large-scale conventional farming.

"It really is not designed to be a high bar," said Allison Jordan, executive director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. "It felt premature to say we're going to set these arbitrary thresholds."

Under the certification program, a company hires a third-party auditor — the list is still being developed — to perform an on-site visit in the first year. The following two years of audits can be performed online.

Seventeen companies volunteered for a trial run, a list dominated by such major industry players as Gallo, Diageo and Constellation but also including smaller properties like Cooper-Garrod in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Honig in Napa Valley.

"We're encouraged by it, we're excited, but we're cautious," said Mike Sangiacomo, a Carneros grower and board member of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, which with the Wine Institute co-founded the sustainable alliance. "We didn't want this thing too far out ahead, so the growers could do these things."

Still, the current standards are so modest that some in the industry wonder whether they will have a real impact, especially in selling to overseas markets, where strict sustainability certifications like EntWine Australia have been in use for years. Several other California efforts, notably the Lodi Rules program, are already ahead — both in specifics and in conducting outside audits.

A quick look at the baseline requirements reveals the potential for tougher standards. Requirements on water use are vague, requiring only an annual test of water quality for decision-making purposes and some basic water planning. Soil fumigation is allowed so long as there's testing to ensure a problem.

As planners acknowledge, the certification will need to evolve. In theory it might run the way that the U.S. Green Building Council runs its LEED program, with projects aiming for certain status — LEED Gold, LEED Platinum and so on, and a certain number of points required to reach each level. Currently the wine certification is far simpler: You're either in or out.

Some environmental pioneers in the industry are optimistic that the big-tent approach will help bring up overall standards. "You've got to be magnanimous," said John Williams of Frog's Leap Winery in Rutherford, an early adopter of organic practices.

But whether the wine efforts grow more teeth — and whether it will be enough for retailers and wine buyers will be seen in time. Jon Heckman of FiveWinds International, a consultancy that helped develop the green program, said it likely will have to become more rigorous within the next few years. "Fundamentally this program is about improving California," he said. "If you as a company trumpet yourself as sustainable when your performance is quite low, then it's up to the marketplace to call you out."