Vineyards increasingly thinking 'green'

Turns out, it is fairly easy being green. And the rewards go way beyond feeling good about yourself, U.S. grape growers largely agree.

Farmers in wine regions the world over are eschewing pesticides and chemical fertilizers, returning to the practices that growers' great-grandfathers used before anyone knew what "organic" was.

"This approach just brings your vineyard alive," said John Fetzer, owner of Saracina Vineyards in Mendocino County, where the "green-growing" movement is nearly universal. "You end up with a healthier plant, and you see that in the juice. The plant ripens faster, which means you can harvest earlier and get better sugar, acid and pH ratios."

Fetzer, who will be in town for this weekend's green-themed Food & Wine Experience, has seen and been through it all, since his father, Barney, and mother, Kathleen (a Pipestone, Minn., native), bought 720 acres of Mendocino County land in 1958.

"We were basically farming organic and didn't have a term for it," said Fetzer, whose winery at the time bore the family name. "Then in the mid-1970s, chemical companies were going to be our saviors with weed control.

"It didn't take us more than four or five years to see the land in decline, the butterflies go away, all that. In the early '80s, we switched back."

And Fetzer, who now farms a whopping 1,800 acres organically, said he found multiple benefits to going green. "Once you get set up, it costs the same, maybe less," said Fetzer, who was one of 11 children and has grandchildren and other relatives in Minnesota. "And the big plus is the safety of our employees. Not using herbicides or pesticides, you have a lot more footprints in your vineyard. You can pay a lot more attention to what's going on there. I see vineyards with pesticides, and they just look sick. But most of them are converting because the growers can't sell their grapes anymore."

Among the proponents of all things green is Shafer Vineyards in Napa's Stags Leap District. "We're always looking for the next thing," said Doug Shafer, president and co-owner with his dad, John. "We're 100 percent solar. We recycle water from the cellar to irrigate the vineyards."

Shafer also looked at following some of his peers by switching to biodiesel fuel for his tractors, "but those tractors smell just like McDonald's." Instead, he's getting an electric-powered ATV, "and I've got enough extra juice from our solar panels to use that."

Organic wines are another matter. By law, U.S. wines that contain sulfites, widely considered an essential preservative to ensure quality, cannot be labeled organic. "I have a friend who sells organic wines," said Fetzer, "and you just don't know what you're going to get."

So most of the green practices have taken place in viticulture, not viniculture. And there's still a lot of work to be done before anyone starts talking about a "next frontier" of winery ecology, said Susan Sokol-Blosser, whose eponymous Oregon winery has been at the forefront of organic and sustainable practices. (Sokol-Blosser's daughter Allison also is attending the Food & Wine Experience.)

"Sustainability is definitely in fashion," said Sokol-Blosser, who noted that until synthetic chemicals and fertilizers are eliminated, "until we produce as much energy as we consume, and until we get to zero waste, we aren't ready to talk about the 'next frontier.'"