SAN FRANCISCO -- The fruits of success enjoyed by California's vineyards are increasingly unpalatable to environmentalists, and the industry is starting to heed the green groups' hue and cry.
Alleging that the wine makers are wasting precious resources and despoiling the landscape with vineyard sprawl, the conservationists are trying to rein in the industry and have scored some notable victories. In the world-famous Napa Valley, so many activists protested the trend of vineyards expanding over many of the scenic hills that Napa County officials about two years ago enacted an ordinance restricting such growth.
Along the central California coast, activists have been pressing for more protections on trees after dozens of native oaks were chopped down to make room for one vineyard expansion. Elsewhere in the state, vineyards have drawn criticism for environmental hazards including use of pesticides and excess waste.
"This has resulted in a lot of bad press for the industry, some of it deserved and some of it not," says Gretchen LeBuhn, an assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University who works with the vintners.
Concerned that all the publicity will pressure government officials to clamp down with more regulation, wine-industry officials are taking matters into their own hands. Next week, the state's Wine Institute trade group and California Association of Winegrape Growers are set to unveil a new code of "sustainable" practices aimed in large part at making the wine-making process as environmentally friendly as possible.
The code -- whose provisions include sharply limiting water intake and guarding against erosion by keeping the ground covered with some kind of plant -- is outlined in a 360-page workbook that is being made available to hundreds of vintners and growers in the Golden State, which represents about 90% of the U.S.'s total wine production. If even only a few adopt the practices, organizers of the sustainability program say that would go a long way toward preserving the industry's independence.
"We want to self-regulate so we won't be burdened by too much regulation," says Kari Birdseye, spokeswoman for the Wine Institute, which represents 600 vintners in California who produce the bulk of the state's wine supply.
Some vintners have already put conservation practices into effect on their own and have found two side benefits: cheaper operations and better wines. For example, the 70-acre Honig Vineyard and Winery in Napa has installed sophisticated monitors to measure the moisture level in grape leaves, to cut down water consumption to only what is necessary.
In so doing, officials of that winery say they are saving about $1,500 a year in electrical costs from not having to pump so much water from wells, while at the same time producing a better grape because it isn't waterlogged. "This is helping the environment, and helping us make better wines," says Michael Honig, general manager of the winery in Rutherford, Calif.
A number of environmentalists applaud the sustainability move in California, saying many of the code guidelines can only improve the environment. But they say the code doesn't go far enough in one important area: curbing the sprawl of vineyards, particularly into nearby wild areas. Wine officials say they are encouraging vintners to address this issue over time.
"I think this is really a step in the right direction, and needs to be taken even further," says Mark Reynolds, a senior ecologist in the San Francisco office of the Nature Conservancy, a world-wide environmental group based in Alexandria, Va.
Although academic observers call the California sustainability drive the most advanced in the wine world, more industries are embracing the sustainability movement amid growing pressure to do so from consumers and others. Tens of millions of acres of the world's forests have been certified as green under a timber-industry sustainability program launched a decade ago. And many businesses such as General Motors Corp. are adopting environmental-management systems in conformance with those set out by the International Standards Organization, a corporate standards-setting body.
The Wine Institute board initiated its sustainability program two years ago, in part to try to offset all of the bad publicity the industry was getting from all the environmental fights that had flared up in recent years over wine operations. "We wanted to show we are good stewards of the land," says the institute's Ms. Birdseye.
The institute teamed up with the state growers' association to come up with a workbook to spell out specific steps wine makers could take to improve their practices. For example, one chapter teaches how to minimize the problem of soils getting compacted by trucks and other equipment, reducing their ability to support grape plants along with grasses and other vegetation needed in the ecosystem. One solution: Outfit trucks with fat tires.
Another chapter shows how better pruning of vines can help reduce the need for pesticides. By keeping leaves trimmed, certain insect pests have less habitat to proliferate in. The other advantage of pruning, industry officials say, is that it exposes the grapes to more sunlight, improving their taste and, ultimately, the wine. Such economic benefits from using cleaner practices are why wine officials are confident many vintners and growers will try to follow the sustainability code.
"We're lucky in the wine industry because you can use economics to promote sustainability," says Cliff Ohmart, a sustainability specialist at the Lodi-Woodbridge Wine Grape Commission, which developed an environmental workbook for its 750 growers near Sacramento about three years ago.
Organizers of the statewide workbook relied on input from numerous other experts, such as growers in Lodi who have already put some of the sustainability techniques into action. "What's great about this is we put in the workbook things people are already doing," says Jeff Dlott, an industry consultant in Watsonville, Calif., who helped oversee the project.
For example, the 2,000-acre Fetzer Vineyards in Mendocino County recycles almost all the skins, seeds and other waste from its wine production by using most of it as compost to fertilize the fields. Paul Dolan III, Fetzer's managing director, says other vintners have long refrained from adopting such practices "because it's just human nature to resist change."
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