Eco Wines

Tuesday, 02 March 2010 17:18

A Growing Number of Elite Wineries are Becoming Sustainable with Shafer Vineyards Leading the Way

Wines, at their best, are products of the earth. This may sound obvious, but for a while there, it wasn’t necessarily the case. Sure, grapes were nurtured in vineyards—often pristine affairs that bore more of a resemblance to graph paper than the farms they ostensibly were—but the earth into which those roots were sunk was often secondary to the chemicals that were dumped into it.

This, of course, had a negative impact on the wine.

“The industry here in Napa Valley, if you think about it, really got going in the 1980s, and that’s not that long ago,” says Elias Fernandez, winemaker at Shafer Vineyards, one of California’s top producers and a leader in sustainable farming. “And so a lot of the old-time ways of farming were forgotten. And it took a while to realize that if we didn’t do something, the soils would not survive and prosper for grape growing.”

A significant number of the early players in the California wine industry came from fields that had little or nothing to do with farming. “If you look at the whole industry,” Fernandez says, “except for the old-timers, a lot of them were from other businesses and had no agricultural background.”

As a result, volume, expediency, and aesthetics (sustainable vineyards aren’t generally as pretty or as straight-laced as their synthetically or chemically treated equivalents) trumped accumulated knowledge. The byproduct of those meticulously manicured vineyards, typically, was wine that could have come from anywhere.

Terroir, in other words, had been undermined by technology and chemistry.

These days, however, responsible winegrowers and producers all over the world are taking significant steps to not only reverse the damage that had been done, but to create wines that are as firmly rooted to a specific piece of the planet—to a particular terroir—as possible.

Doing so, it turns out, is not just a far less destructive process in terms of its environmental impact, but it also results in better wine.

“It seems like the more that people do to be sustainable, to be better for the environment--they end up producing better fruit,” says Ryan Davis, Beverage Director for Daniel Stern Restaurants and sommelier at the new R2L in Philadelphia.

“They’re farming the dirt as opposed to farming the fruit,” he adds. “One hand kind of washes the other, and it ends up leading to better-quality fruit in the process of just trying to be more sustainable and have less of an imprint [on the planet].”

The one downside to sustainable farming is the cost. But claiming that growing grapes sustainably costs more is not entirely true—at least in the long term.

“The short-term cost goes up slightly just in the new methods, and some of the new methods are not necessarily high-tech but more low-tech,” Davis says. “And the more low-tech [you go], the more hands-on labor is involved,” which costs money.

Once a healthy vineyard ecosystem is created, however, the costs that were incurred in the beginning are likely to be mitigated by the quality of the wines and the overall health of the environment itself. Cost, in other words, is best considered from a generational point of view, and not a quarterly one.

Shafer's philosophy with a vineyard like Red Shoulder Ranch, for example, will continue to pay dividends for decades to come. Fernandez explains that he does not look at a site like Red Shoulder Ranch simply as a vineyard, but as an entire ecosystem. And while implementing that vision has taken time, money, and a deep understanding of how all the life in a vineyard is interconnected—from the various grasses, birds, bats, and more, even down to the micro-organisms working away in the soil itself—the results of all that labor are more than worth it.

“With the [healthy] ecosystem, you actually maximize what the ground is doing, and therefore it translates into the wine,” Fernandez says. “[You have] more concentrated wines because the berries are smaller, because of the competition with the organic [material in the soil]. More balanced wines, yet more concentrated wines are the result." 

Sustainably produced wines aren’t just more expressive; they also tend to be more indicative of a specific place, of a specific terroir.

“Sustainable agriculture is a vineyard-to-vineyard thing,” Fernandez says. “And some of the things that will work here won’t work somewhere else…And so, everybody’s got to figure out their own thing: What works for them.”

“The key is, we’re all doing something,” he says, “which is good.” And, he adds, once grape-growers discover the keys to unlocking the clearest expression of their own vineyards, “I think you are going to see some very unique, terroir-based wines. And that’s exciting for the future.”

Shafer Chardonnay “Red Shoulder Ranch” 2008, Carneros, Napa Valley

The nose here shows rich, warm notes of persimmon, dried papaya, and roasted nuts, all of it lifted by a sense of minerality and Granny Smith apple singing through. The palate, despite all its creaminess, stays impeccably fresh and lively, its pitch-perfect acidity and apple notes lending real brightness to the concentrated flavors of apricot and honeydew. (NB: Shafer Chardonnay does not undergo malolactic fermentation, which allows the terroir to come through more clearly, and the wine itself to maintain its freshness.) The well-calibrated oak is astoundingly integrated, even this early in the game, and lends the mid-palate and finish a caressing hint of vanilla, which, set against the barest intimation of mint on the end, is lovely. This wine is a singularly delicious argument for the efficacy and importance of sustainable farming and winemaking. In other words, it’s utterly delicious, and good for the earth, to boot.

—Brian Freedman