Saturday, March 16, 2019

How to make wine making more sustainable?


Besides organic and biodynamic wine, there are more innovative ways to make wine making sustainable. Taking a look at the recommended readings from Vinography.com, I found an article with 3 interesting practices for sustainability in wine. These practices are: “living building” tasting room, dry farming and no-till agriculture.

Here is a link to the article: https://daily.sevenfifty.com/the-next-wave-of-sustainability-in-wine/. The following quotes summarize each of the practices.

A “Living Building” Tasting Room
“The most rigorous standard for green buildings in the world, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) was formulated by the Seattle-based International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2006. It’s designed around seven performance areas, referred to as petals. Unlike other certifiers of green buildings, the ILFI won’t certify a building until a full year after it’s completed. That’s because some of the building’s petals—namely, energy and water—require 12 months of continuous occupancy before they can be shown to work in accordance with the challenge. The Energy Petal requires that the building produce 10 percent more energy than it consumes; the Water Petal requires (among other things) that 100 percent of the project’s water needs be supplied by captured precipitation or other natural closed-loop water systems.”

Dry Farming
"After the recent six-year-long drought in California, water conservation is on the minds of many farmers in the West, including growers of wine grapes. As a result, the Old World practice of dry farming is making a comeback. Why irrigate vineyards if you don’t need to—and if dry farming creates better-tasting wines (as its advocates claim)?"

No-Till Agriculture
"Healthy soil is full of microorganisms and mycorrhizae, which are essential for the health of your crop and which are disturbed when you till. When you refrain from tilling, not only are you preserving the soil’s rich biodiversity but you’re sequestering carbon and preventing erosion. Another benefit of using the no-till approach and then planting cover crops is that the soil becomes better able to retain moisture."

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