Organic practices turn out 'green' wine

GEYSERVILLE, Calif. -- Viticulturist Douglas Price breaks open an owl pellet, the matted brown material regurgitated post-meal by the big-eyed bird, and pulls out a curved strip of bone.

"Gopher jaw," he said happily.

Bad day for the ex-gopher, good news for Clos du Bois, which like many wineries is trying to subdue vineyard pests without chemicals in a quest for greener wine that is becoming increasingly popular in California.

"More and more wineries are backing away from chemicals," said Paul Dolan, president of Fetzer Vineyards, a strong proponent of organic grapes. "It's been really significant in the last couple of years."

Dolan can remember talking about environmental commitment to industry groups, "and I'm sure people thought I was smoking dope. I guess they couldn't relate to it."

But proponents kept plugging away. Today about 2 percent, or 8,000 acres, of California vineyards are certified as organic, according to the California Certified Organic Farmers. That's about double what it was a decade ago, according to Jenny Broome, associate director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture and Research Program.

While organically grown grapes have been embraced by some high-end winemakers as better quality fruit, organic wine has a less glowing reputation. To be labeled organic, the wine can't have sulfites added to prevent spoilage. That makes it a challenge to turn out a product with a reliable shelf life. There are good organic wines being made now, Broome said, but earlier misses left some people leery of the label.

Broome suspects more vineyards are going organic than are ready to boast about it. And quite a lot more, perhaps as many as one-third of the state's vineyards, are adopting an approach known as "sustainable farming," said Kent Daane, a UC Davis agriculture adviser.

While organic means forgoing artificial chemicals, sustainable farming is an umbrella term for a number of environmentally friendly practices.

So growers who once sprayed herbicides to keep the narrow corridors between vines bare and brown now plant cover crops that crowd out weeds and attract "good" insects to feed on the pesky ones.

Changes in canopy management, the way vines are trained to grow, have reduced the need for fungicides by improving sun exposure and air circulation.

Meanwhile, nature's predators have become vineyard VIPs, with growers putting up nesting boxes and perches to attract rodent-hunting birds.

Price, a detail kind of guy, once put a tarp under a nesting box where a pair of owls and eight fledglings roosted. He counted 500 gopher skulls in the debris.

The Benziger Family Winery in Sonoma County has gone beyond organic to "biodynamic" farming, which not only avoids synthetic chemicals, but also keeps the vineyard environment diverse with surrounding woodlands and gardens.

"We think of it as the grapes are the lead character on stage, and think of these other aspects of the environment as the supporting cast," Mike Benziger said.

Gentler farming is particularly important in an industry that has had some bitter battles with environmentalists over issues including soil erosion and wastewater discharge.

"They want to be able to live in harmony with their neighbors and growing organically makes that easier," said Broome.

In Napa, where about 10 percent of the county's agricultural land is devoted to wine grapes, fights over vineyard growth have been particularly tense, especially over the trend by high-end wineries to plant vines on steep hillsides, which is believed to produce a superior product.

Chris Malan, spokeswoman for the vineyard committee of the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter, said the farming changes have not gone unnoticed. However, using fewer artificial pesticides doesn't mitigate critics' main objection -- the bulldozing of forested hillsides for vineyards.