Sustainable Winegrowing

Did you know that standard wine packaging, including the bottle and the process, is 42% of the wine's total carbon footprint? That statistic is exactly what inspires Erica Landin-Lofving, Chief Sustainability Officer at Vintage Wine Estates to explore alternative packaging. Lightweight bottling positively impacts the full circle sustainability of wine from saving money on glass and transportation to the quality of work for the people lifting cases to less wear and tear on equipment. Erica covers challenges and solutions related to all types of alternative packaging (wine in a bag, wine in a box tetra pak, lightweight glass) including choosing the best packaging for your brand, quality signaling, getting leadership to buy in, what changes will be most sustainable, and educating consumers.

References:

• 171: How to Farm Wine Grapes for Climate Change
• Alloy Wine Works
• How Climate Changes will Change the Wine Climate
• Is Wine in Cans Your New Favorite Format?
• SIP Certified
• The Changing Landscape Of Sustainability (Video)
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member
• Vintage Wine Estates
• What does a sustainable water strategy look like in the wine industry?
• Why is sustainability now not a choice but a necessity? What does it mean for wine businesses?

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Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.

Transcript

Craig Macmillan 0:00

My guest today is Erica Lofving. She is Chief Sustainability Officer with Vintage Wine Estates. And we're going to talk about sustainable wine packaging today. Welcome to the podcast. Erica.

Erica Landin-Lofving 0:09

Thank you happy to be here.

Craig Macmillan 0:10

You have done a lot of work on sustainable packaging. It's obviously an area that not only you're interested to, but there's a major component to the work that you do with with Vintage Wine Estate. How did you get into it? What is your interest? What kinds of things you've worked on recently?

Erica Landin-Lofving 0:24

Well, I first got into sustainable packaging, maybe six, seven years. Back when I was still living in Sweden, I'm Swedish. I was consulting for the Swedish wine monopolies, Systembolaget. They are possibly the biggest buyer of wine in the world. And they have sustainability as a core issue. And they started lifting the packaging, and did lifecycle analysis together with the other Scandinavian monopolies and saw that packaging bottling and the process of doing it was up to 42% of the total carbon footprint of a wine, which is huge. Of course, they started focusing on on that because of course being big buyers, they can require changes in packaging of their buyers. So they launched projects on lightweighting bottles and alternative packaging, which they are still very strong and probably leading in the world. So that's that's when I got interested at that time, there was almost no discussion about packaging as part of sustainability and wine. We talked vineyards, vineyards, vineyards, maybe a little bit of winemaking, but packaging got ignored most of the sustainability certifications around the world don't even mention packaging, or didn't at least at that time. Actually, that was my project for the monopoly. I went through basically all the sustainability certifications around the world. Comlpex job. Let me tell you that.

Craig Macmillan 1:39

Yeah, I guess.

Erica Landin-Lofving 1:41

So of course, when I started at Vintage, I, you know, packaging was one of my key topics that I want to bring up. It was also really interesting to see we did a survey last year when we set our strategy I've been with Vintage for a year and a half. So one of my first things was to start collecting the information called a materiality analysis, basically pinpointing which areas are key sustainability areas. And as part of that, we did a survey in house and a lot of our staff were also interested in packaging, primary secondary packaging, and then of course, the waste of incoming packaging. So that that became one of our core core topics, and a very exciting one to be to be working on.

Craig Macmillan 2:22

For those of us who don't know what to what kind of companies of Vintage Wine Estates, what do they do?

Erica Landin-Lofving 2:28

Oh, yeah, Vintage Wine Estaes is a group we own 13 wineries, I believe and have 50 brands on top. Plus we do contract production for for external brands. We went public. Last June, June 20. June 22. It or is it 20 this year?

Craig Macmillan 2:47

Yeah. Oh, that's right. No, that's right. No, I do. Yeah. That was kind of a big deal.

Erica Landin-Lofving 2:53

It was a big deal. There aren't. Yeah, there aren't that many public public companies. So year and a half ago, we went public. Yeah, I know. That was that was part of the goal of of Pat Roney, our founder was to build a company to take public so that was definitely a big deal for the company. And we're continuing to grow. A lot of our brands, we will buy grapes, we buy juice, we even buy finished wines. So packaging is one of the sustainability aspects we can control there. For me, there's there's two big aspects to to packaging, of course, that the wine bottle is bigger than any of the other packaging considerations. The one that I'm most attached to is lightweighting. of glass, find alternative packaging is interesting. And so in Sweden, I think it's 56% of the wine sold by volume is in bag in box. But they are also big buyers of Tetra Pack, PET bottles, cans, wine and cans, and it becomes an interesting market to watch. I'm not completely positive to all the alternative packagings and we can we can get into that if they do have a much lower carbon footprint. But there are other considerations. I cans I am some fairly positive too. But let's dive into that separately. But I'm still a firm believer that the glass wine bottle is going to be our key wine packaging for the foreseeable future. However, this attachment that consumers and therefore producers have to heavy bottle being a signifier of quality of the wine, we've got to let that go. That is that got outdated when we set the Paris, Paris climate goals like that's it has nothing to do with the quality of the wine. This is part of the message that is finally slowly catching hold. And it's gone a lot further in Europe professionally in Scandinavia than it has in the US still, but I believe that we're heading that direction. I've started seeing articles on the negative aspects of a heavyweight bottle in New York Times ,Wall Street Journal,Wine Enthusiast and when that starts coming, it's like we're starting to get that message into the mainstream. It is going to bring change. Fancy wine wants to be sold in a heavy bottle still,

Craig Macmillan 4:59

Based on On that basis, we're now getting national non wine press paying attention to this a little bit. Do you think there might be a groundswell of public interest attitude belief that might put some pressure on wineries to reduce their glass weight to go to a lighter weight package?

Erica Landin-Lofving 5:15

I believe so I believe we're in the early days of it still, I think the people that we're going to reach first are the wine connoisseurs that read those newspapers, magazines, and want to be part of early adopters who want to show that they know something, as well as the millennial consumer who is not as concerned with tradition, and is very concerned with environmental aspects and more knowledgeable in general on on environmental impact. I think those are the two groups that will start making the change from two directions.

Craig Macmillan 5:45

Now, do you think that there is a curve of this behavior that's related to price, so somebody's going to buy a $100 bottle of wine in a traditional dead leaf green Berg bottle as opposed to a big heavy deep punt? You know, I've been doing some analysis, you can have a bottle that's say 400 grams, or you can have a bottle of over 1000 grams big difference? Am I going to pay the same for 400? As opposed to 1000? Do you think?

Erica Landin-Lofving 6:12

I think you will, when you understand why I mean for 400 is still an extremely lightweight bottle. 420 grams is kind of what the international wine industry has set as the limit for true lightweight bottle in the US. I know a lot of producers who speak about eco weight or lightweight and they mean 470 to 490 grams, I've started speaking in terms of true lightweight as something under 420. Those bottles do feel quite light, I think they will be their shoo ins for anything under $20. But I think for for these $100 bottles, moving them from the 900 Gram 32 ounce massive pieces down to more normal weight, like 500 500 grams, we should be able to do that. And again, this is where we're New York Times and Wall Street Journal's writing matters the most because they reach that consumer, when the first adopters there, start understanding this, they might react negatively to one of those super heavy bottles. I do now. I mean, this has been something I've been I've been looking at for a long time. But now if I lift a bottle and it's a 900 gram bottle, I just say like, seriously, why? Why would I want to buy this? Also, why would I want to drag this home and then drag it to recycling?

Craig Macmillan 7:24

Well, I think that you're absolutely right, that once we get below about a $20 retail price point, the lightweighting seems to be kind of a no brainer. As we push up. Hopefully that message will get out I think from a sustainability standpoint. But I also do wonder how far that can kind of go. Right. I remember, this is how old I am. I remember when very expensive Napa Cabernets came in a straight sided forest green Bordeaux bottle with a just a big square paper label on it and a very cheap foil. Now I don't think I could get $100 for that package. Even there's been a lot of work that's been done. And if I understand it correctly, this is you know, social psych stuff. If you give a consumer two bottles, one's heavy one's lighter, you say this is the same product even? Which what will you pay? Their willingness to pay is higher for the heavier package? Yeah, if that's true, right. That's a tough psychology to ignore.

Erica Landin-Lofving 8:20

That's a tough psychology to ignore.

Craig Macmillan 8:22

So some of it, I think, is consumer level. But I'd also like to hear a little bit on what's going on behind the scenes on the production side, what kinds of conversations ideas, potential is there because it seems like there might be some work to do there on the marketing side. But there's some work to do. Maybe behind the scenes side.

Erica Landin-Lofving 8:36

We'll just say that imagine that they were doing this test again. But that the test subjects had been given an article to read that said that the environmental impact of the bottle was the biggest contributor to the carbon footprint of the wine, how many of them their mind, and that's what I believe is the key. I think as long as the consumer does not know this difference, we will see a preference for the heavier bottles, the more that information disseminates into the marketplace, the more impact it will have. I will also say that so behind the scenes, one of the calculations that I'm doing is that I have a much bigger impact taking a SKU that has 300,000 case production and moving it from 500 grams to 400 grams. Then I do taking a SKU that's in a seven 750 gram bottle and moving it to 400 grams, but the production is only 1000 cases or even even less. So for that reason, my focus and our internal discussions center around the big volume wines. That said there there are bigger volume wines that come in those super heavy bottles. I For me, it's the super heavy bottles. We've got to watch out there because while I would like to make the move purely from a sustainability perspective, there is the marketing risk, but there's also a risk of not making the change. because I'll just tell you when I was in Sweden last time now Sweeden, as I said, much further along than the US market when it comes to consumer understanding of sustainability and an interest in sustainability. I went into the store and I was asking for advice on something cool and something high end. And the guy picked out two bottles, and he said, Oh, this one is great. This is Niepoort I, you know, I love this wine. 10 years of age for selling it aged, which is, you know, not always easy to find in a store. He said, but you might not want it. It's a super heavy bottle. And I said, Oh, why do you think I might not want it now? The sustainability impact is is pretty big. I don't know. I've had people hesitate. I was like, wow. They advised me away from a really cool wine because it's an a heavy bottle. And and I liked that. I know that I know that Jancis Robinson, for example, called out Joe Wryneck iIn South Africa, great producer, amazing wines, and definitely a sustainability champion. And this was a couple of years ago, you know, in in her magazine, she said you can't have accountability, profiling, make these beautiful wines, and put them in a super heavy bottle, if the message doesn't add up. And again, the more we get that, the more you're going to have high end consumers turn away from these bottles and be like, nope, gotta gotta change that.

Craig Macmillan 11:19

Maybe we're getting groundswell on both sides. Now, I want to get technical, I've done some of this work myself and feel like I have failed miserably. Probably not entirely true. But tell me about your methodology when you're looking at this with glass and you're trying to get a carbon footprint sense, because what I'm guessing when you're telling me what you're doing is you want to come back to management ownership and say, Hey, this is how much reduction we have in ourCO2 equivalent. Is that fair is that by alright?

Erica Landin-Lofving 11:46

Let's be completely fair, the the message to leadership is, this is how much we're saving on glass. And this is the sustainability messaging we can attach to it. But you know, the savings, CO2 reduction, for a lightweight bottle will almost always come at a lower price point. For us. One of the challenges has been finding really nice quality molds with perfect stability and stability. I don't mean to make the wine stable. I mean, we have some high speed bottling lines, we don't want it to crush in the bottling line, or we're losing speed. So finding these really nice looking molds, making sure that they're not shorter and smaller, we had a launch with 100 gram bottle on the on the Canadian market, it was shorter. We did not want to bring that to the to the US market.

Craig Macmillan 12:29

Well, why not? Oh,

Erica Landin-Lofving 12:30

The funny thing is you, you get a surprising number of people writing in saying, Hey, you're cheating me out of wine, I see this bottomless is smaller than a regular wine bottle. Right?

Craig Macmillan 12:40

Right. Yeah.

Erica Landin-Lofving 12:42

Especially the amount of it just didn't look looked nice on the shelf. But it makes me makes me laugh. And it makes me also understand the the millions of packaging said had that say this, you know, this package was full at the transport and items might have settled or things like that, because I understand that those companies were getting callbacks, saying, Hey, you're cheating me out of product. It still needs to look nice, then you have the calculation on saving on glass cost. But then you also get the calculations on saving in other parts of the production, which include transportation, because if you do have your bottles, a lot of our trucks aren't physically full, they are at their weight capacity, you lower the wine bottle weight, and you can load that truck to capacity before before hitting the weight limit. That's a saving right there. It's also an additional carbon carbon saving that I might not calculate. I would love it if I sat on all the data to do that. But I know that there is a gain there. But also things like throughout the supply chain, when you have people handling it, it's better for the for the people, it's better for the people who are lifting those cases. And if that's our crew, or if it is if it is the crew in the store or or logistics company, there's less wear and tear on people. I would personally if I was working in a wine store rather restock shelves with with the lightweight bottles or lighter weight bottles and those super heavy ones.

Craig Macmillan 14:05

Part of my job is I work in the tasting room. And it's amazing as a server, you know what a huge difference it makes, just carrying stuff from place to place and you can't tell whether something's full or not because of the weight of the glass is darn close to the weight of the wine, you know, it's drinking sense. So yes, absolutely. We do need to take that into account. There's wear and tear on people and there's efficiency questions. I think the mechanization question is a good one depending on which direction you're gonna go, what kind of molds you have and how fast you're trying to do it.

Erica Landin-Lofving 14:35

The super heavy mold so we're talking like the 32 ounce mold that's also wear and tear on equipment and extra energy for the for the forklifts and trucks transporting it around. I'm not at the level where I'm doing calculations on that but definitely in the bottling line running a 32 ounce bottle this is going to be rough around the mechanics. And again, lifting it with a forklift is going to take more energy I mean In basic physics, you might not know the exact gain from a lighter weight bottle. But there's definitely gains throughout.

Craig Macmillan 15:07

You mentioned it before. And this is a really interesting question because there's a winery that I'm familiar with, that's in the oh, golly, 25 to $75 retail range with their products at least. And they just brought out a bag and box product.

Erica Landin-Lofving 15:22

Tablets Creek?

Craig Macmillan 15:23

Maybe.

Erica Landin-Lofving 15:26

I love those guys. I really...

Craig Macmillan 15:30

I think we can leave that in the podcast, can't we?

Erica Landin-Lofving 15:34

It was a was three liter.

Craig Macmillan 15:36

I'm sorry, yes, three litre, and was a customer who brought this to me because we were talking about these issues. And they said, hey, you know, I just saw this product. Maybe I'm not gonna put super high end wines, really expensive wines. I mean, I don't want to have a $400 box product and then say, okay, you gotta drink all four bottles necessarily. But how many future do you think there is for that, or one liter turbo pack packaging and that kind of thing.

Erica Landin-Lofving 15:57

With those alternativepackagings, I'll just list the ones that I would look at. One is Tetra Pak, usually one liter, can be 77, or 750 milliliters to the PT plastic bottle, which is very often same size as a regular wine bottle. Aluminum can which can be between 25 centimeters and 33 centimeters. Generally, you have the wine pouch, which is the one and a half liter and the wine pouch is more or less like the inside of bag and box, it's usually a little bit thicker. And then you have the bag and box, which is generally three liters. I've seen two liters, frequently as well, the bag and box. As I said, it's 56% or more of the Swedish market by volume. It's popular as well in places like Norway, Finland, partially because it brings down the price of wine a little bit, but it's also growing a lot in France, supermarket sales.

Craig Macmillan 16:48

What kind of price points are we talking here? I know that I know. We're talking about years and things.

Unknown Speaker 16:53

Yeah, so I would say for three liter box, which is the equivalent of four bottles, I would say most of them lasted between 20 and $40. So at $40 because you have a lower packaging cost, lower lower handling cost, so on. So at $40 It's not a $10 bottle of wine. It's a $15 bottle of wine. I mean, it's not high end high end, but it's not bad wine either. What Tablas did launching $100 $100 box, so $25 a bottle. That was that was unusual, and it was a great PR thing and it got got people talking, I don't believe we're going to see mass market boxes in that price range. But I definitely think that there should be more 30 $40 boxes. There's one advantage of the bag in box, which is of course it's really just take one glass, it's also really easy to take three glasses not notice that you're taking three glasses every night. So you know, two sides, two sides to that. But it's a it's a pretty convenient format. And it's gone from being something that people hide in Sweden to something that you actually you know, you have people over for dinner, you put it out, maybe you poured into craft to make it look nicer. But it's it's not something that the mainstream consumer hides anymore. Maybe the wine geeks still shy away from it. Carbon footprint of wine in pouch or wine in bag and box is once we say it's it's less than a fourth of a lightweight bottle per liter equivalent.

Craig Macmillan 18:19

Wow. And huge.

Less than 1/6 of a traditional glass bottle at 540 grams.

Wow.

Erica Landin-Lofving 18:27

So yeah, it's big

Craig Macmillan 18:29

That's very attractive.

Erica Landin-Lofving 18:31

So let me tell you what I don't like about t.

Craig Macmillan 18:32

Yes, please do.

Erica Landin-Lofving 18:34

And honestly for you know, for your general consumer who consumes their wine within days or a week of buying it and who buys at the $15 price point. Sure. Go for the box. What I don't like about it is plastic recycling in the US is still pretty limited. So that pouch does not necessarily get recycled, which means plastic production and landfill. Don't love that. And then of course, most of the plastic pouches have a petroleum base. So fossil fossil base, you can you can weigh that against the carbon footprint and see what what it's important to you. The other thing is when I worked as a wine writer, many years back since we had so many quality wines and seven saying like 15 $20 wines in both box and bottle, maybe not $20 wines but let's say $15 We would as journalists, we would sometimes go and we would buy the same wine in bottle and the same by wine in box and make a comparison and 80% of the wines tasted tasted a little bit better in bottle 20% of the wines tasted better in the box and they were usually the ones who would have in the bottle needed a little bit age a little bit less sulfur or somehow just breathe more. Because it's not inert. That pouch is not inert. While the Swedish monopoly says it has says six month in six months there's no problem with a with a bag and box. I would like to do taste tests on. I think maybe what they're checking that acid and sulfur levels and VA and things like that aren't actually changing. But I do believe that there are some sensory changes over time.

Craig Macmillan 20:12

Interesting. What about cans.

Erica Landin-Lofving 20:13

Oooh I like cans.

Craig Macmillan 20:15

Aluminum is very attractive from recycling standpoint, it's one of the one thing that we seem to be able to do fairly well out in the US compared to plastic of things.

Unknown Speaker 20:23

I'll call out the US. So let's just say that glass recycling percentage in Scandinavia is 98 to 99%. In the US, the recycling rate is 31.1% for glass and in California and step up towards 60 beer and soft drink cans. So that's where we can classify wine cans to the recycling rate. It's actually 50. A little bit over 50% In the US, so isn't terrible. It's still almost half of Scandinavia, which is again 98%. But let's just say it's, it's not it's not terrible. So yes, it's decently easy to recycle. The carbon footprint is about twice that of a pouch or bag and box, but still, then less than half way less than half of lightweight glass bottle and about a third, a little less than a third of a standard weight bottle. So, so good. I liked the format. I can't I can't help it. I'm, I'm a bonafide wine geek. I drink the fun stuff. I like that. It's a small, small package. I like that it's very easy to transport. It is inert. It does have that little tiny plastic lining sometimes but I just think you can play with it. You can put fun wines in it if it doesn't suit all wines. And not all wines are good drinking from the county there. But I think it's a great packaging, especially for newer consumers, millennial consumers who aren't so stuffy about how things are supposed to be done. But you know, rosacea, white wines, orange wines, sparkling wines, lighter quaffable reds, and some fun packaging to go with it. Say like, why not? I like it. We we have one we have Alloy Alloy comes in cans. And we've done some specially can projects for festivals. But isn't it a nice format. I mean, if you're going to go to a festival or a picnic, and you're drinking out of plastic glass anyway, so you might as well just bring a can. I think it's a way for the wine industry to also tap into all those people that are drinking spiked kombucha and hard ciders and who are you know, necessarily dragging my bottle around.

Craig Macmillan 22:32

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was a long time ago. But I forget the name of the product. There was an Australian product that came out and it was in a half size can. And you see sodas occasionally in this like smaller can. And I thought it was really interesting. And then I met an Australian winemaker who was visiting. And I asked him about it. And if he was familiar, he was oh, yeah, absolutely. Everybody loves those things are everywhere. It was like really knows, yeah, you don't need to take the thing. You dump it in your cooler and you put a bunch of ice over it. And anyway to the barbecue you are set. It's easy. It's great.

Erica Landin-Lofving 23:01

I do think a key thing is putting in like quality stuff.

Craig Macmillan 23:04

That's the question then is what's the quality level that we can kind of get to.

Erica Landin-Lofving 23:08

I think like a sweet spot a 10. A $10 canister is nice. Like don't make it the crap wines I want I want a little bit better quality and a little more fun ones and actually suitable to natural wines, natural wines to both from a style stylistic perspective. And also because you have to reduce your you can't add as much sulfur to to a canned wine or it becomes productive. So you have to adjust your..

Craig Macmillan 23:32

Yeah, we we keep coming back to millennials. And so I kind of want to wrap wrap this up on this topic. Again, based on your experience, your view, you obviously are on top of this, because you mentioned it several times. How much of a difference is there generally generationally in interest, and maybe even willingness to pay just the sustainability topic? For folks. It sounds like Millennials are much more interested in do more research on this than maybe the folks that from later or earlier generations. You see that continuing?

Erica Landin-Lofving 24:10

Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's with with younger generations, and I mean, I'm on the cusp of that myself. There's definitely more interest. And they are better at calling out BS too. They might, you know, they're not going to dig into every every number, but they they want a credible story and they want sustainability to be part of the story that you are telling about your wine. And yeah, I mean, they it's definitely one of the things that makes me hopeful is the more consumers is that we have a problem reaching them as one consumers but if we can pull them into the fold, one way of pulling them into the fold of wine lovers is actually To, to show this connection to the earth that we have in wine, I mean are seriously our product is so much more natural than a lot of the stuff that sold us, you know, no additives, no super sustainable, no carbon footprint, whatever they're selling it as it's still like a manufactured product in a, in a more synthetic way we have a direct connection to land, I think we need to communicate that to them. And part of that communication needs to it needs to consider sustainability that we are stewards of our land.

Craig Macmillan 25:29

So maybe just to editorialize for a second maybe not only on an individual level to individual wine companies, but maybe it's an industry wide, we need to do a better a better job messaging sustainability, and communicating to the consumer, especially apparently the millennial, what we're about what we do in in some of what our kind of standard practices are I you know, I mean, I remember when I first started farming years and years and years ago, the idea of cover crops was a little bit iffy. And I had one friend of mine, and he tried it, he says, you know, I'm farming two crops, I can barely farm one crop, and I'm farming two now, minimum and many years later. It's everywhere you just, of course you do you know, why wouldn't you? You know that so those changes there. Now it's a practice that I think it's an important practice that if people realize what's involved and why people do it, I think it could be very, very beneficial. Kind of wrapping up what one piece of advice or message or idea would you like to communicate to, let's say, winery owner or management or whatever on this topic, what's the one piece of like advice that you would have?

Erica Landin-Lofving 26:30

Well, I guess we've spent the last half hour talking about it, but it is definitely to consider the full scope of your packaging as part of your core sustainability work. Lift your eyes from just the Vinyard. It's super important, but include the winery and definitely include packaging, primary and secondary packaging and see what you can improve. Start asking questions, start asking your suppliers for information, ask your glass producer, what their coolest content is the recycled content, just start getting an understanding of what sustainable wine packaging is and how you can implement it and start communicating it to your customers, the more of us that tell the customer that these super heavyweight bottles are actually not an environmentally beneficial way of selling wine, the quicker the consumer is going to catch that and you know, what if you don't care at all about the environmental footprint, care about your your costs of goods, and help the rest of us get that message.

Craig Macmillan 27:24

Because one of the E's is economy economics, right? And that's part of the picture and controlling my costs is huge. Where can people find out more about you?

Erica Landin-Lofving 27:33

Oh, geez, I was to say I'm all over the internet. I've been a writer on other podcasts and speaking probably Google my name I there's not that many Erica Lofving spelled LOFVING in wine out there. My name is we Landin. So half of my articles are in Swedish. But you can you could probably find out online and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to have a dialogue about anything.

Craig Macmillan 27:58

Fantastic. Wonderful. Our guest today has been Erica laughing. She's Chief Sustainability Officer with Vintage Wine Estates. Thank you for being the guest today. It's been a really fascinating conversation. And I look forward to talk to you again. Let's meet you in person at some point.

Erica Landin-Lofving 28:11

Thanks for having a good podcast. I always enjoy listening to the people. You're interviewing so much knowledge out in the wine industry.

Craig Macmillan 28:18

There really is. There's just a lot of richness and that's one thing that I love about doing this is meeting people like yourself and hearing perspectives and information I never otherwise would have gotten.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Of the 3 Ps of Sustainability (People, Planet, and Prosperity), People is no doubt the most important one. Without the supporters, partners, and cherished friends in our community, who would be here to enjoy the prosperous planet we are all striving toward?

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

This week's Marketing Tip is a bit different than previous tips. We want to share how the parent non-profit organization of the SIP Certified program, Vineyard Team, helps children of vineyard and winery workers achieve their dreams of higher education. Applications for the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship are open through March 31st, 2023. If you work in California's wine industry, you probably know several people who are eligible to apply for the scholarship!

Investing in future generations

Vineyard Team's Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship is our way of giving back to the community and contributing to a prosperous future of educated and determined professionals. This funding supports students and their families in achieving their dreams of successful graduation to pursue a professional career. The majority of awardees are first-generation college students, who have more barriers when it comes to attaining higher education.

This isn't designed to be a one-time award. Starting in 2023 we will award two- and four-year scholarships, complete with a graduation bonus to help them launch into the next phase of life. The total will end up being in the range of $6k to $20k per student. We've also invested in a program mentor, Alex Gonzalez, who will be a resource to the students. This upgraded scholarship is possible because of the local non-profit Must! Charities recognized the importance of this program and have created a matching funds program for us.

Share this scholarship opportunity!

Applications for the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship are open March 1st – 31st. Please share this opportunity with your team by posting and electronically sharing the flyer (available in English and Spanish), and sharing the paycheck inserts with your payroll facilitator so they can reach the families of your operation's workers/employees -- who are likely eligible for this opportunity!

You can help the program flourish

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Use the link in the show notes to make a donation to the program, and share this podcast with those you think could benefit from learning more about the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship.

Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging.

Check out the show notes for links to the scholarship flyers, paycheck inserts, application, to donate, to read stories from our incredible scholars, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter.

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

References:

• **SIP Smart Training online course
• Apply for the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship
• Donate to the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship
• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship Pintables
  • Flyer (English & Spanish)
  • Paycheck Insert (English)
  • Paycheck Insert (Spanish)
• Scholar Stories
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• SIP Certified
• Vineyard Team

Amid extreme weather events, many grape growers ask themselves what they can do to adapt their vineyard for climate change. Chris Chen, Integrated Vineyard Systems Advisor in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake Counties at the University of California Cooperative Extension is exploring solutions to this question. Mediterranean climates like California, with hot and dry summers and cold wet winters, are particularly sensitive. Researchers expect temperature maximums will be higher and the minims will be lower in years to come. Chris explains a few tactics growers can use to continue farming successfully amid climate changes including rootstocks, canopy management, new scions, and most importantly trialing.

• References:
• REGISTER: 3/10/23 Canopy Management: Trellising, Sunburn, & Mechanization Tailgate Meeting | Paso Robles, CA
• 67: Impacts of Climate Change on Wine Production
• A New World of Wine: How the Viticultural Map is Changing | Greg Jones | International Masters of Wine Symposium (Video)
• Andy Walker, Emeritus Louise Rossi Endowed Chair in Viticulture and Enology
• Chen Lab
• Chris Chen Twitter
• Climate, Grapes, and Wine | Greg Jones | TEDx Roseburg (Video)
• Out of Sync: Vine Responses to Changing Conditions
• SIP Certified
• UCCE North Coast Viticulture
• UCCE Sonoma County Viticulture
• UCCE Viticulture Newsletters Online - North Coast
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.

Transcript

Craig Macmillan 0:00

My guest today is Chris Chen. He's integrated vineyard systems advisor for Sonoma Mendocino and Lake counties with the University of California Cooperative Extension. And I think we're gonna have a very interesting conversation today, Chris has done some pretty interesting work and some pretty interesting ideas. So welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris Chen 0:14

Thanks, Craig. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.

Craig Macmillan 0:16

Doing a little bit of background on you. Would you say that there's a particular thread or what the thread is that runs through your research and extension work? Because it seems like there is one to me.

Chris Chen 0:25

A lot of my work is focused on adaptation to climate change and vineyards. And it's something that goes back to when I was in grad school, you know, the, the whole climate change thing became really big and something to focus on when I entered grad school. And as I went through grad school, it became what I did. The thread here is kind of how do we adapt viticulture, to changing climates? How do we predict what a climate today is going to be in 510 years, the thread is to see how can we adapt to these changing conditions, and still keep viticulture, thriving and successful.

Craig Macmillan 0:57

What is the prediction right now, in terms of let's start with California, but we can talk about the West Coast, we can also talk about New York, and we can talk about Europe. But you work in California, what is the current picture in terms of long term climate change that might affect grapes?

Unknown Speaker 1:15

It's not really easy to say this will happen that will happen. But what we expect to see in California, it's a Mediterranean climate right now, these are very sensitive climate types, typically classified as regions with really hot, dry summers, cold, wet winters, right. And they're kind of fringe ecosystems, fringe climates. So they're on the border of, of an inland climate in a coastal climate, that means they're the most sensitive to climate change. So what we're expecting to see in California, and what a lot of researchers, climate researchers are planning on is, you know, increased temperatures, the maximums are going to be higher, the minimums are going to be lower, and those swings are going to be more drastic in between. So the diurnal temperature shift is going to be huge. You know, that is something that everyone kind of expects with climate change. It gets hotter, it gets colder, the extremes are more extreme, but what we're not really sure about is how precipitation is going to change. And in California, rainfall is such a huge thing. It's variable year to year, we have droughts for three years at a time and then one relief year, what we're really confused about is how is the rain pattern gonna change where we are today are we going to get the same rainfall and we're going to be able to support viticulture here anymore?

Craig Macmillan 2:33

Now that brings up an interesting question. I'm going to bring up Andy Walker here, Dr. Andy Walker, the very famous plant breeder and I attended a seminar that he did on rootstocks, which he's done a ton of work and many rootstocks are out as a result of his lab. And he started off the whole thing by saying, you can dry farm winegrapes anywhere in the world. And the room just went silent, like I don't think anybody was breathing. And then he says, Now you might get two clusters, providing but the plant itself is going to do what it does. It's an amazing plant. It's incredible. And then he went on and talked about being in the Andes and seeing things in different parts of the world. And I found that really inspiring because when we talk about what we're doing right now, water, obviously is probably the biggest knob. If you have all these knobs, you can twist fertilizer, whatever water is probably the biggest one. Yeah, California, you have done some work with a number of people, but also with Kaan Kutural who I love on drought tolerance, drought resistance, I would say and what kinds of things? Are you finding out what you mean? Where is it kind of leading you? Where is it? What's kind of the thought process?

Chris Chen 3:38

Andy, he was also my doctoral advisor. So I've heard his Spiel once or twice about dry farming. You know, you can do that can grow grapes in most almost all places without water there. There are grapes on islands that are irrigated with fog drip, so it's possible, but he's also right in saying that you're not going to get the yields that make you profitable. So that's concerning. And what we want to avoid, because we still need a certain tonnes per acre to reach profit margin that matters in terms of what can we do and how we're going for drought adaptation. There's the old approach of using rootstocks. And it's a very useful approach, right, these rootstocks from Andy Walker's perspective, and if you're looking at it from his lens, they have different rooting patterns. They have different water demands, and that translates to what we're growing on top. Whether it's Cab, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, whatever you want to grow on top of it, it's going to be impacted by what it's grafted to that is actually a very reasonable strategy to address drought that has its limits, you know, you still need water to grow grapes. Almost all grape vines in the wild, are only found near perennial water sources. So it's not like we can get rid of water altogether. We can't just leave them alone and expect to have any crop on them. But there's other things we can do. One of the huge management strategies that we can look at is canopy management. So canopy management in vineyards have really impacts how much water transpires and how much water evaporates from the surface of the soil. With a bigger canopy, you get less evaporation. But you also get more transpiration because there's more leaves, right. And vice versa. If you have a small canopy, you have the opposite problem that actually really impacts your fruit, your crop load, you know the quality of your fruit, the characteristics of the berries. So it's not something that everybody's going to play around with, because they want us to in the end, they want a certain kind of fruit with certain characteristics for their winery. But canopy management is a huge one as well, as rootstocks, there's also the interest in precision agriculture. So there is the spoon feeding approach where instead of irrigating large quantities at once, we can irrigate small portions at a time.

Craig Macmillan 5:43

Irrigate strategicly. I mean, I've seen some pretty interesting work from the past where it was like a 10, Vine irrigation block. And you were able to control this and that little bit in that little bit. And you could use NDVI to figure out where you want to do it. Interesting work. I'd never was convinced how practical that might be for most growers, especially if you're retrofitting their orchards.

Chris Chen 6:05

In Australia that irrigate on a tree to tree basis. So it's very doable. You know, the question is, how much water would you actually save doing that? And how much energy are you using to pump that every time?

Craig Macmillan 6:18

Exactly. Now, we're talking about rootstocks rootstock breeding back in the day, 100 years ago, or whenever it was all about phylloxera. And it was about salt. I know that Dr. Walker has done a lot of work on salt resistance. n=Nematode resistance is turned out to be a big one. If I remember that's the GRM series are specifically for nematode. Is that right?

Chris Chen 6:38

Correct. Yes. Those are anti Walker's.

Craig Macmillan 6:40

Crowning achievements. Brilliant stuff. You know, we're talking about genetic differences and rootstocks that have been bred for different conditions, including things like drought tolerance. What about what's on top, you make a point one of your articles that the landscape of wine growing is dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, which means we have a very limited genome, essentially, of what's above ground. And we've learned from other crops that might not be such a great idea. We're talking about maybe trying to rootstock our way out of some of this. Can we variety, some of our way out of this.

Chris Chen 7:11

So the short answer to that is yes. The long answer is a bit more complex. You know, overall, all of the scions we put on are all one species Vitus vinifera, there's a few others like Vitesse labrusca, which is Concorde. And there's a there's a couple others that we use, but the majority of what we consider winegrapes is Vitus vinifera. So the genetic differences in the scions are not huge. The real differences are in the phenotyping. Right, you look at a Cabernet Sauvignon vine. And you compare that to a Tempranillo or Zinfandel, you'll see that the latter, they actually have quite larger canopies, even though they're the same species. The weird thing is they're more heat tolerant. Part of that might be their transpiration and might be for several reasons, these small changes in how they look change how they interact with their environment. So the real concern in you know, changing the scions from place to place site to site is that some places actually have latched on to a variety or two. If you think about Napa Napa, you think Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, where I work in the north coast, it's Pinot Noir, a little bit of Chardonnay, some Sauvignon Blanc and Lake County, right? It's very possible to say, you know, if we have a one, one site that increases temperatures by, you know, temperature accumulation by 20%, in 10 years, it might behoove them to go from a cold climate grapes like Pinot Noir and switch over to something like Zinfandel. The problem is, well, the market that purchases their wine actually still keep buying their wines. If they go to Zinfandel, it would be a smart move. If you're thinking about, you know, the physiology of the plant of the difficulty of managing the vineyard, all the extra things you have to do if you want to stick with that cold climate grew up in a hot climate, not to say that people don't do that we do have Pinot Noir grown in San Joaquin Valley, for instance, just not as much as up here. So it's possible one of the problems is actually picking those varieties, picking the right varieties because just because it gets hotter here doesn't mean you know, Santa Rosa has the same climate as Bakersfield. There's differences in humidity and light incidents. There's differences in just cultural practices, what people do to manage the soils what they do for fertilizing. So overall, yeah, it's possible but there's other barriers besides just switching the plant.

Craig Macmillan 9:29

It sounds like some of those barriers are the ability to make accurate predictions about what might happen if I'm planting Zinfandel in an area where it's never really had Zinfandel. I don't know exactly what's gonna go on. But then also it sounds like acceptance of the marketplace is gonna play a big role. That's that's a different conversation. Unless you have a feeling about it. I think part of what goes on is we do have information from the marketplace. We do have research, but a lot of what goes on here is growers themselves as individuals are making decisions out what's gonna happen? Right? It's not necessarily that we're getting handed down this necessarily the trend, but like, I think this is where we're gonna go. When you talk to people about this kind of thing. What kind of response do you get from growers?

Chris Chen 10:10

Yeah, you know, it depends. There are growers that are all about trying new cultivars, and they usually inhabit kind of niche markets, a lot of these growers will grow varieties that are useful for blending. So if you need some more color, if you need some more acids, they'll grow these varieties that impart that to wines that otherwise wouldn't have them. And you know, there's only so much of a market for that. I think there's also growers on the other side where they say, Well, no, in order for us to make our ends meet, we have to stick with so and so variety, we have to stay with Pinot Noir because our entire consumer base wants it. And you know, there's trends in viticulture in California as a whole that have followed these, you know, this chain of events Muscats Muscats, used to be very popular along with making a rose out of Zinfandel. Riesling was another one, people planted a bunch of these things, and then the consumer market dropped out. And they were stuck with fines that take, you know, five years to hit any kind of good crop. And within those five years, it fell out of favor. So they're selling their grapes for pennies, compared to what they would have been if had they had them at the peak of the popularity, we can't change our varieties just based on popularity, and we can't keep them just based on popularity. But there are these constants right 40% of the grapes planted in California are Cabernet Sauvignon Chardonnay, which is not a bad thing. It just means that people want it.

Craig Macmillan 11:31

use the term asynchronous or asynchrony, and viticulture. What What do you mean when you refer to that?

Chris Chen 11:37

so that's a term that I thought would be very applicable to the situation. So vineyards as a whole run on a schedule, they run on timing, and part of that is their biological timing, right? So their biological timing is based off of heat accumulation. So the hotter it is for the longer the quicker we have budbreak, the quicker we have chute growth and fruit set, and so on. So that as the climates are changing, and we know we're going to see higher temperatures in some places, then we're seeing a shift in that timing. And a shift in that timing changes a lot of things, it changes how the plants interact with insects and pests and beneficial insects, because they're also changing their timing, we're seeing, you know, some insect pests are increasing their generations. So they instead of two generations a year, they'll have three in some really hot places, for instance. But also these these beneficial insects that control the pests are switching their timing of hatching and switching their timing of maturity. And we're seeing that more and more, and we're afraid we're gonna start seeing that in agriculture relatively soon. So what all of that together means is that when you look at a vineyard, the events that you would have had for the past 100 years are not happening at the same times as they would have been in the next 10 years than they did previously. And that's a challenge actually, for you know, management as well, because labor resources are, especially in agriculture are often you know, made more available during timeframes where they're needed. And if that timeframe changes, there's gonna be a year or two where that's a problem.

Craig Macmillan 13:09

If we don't change anything, let's say we don't change varieties, we don't change the root stocks or anything, I'll get vineyards that are 10 years old now and hopefully get another decade or two out of it, or I'm making decisions 20 years from now for a variety like Cabernet Sauvignon you're in and we will talk about Pinot Noir as well that I think that's an important one. But I want to start with Cab, in your experience, let's say things get warmer and colder. And then we don't know what's going to happen with weather. So let's just leave rainfall out of it for now. But just the swings in the higher the highs and lower lows, what impact do you think that's gonna have on wine quality or yield? How are these things going to change? Do you think as a viticulturalist?

Chris Chen 13:45

Especially wine grapes really need that big swing in temperature, so they need that diurnal shift that's really hot summer days and really cold summer nights. That really helps them develop their flavonol profiles, their tannins, their anthocyanins, anthocyanins more so about, light, you know, incidents light exposure, but that's beside the point. So it's actually kind of a good thing. The problem is when we hit these limits, right? So when we hit these limits of it's too hot. So now instead of accumulation of these compounds, what we're seeing is a degradation of them. So they're accumulating in the grapes faster throughout the year. So again, this is that asynchrony, right. So as you get closer toward the traditional historic harvest time, you think, okay, these grapes are still accumulating their tannins, or they're still accumulating their flavonols or their their anthocyanins are not degrading it. But what we're seeing is that increase in the growing degree days or heat accumulation is actually decreasing the amount of stable compounds in the grape that we want. So we're seeing especially with color, we're seeing a degradation in color. anthocyanins are degrading, much sooner and to higher degrees in these really hot summers, especially when We have these heat waves that we had last year. These heat waves are terrible for these things. But we don't know which varieties are going to be tolerant to this and can can withstand these changes in extremes. So the increases in high temperatures, the decreases in low temperatures, the low temperatures aren't really a problem unless we get freezing temperatures which we shouldn't in summer, but it's not impossible.

Craig Macmillan 15:23

Not impossible could happen. What about Pinot Noir, famously very sensitive, very narrow range that it likes. Right. I got you on the spot here.

Chris Chen 15:32

Yeah, I can't speak to that too much. Because all of the trials that I've done and I've seen have been with Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the most popular red varieties in the world, I can't say that it's more or less sensitive to these changes Pinot Noir. But based on its classification, as a region, one region two cold climate grape, it's likely to be more sensitive to these extreme highs in summer and degrade faster. We do know that Pinot Noir ripens sooner than Cabernet Sauvignon does, on average, you know, put them in the same spot and your Pinot is going to be done. I don't know spitballing number here two weeks before the Cabernet is so you harvest the two weeks ahead of time. That means if you're harvesting it at the same time as Cabernet, you're getting more degradation in those anthocyanin. So that would be the theory behind why Pinot Noir might be more affected by these high temperatures. But I don't have anything to cite for you at the moment.

Craig Macmillan 16:25

Sure, sure. But I think that your insight there is useful in that. Okay, maybe we don't know what's gonna happen. We can kind of guess at some things that might happen. But if we know kind of where things might end up, or how the vine might repond, I might change my winemaking, I might change my canopy management style, right? I knew a guy who was an old school farmer, and he refused to put in drip irrigation even in new vineyards. And I asked him about it. And he said salts, that's the way to go. That's it only way to do it. And I was like, well, that's 1974 It's not 1974 anymore. And he goes looks listen in the middle of a day, it's 105 I can turn on those sprinklers. And I can cool that canopy and I can avoid stress. I said we're gonna overwater, you're gonna do it, because you just gotta know what you're doing son, like just, I can put it out there. And I can manage this a more effective tool for me. I watched him over the years and saw what he did. He had it really dialed in. But he had a totally different approach to what tool he wanted to use to deal with whatever the environmental condition was. And I thought that was really interesting and very clever. Are there things that we can learn from other parts of the world? Because obviously, there's differences in climate different places to Australia, you know, very different interestes and very warm areas there, if I understand correctly, are we gaining knowledge, we gained some guidance from other parts of the world on this topic?

Chris Chen 17:42

If we're not we should be there's this popular topic that England United Kingdom can grow grapes now, and they can grow good grapes now. And that's new. That never used to be the case. And you know the story of I don't know if this is true. But the story of why Brut champagne or Brut sparkling wines called Brut is because the French made it for the English and they didn't like them. No, I mean, we do have things to learn. Yeah, we do have things to learn from other people, especially places that are really hot. South Africa, Australia, these, you know, these locations are, a lot of them are dealing with conditions that, you know, we see here as well, but they're dealing with it on a much larger scale. So we see, you know, really hot temperatures in the San Joaquin Valley, Sacramento Valley. But we grow grapes there. And we're good at it. You know, in Australia, that's a huge swath of land that's in those kinds of conditions. But then the one where it gets really sensitive is when we get to the coast when we get to colder climates, like where I work where I operate. So it's going to be, you know, the coastal regions that really are impacted more, because they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the cultivars to really tolerate that heat. And what we need to do is look at places that are experiencing this change before we're experiencing it. And often these are Mediterranean climates, also, right, New Zealand, Australia, South America, Chile, and see what they're doing, see how they're adapting to it and what cultivars they're planting. You know, I'm not saying that all of Mendocino County should be planting Sheraz or Sahra. But you know, it might be good for some growers to try it out and see what's going on. I've been advocating for a lot of growers that, you know, if you're replanting, and vineyard, plant a few other cultivars somewhere and just see how they do, you know, it's not really great for if you're harvesting with the machine, because you end up knocking those into the same bin as all the other grapes. But if you could, you know, find an area where it's isolated and far enough away that you're not going to mix them up might be good to plant five, five to 10 vines of something else and see how it does because each each region is going to be different. Each region is going to have to have a different response because climate change is very regional.

Craig Macmillan 19:53

But the good news is that we are pretty clever. As an industry we've come up with all kinds of solutions to all kinds of problems over the years. without the folks like you have made that possible. We're running out of time. But I want to ask you one very simple and very short question. And that is based on everything that we've kind of talked about what one piece of advice or what one takeaway would you give a grape grower?

Chris Chen 20:16

I would say the most important thing is to do really good monitoring practices to really get out there and see how your vines are changing, and how your site is changing. You can you can try new cultivars, you can try, you know, different root stocks, you can try different canopy management practices. But if you don't keep track of how things are changing in response to that, then there's no point, right? There's a lot of really good tools out there. There's a lot of new things coming out that you can you can, you know, remotely sense and identify diseases, changes in stomatal conductance in different physiological measurements that are really important to developing a grapevine. Just look at these new monitoring solutions. Be wary of ones that may or may not work, you know, don't don't put all of your your eggs in one basket, that kind of thing. But get out there and monitor.

Craig Macmillan 21:06

I think that's great advice. And I think that applies to a lot of things. Where can people find out more about you?

Chris Chen 21:10

I have a website. If you go to Google, and you type in UC AND Chris Chen, it should bring up my bio, and there's a link to my lab page there, has a bunch of resources has a bunch of links and papers. And I think you know, especially if you're in the North Coast region and the counties I work in, you can just give me a call. You know, most people can just call me anyways, I work for University of California. So it's, you know, quasi public domain. Yeah, please feel free to reach out.

Craig Macmillan 21:38

Fantastic. So our guest today has been Chris Chen. He's an integrated vineyard systems advisor for Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties with the University of California Cooperative Extension. Thanks for being on the podcast. Chris. This is really fun.

Chris Chen 21:50

Thanks for having me. Craig. Enjoyed it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

We hope that the previous Marketing Tips' strategies to build a strong brand and practices to maintain consumer trust have been helpful in planning or reviewing your branding strategy. But branding isn't something you can set and forget.

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

This week we'll go over ways you can manage the brand strategies you have already put in place.

Ensure Consistency with a Style Guide

Consistent imagery and language help to provide the voice and visual presence of your brand. A style guide is a document that provides guidelines for the ways in which you communicate through and about your brand. Style guides typically include your logo and any variations of it, your color palette, typography details, and design standards (think minimalist, modern, etc). Having all of this standardized and readily available for reference will help to give direction and provide cohesion for all of your visual communications.

SIP Tip: check out our Style Guide!

Bring in the Team

It's important that your entire team is on the same page when it comes to branding efforts. Start your next team meeting with an overview of your branding strategy so that everyone is aware of your brand's communication style and messaging. And be open to their feedback! Every team member has a different experience when it comes to interacting with your brand. They can provide valuable insights into how the brand is being perceived, what efforts seem to be working, and which ones can use improvement.

Continually Share Your Story

Whether it's in the tasting room, on your website, in your sales calls, or in casual conversations, telling your brand's story in an open and authentic way is key to a consistent brand identity that people will recall and trust. Did you know that talking about your specific sustainability efforts can boost wine sales? In her recent research, Kathy Kelley Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University found that when brands shared stories about their sustainable practices and why they used them, consumers were willing to pay $1 - $4 more for a bottle of wine! Listen to her 22-minute interview with Craig Macmillan to learn more about her findings, and how you can experience these benefits.

More SIP tips to come!

Searches for sustainable goods have increased by 71% since 2016 making it more important than ever to share your message of sustainability. Continue to tell your customers how your brand protects the health of the people and the planet. It lets them know that by purchasing your wine they are supporting a brand that shares their values. Stay tuned for more ways to communicate your good work.

Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging.

Check out the show notes for links to our latest tips to help you build your brand strategy and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

References:

• **SIP Smart Training online course
• 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine
• 3 Ways to Build a Strong Brand
• Did you know...?
• Do consumers trust your brand?
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• SIP Certified

The study of whole vine physiology does not isolate one variable in grape growing. It looks at many factors at once including data collection in the plant, in the environment and in fruit. In her research, Patty Skinkis, Viticulture Extension Specialist and Professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University helps growers improve their farming practices by evaluating the plant growth stage, shoot growth, pruning weights, yield, cluster weight, berry size, and fruit chemistry. Patti shares her surprising results from a 10-year trial on crop load management. Grower trials found there was very little difference with crop thinning in both fruit and wine quality.

References:

• 145: New Class of Compounds Linked to Smoke Taint in Wines
• 2/15/2023 Managing Grapevine Trunk Disease Webinar | REGISTER
• Elizabeth Tomasino, Associate Professor, Oregon State University
• Patty Skinkis
• Patty Skinkis Google Scholar Page
• Patty Skinkis on Instagram
• SIP Certified
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member
• Yield Management Video

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.

Transcript

Craig Macmillan 0:00

And our guest today is Dr. Patti Skinkis. She is viticulture extension specialist and professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University. And really excited to have you here tonight. Welcome Patti.

Patti Skinkis 0:10

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Craig Macmillan 0:12

So there's a concept that's kind of out there. I'm familiar with the words, but I'm not entirely familiar with what it means. What is whole vine physiology?

Patti Skinkis 0:21

Whole vine physiology is really looking at the study of how the vine is responding to its environment. And it's not looking at just one component, it's looking at how the entire vine is responding. A lot of times, whole plant physiologists are more applied plant physiologist, rather than more fundamental in that they're looking at exactly how that plant is responding to its environment. And sometimes that environment is things that we do to it, such as the studies that we do and in crop management, as well as fine tuning, looking at some aspects and and trying to understand how it links to other aspects of how that plant is responding to its environment. But we're taking the plant as a whole.

Craig Macmillan 0:59

That sounds kind of difficult. It sounds like there's a lot of variables there. How do you do you identify a couple of variables? And say, we're going to look at these? And if so, how many might you be able to handle at a time? You know, I've done a lot of research and statistics. And every time you add something the whole system gets exponentially more complex. As an example, what kinds of things might you look at with a plant, you're going to modify one variable in the environment? But then what other kinds of responses might you look at?

Patti Skinkis 1:23

Well, doing whole plant physiology work is difficult in it's the nature of the beast, when you're looking at the entirety and taking it in as a whole. I like to address this question from a standpoint of what it is not. And partly because I work with a lot of other scientists who work in biochemistry or fruit chemistry. And they always want to isolate the one thing or two things that can explain what we might be seeing in fruit chemistry, or in plant nutrition. But the reality is, we have to accept that we can't explain at all that it's a whole package. It's not one specific mechanism. As a result of that we look at a lot of things, we try to understand how one piece will influence another piece. So a lot of times in the studies that I'm doing, we tend to do a lot of data collection on the plant as well as in the environment. And then the fruit, it means that we do a lot of data collection, maybe more so than other scientists would if they are just looking at pathology or insects or some other aspect, we monitor the vines phonology. So the growth stage, we monitor shoot growth early season, and then we switch to leaf area, we do pruning weight. So all of those are giving us an idea of the plant size, how much it grows. And then of course, we look at yield, and then yield components, which takes it through looking at cluster weight and rakus, length and very size. And all of those just take a lot of time. And then of course we get into the root chemistry. And it's not just you know basic ripeness at harvest, we then go into global analyses of key compounds like nitrogen and the phenomics. We do collect a lot of data and ultimately, what refines what we're looking at is kind of we always write our research questions to say, Okay, here's what we're going to target. But then a lot of times, we end up coming back to doing all of those measures, in part because we know that a lot of it is interlinked. And so it is a lot of data collection, a lot of complexity. One of your questions was how do we deal with all the variables? And so that really, you know, from the standpoint of doing whole plant physiology, where I'm working in a vineyard, I'm working typically in research farms, or on grower collaborator sites. And when it comes to controlling variables, that's when we try to do as much as we can. So can we pick a trial site where we've got very healthy vines that we know are consistent, rootstock consistent soil as best we can consistent, slope, we try to even avoid hillsides if we can. And if we can't, then we block accordingly. So we're doing a lot of re study evaluation of the site to know what can we at least try to eliminate instead of creating more messiness, in a system that we're trying to understand.

Craig Macmillan 4:02

You mentioned work that you're doing what what kinds of things you're looking at right now.

Patti Skinkis 4:05

So right now we have a number of different trials, but main work is in vineyard floor management rootstocks and yield management. And so those are the three primary areas that I'm working on currently.

Craig Macmillan 4:19

What do you do with root stocks? I know that wasn't the topic you and I talked about earlier, but I'm curious about that, because that's a fixed thing. Pick the root stock. And that's it forever. I hope I made the right choice.

Patti Skinkis 4:30

While we're doing a rootstock trial, and I'm lucky that my predecessors had established a block in 1997. So we have a well maintained mature trial with 19 rootstocks that are include Pinot Noir on those 19 rootstocks and owner divines. And so we came back thinking okay, there's a lot more questions coming from growers here in Oregon about what rootstocks they should be using climate change is definitely occurring. We see warmer, drier seas Once and while most of our vineyards can be dry farmed in the Willamette Valley, many people are very concerned about being in sites that have limited soils or not as luxurious soil. So we call them in terms of soil moisture as and nutrition, but also there, even though we're dry farmed, we don't necessarily have access to water. So if they needed to irrigate and may not be be possible if they're getting into different vineyard properties, we decided to embark on looking at this trial that has been in place at our research farm and come in and start looking at plant water stress and comparing those to our standard rootstocks, which happened to be in our trial. So we have a whole mix of more drought tolerant root stocks as well as our standard vineyard rootstocks, which are mostly vigor reducing, not drought tolerant. And those are what most of our industry is planted on, at least here in the Willamette Valley. And so the the trial was really done to see, okay, if we do switch to root stocks, what does it look like for yield for canopy size. And we, of course, looked at the the water stress response as well. And so we've been monitoring over the last four years different components of that rootstock trial, and the last two years being looking more in depth at plant water stress as a result.

Craig Macmillan 6:12

This is kind of a practical question, in my mind when we're talking about things like yield changes, are you pruning like this rootstock tell? Are you pruning everything to the same bud count? Are you leaving the same number of growing points on every mind?

Patti Skinkis 6:22

That is a great question, because it's such a mature trial, the results of rootstock are clearly visible. So for the most part, we can prune to the same number of buds per plant. But in some cases, we have to do balance pruning, because there's so little vigor, so for example, with Riparia rootstock, it's very degrading. And so we cannot do the same number of buds as we can, for 1616 or 1103 or 140R for the most part, we try to keep to the same, but number. But again, we have to balance prune some of those that are clearly very invigorated by the rootstock.

Craig Macmillan 7:00

You've been doing work on crop load recently, which I'm very, very, very interested in. What is it specifically that you're looking at terms of variables, manipulations, then also very user? How did this come about? How did this become a research question they became interested in?

Patti Skinkis 7:12

The crop load work has been a part of my research program now for about 12 years. And I started out doing that work, because I saw a lot of focus on reducing yield in the Oregon industry. When I first came here, it didn't make sense to me, because our vines are very healthy, we get a lot of leaf area, they're well managed. And it's not high shoot density. I mean, everybody has shoot thinning to the the required three shoots per linear foot, or three to five at most per linear foot. And so their crop thinning at that time to one cluster per shoot, which is about a 40% crop reduction, and they're doing it late in the season. So around lag phase, of berry development. So I embarked on a study to studies timing by intensity trial in 2010, through 2013, and looked at just when should they be cropping and by how much. And we found that from that study, there was very clearly no benefit to really doing it early, we could do it late in which was my surprise, I thought if there was going to be any impact that would be necessary to hasten ripening, then, and that's always our goal, hasten ripening and increase quality because a lot of growers believe we need to do it to get our harvest end before the fall rains, or just to improve what they call concentration.

Craig Macmillan 8:34

Real quick, just talked about Oregon in general. So if I've got Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley, how much danger do I have from rain coming into harvest? Is that a common problem? Is that happen occasionally, but enough that it's an issue?

Patti Skinkis 8:46

Certainly 10 to 12 years ago, it was a real and present danger every year. And now in recent years, it's been less of a concern because we become warmer and we tend to be harvesting earlier. So when I embarked on this trial, you know, it's always a concern. And it certainly is at the forefront of most of the longtime grape growers and winemakers as we get new people and I think they're willing to do more hangtime. So there's always this dichotomy of wanting hang time, but always the threat of, of rain, and we just don't know there's no crystal ball to know how long we'll have. But typically, we're seeing more dry September's than we have in the past. Usually, by the time we get to October, everybody's you know, they're worried about the rain coming, it's a percentage chance of having rains during harvest is significantly higher. As we get into October when we were doing the work. We wanted to see, you know, should they be thinning because their vines are behind and they need to thin earlier or do we thin later as a means to kind of have them catch up. And what we found in those first studies was that did not really make a difference to crop thin, early, and in fact, it made more vigor and we deal with a lot of over vigor in the Willamette Valley, so there was definitely not worth cluster thinning preboot Boom or at bloom or even at fruit set and waiting to leg favs was completely founded. The second thing we found is that the cluster thinning really didn't have had much of an impact at all. The only year it did was in 2011, which was a, a cooler season, and a very big crop. And we were very late. So about a month later in everything. And so we did see a benefit of of cluster thinning in that year where we kind of reached a maximum level that we would expect that these plants would be able to carry through ripeness. So when I did all of those trials, I shared it with growers, they were very excited to hear the results growers much more excited than winemakers about the results. But their answer kept being to me, you know that that's great, you got an answer for those two vineyards where you did that work. But those are special cases or only those vineyards. And I thought, you know, is bigger. When we look at crop load management is such a entrenched practice that you crop then in high in cool climate regions for high wind quality. Restricting crop is important. And that's something that one study here there is not going to change. And the only way to really change it would be to embark on a very large project that directly engages growers in that process, not only growers but winemakers, too, and doing that work on their farms. So prior to my first crop load studies even being finished, I started embarking on this idea of a much, much more grandiose project that involved a lot of partnership with industry directly. And so over two years, we had planned the study, working with growers on an advisory committee and said, Okay, here's my idea, what do you think, will you join? And how can we make this work. And so that was in 2010, I basically started having those conversations while I was also doing my smaller scale projects. And as a result of that, we started what's called the statewide crop load project. And we ran that for 10 years from 2012, to 2021. So 10 growing seasons, and we solicited partnerships with growers, they were all volunteers, and they came mostly from the Willamette Valley. And they basically did the cluster thinning or crop thinning to their determined levels that they wanted to use over as many as 10 years. So so they had to be in the project at least three years if they could. And the the goal was for them also to make wine. And so sometimes the winery that owns the vineyard made the wine sometimes other folks or other people who bought the wine made the wine, the wines had to be made. And so the process was that the growers had to do the thinning and collect data per protocols that my lab gave them. And then they had to produce the wines that then we did some analysis on. And we did the analysis on fruit as well.

Craig Macmillan 12:43

These growers, were they doing different different levels of thinning on their property, side by side, and then you were using site as rep. I'm totally geeking out here, but or were they designed as replicated experiments on site or just this ranch does this and this ranch does it? How did you how did you set it up? Because that's hard?

Patti Skinkis 13:01

Yes. So we set it up as more robust is what I wanted, I wanted to be replicated on site. And then so each trial is its own trial. So each grower had to replicate it in a randomized complete block design in their individual vineyards. And so that at the end of the day, we could analyze their data within their vineyard, as well as across all vineyards. So it's replicated at least three times. In fact, most vineyards were replicated far more than three times, but I only made them get data on three reps, because they've quickly realized that they could divide their vineyard up into as many treatment reps as they wanted. But then if they would collect data on all of those, it would just be time to time consuming. So we did minimum of three reps of data collection.

Craig Macmillan 13:45

You are my statistical hero. Now, I've had to do these. And what you're doing is just the gold standard gold plated. I'm so happy. I can't wait to find out what you found out because you did it exactly right. I'm so struck, anyway continues to have. So this is great. So the industry they're doing, they're doing it on site. They're collecting data.

Patti Skinkis 14:03

They're collecting the data, they hand in the data, they make the wine, and then we did sensory for five years with the Oregon State University. My colleague here Elizabeth Tomasino led sensory trials with winemakers. And so we did the first five years that way. And then the second five years, the group as a whole decided they wanted to switch gears and focus on just their internal sensory. So in house evaluation of their wines, which I had hoped that they were doing the first five years, but it turned out unless you gave them a protocol, they did not collect the data on it. They were collecting data, but they weren't sharing it. So that was my the second half of the study. I thought okay, we'll shift gears and part of that was, you know, ideally, someone would say, Well, why don't you just stick it through with that the sensory analysis at OSU? Well, it costs money. And this project was, you know, for a 10 year project, we had to try to save money as best we can because no granting agency wants to get have money for 10 years of research. And so we decided, you know that we were not going to continue with that and, and shift really to the focus of the growers. I mean, that's who's making the decision growers and wineries, I should say, making the decisions about the quality of the wines as a result of thinning to make their choices as to where that fruit goes and make future plans on crop thinning. And so we really took it towards that first five years looking at do we see a difference? Versus and doing some descriptive analysis to the second five years still trying to see asking questions about difference testing, and about descriptive analysis, but now taking it from a standpoint of who's making this decision about these wines, and they're tasting them. And so really encouraging growers to taste them and wineries to taste them if they had not already done so.

Craig Macmillan 15:51

And what kind of things did you find out?

Patti Skinkis 15:53

So the power of doing the research in each individual vineyard meant that I could do the stats for each vineyard and hand them a report of their project. And each year as we went through the project, we would share the results with the growers. So we went every year crop year that we closed, we shared the viticulture data with them. And the results were there's very little difference with crop thinning over time, we figured okay, this might be a you know, impact of, you know, over time, you know, we always hear from crop consultants or vineyard managers, if you keep cropping heavy, you're gonna have to add more inputs. We didn't see that, generally speaking, we have some vines in the study that were full cropped, never thinned for 10 years. And they did just fine. There are some things that we did find, you know, generally speaking in any one vineyard with lag phase crop thinning, there was very little impact on and fruit quality. So fruit composition is mostly what we had data for. But we're talking bricks, pH titratable. acidity, very rarely were they different until we got into years where our base yields were just much higher than normal. So we saw that in a year where maybe our yields were double. So cluster sizes were bigger fruitfulness was higher than we saw some impact, but it wasn't every site, it was maybe a third of the sites, the results really came that most sites there's very little difference in that end wine quality and when I'm sick or fruit quality, I should say. So Brix pH ta Yanes. So use this global nitrogen, we looked at total phenolic total tannins total anthocyanins and for the first five years of the study, we had ETS labs run their whole phenolic panel, and as well as their ripening panel, and we saw very little differences in there might be some years that a certain vineyard had a difference. But then after that year, they didn't have it anymore. So it was very inconsistent. And it's not to say that thinning did nothing, but it was very, very limited in the results to say okay, we are definitely changing x when we crop then we didn't see that. And that was a real eye opener. So that was the fruit. So I should say that was what the fruit told us now when it came to the wine. For the first five years, our sensory panel led by Dr. Elizabeth Thomasino, you know, here at OSU, she was winemakers. So the winemakers were Oregon winemakers, the results of those years was that crop level was not what drove the quality or the perceived preference of wine, it was really the vineyard or the the winemaker from a given site, there was never really any clear identity of higher quality or higher concentration or higher certain descriptive analyses for a crop level. So it became clear that there wasn't very much difference. And that was one of the reasons the real reasons why I think the collaborators wanted to go a different route because they were not seeing seeing much difference. And so they thought, Well, maybe if we start looking internally, we see differences. So the second five years, we did ETS labs didn't run the analysis, I ran those in house in my lab. And so we we did the same measures as ETS lab from from the standpoint of global analyses, same thing, very little difference. But when we switched to looking at the impact of wines from getting the data from the winemakers, number one we had a really hard time getting that data and so many collaborators, they followed through, and they didn't do the paperwork, or they didn't ever follow through with us. And so it was really challenging to get the data but from those who did follow our protocols, the results mirrored our first five years which was there was very little difference. And it was very hard to tell a difference in in the wines. Now they knew that there was a difference. So when we asked him for a difference test, we said can you tell the difference? Of course they said yes, because they knew they were blind tasted but they knew if any, it was an evaluation, so it was a little leading there. But when it came down to describing what they were seeing in the wines, comments like all of these wines are lovely came up and so there wasn't a clear distinction on quality, that one was very clearly bad. So we did a two step approach, we had them first taste some blind, do their ratings individually, then they would find out the identity of the wines. And then they as a group, they would talk about them. And it always came out that after they knew the identity, that's when they were changed their mind about any given wine that they rated initially. So what we see in the pattern of the results was that they were willing to not completely downgrade the higher yield. Unless it was the no thin. If it was no, thin they felt very uncomfortable saying, Okay, we don't need tp thin, but they felt more comfortable saying, Okay, we like this one and a half clusters for shoot, which is a one to one to thinning pattern, which is about a 15 to 20% crop production. And I can understand that as a winemaking team, as a grower team, you want to be conservative, you want to be careful, you don't want to say okay, yeah, so I found a lot of what they were answering on was more future looking rather than what's right in front of you right now. Like looking at, okay, here's the wines use the full crop or no thin and here's your one and a half cluster, one cluster pursuit, you didn't find them all that different in the descriptive analysis. But now when you're, you know, the identity, then you're saying, Okay, we're not going to take these notes into our highest here. We're going to leave those aside. So there's some bias.

Craig Macmillan 21:20

Yeah, well, no, absolutely. And that's one of the things I love talking about. And you know that the winemaking techniques were consistent across the lots. Yeah, so it wasn't canopy management manipulations or anything like that.

Patti Skinkis 21:32

Yep. So both in the vineyard and in the winery. So when we said they did this in their vineyard, they couldn't do things differently in the vineyard of two, one or the other. And we actually picked up an issue. And that some you know, when you do crop thinning, you have labor crews come through and leaf pull. And we recognize that early on that some growers just wouldn't leaf pull as much in there no thin so we had them go in and leaf pull the same as they would for their other thinned to remove that that issue. In the winery we told them they had to make all their wines the same. And we did not have them do for example, long barrel aging in oak barrels, they could make the wines how they normally make their wines. But they we did not want them to go to barrel. And so they had to be bottled and then tasted after about a year of bottle aging.

Craig Macmillan 22:21

Interesting. Maybe I missed this but you were talking about the thinning protocols meaning like around bloom time and round lag phase. What about at verasion that's at least around where I'm at in Central Coast's is very common to do crop dropping about 85% verasion was that a component what you did was or verasion era?

Patti Skinkis 22:40

We did verasion time point included in our time core study that was before we launched on the big project. So when we did the big project, we decided we would just go with what growers always do, rather than adding more time points. And so they just did in the statewide crapola project just did like face for our crapload are thinning by timing by intensity trial, we did include verasion for that time for that trial.

Craig Macmillan 23:08

And that green drop is at about the same, like at about 85% or somewhere in there. What was the trigger for the drop at verasion?

Patti Skinkis 23:16

It's post lag phase was done when there's about 50% color.

Craig Macmillan 23:20

Okay, there we go. Okay, that makes sense.

Patti Skinkis 23:22

The verasion time point is or late, even later, is oftentimes done in Oregon as well. But usually it's a result of either thinking that they have way too much crop out there for their target yields, or disease, so botrytis.

Craig Macmillan 23:54

And when you're talking about these different crop load levels, I would imagine that disease pressure would be an important issue, especially in Pinot Noir in Oregon, I would think.

Patti Skinkis 24:04

So that's a great point, because some people, you know, will crop thin because they want to avoid overlapping clusters. But in our trial, what we did was we said, Okay, for the no thin, we want you to just do things like you've always done and some growers would say, Okay, now when they're, we're sorting that fruit, should we sort out at the sorting line, you know, and I said, No, you know, if you do sorting line for that fruit, make notes, you know, obviously, you don't want to make a bad wine because there's too much botrytis. But basically, what we had them do was if you're going to sort through one you have to sort through the other and don't just have preconceived notions that you're going to have to sort more in your no thin than the others. And we always in the data that we got in we looked at as we dissected clusters, we looked for detritus, and what we found is in most years, there is not an impact of having no thin having more disease. Now Could there have been sure if there was years with very heavy crop yield, and with high shoot density, but most of our vineyards have when we looked at all of our data we got in and one of the quality control checks is, what was their shoot density, and almost everybody's following in that perfect shoot density. And so there wasn't that necessary, necessarily that much fruit on their vine. So they're all cane pruned. And they're all shooting for that shoot density of between three and five shoots per linear foot. And we're more on the three end. So we can see that in all of the data. So it's not surprising to me that we didn't see disease issues as a result of leaving that full crop on there, why we didn't see a lot of differences in this trial, I should provide some context here. Without you know, the amount of yields were not terribly high, with that kind of shoot density. So single canopy, low shoot density, we're at a pound per linear foot on average full crop in only a couple of years. During the 10 year period, we're over one and a half pounds per linear foot. So the tonnage that would come off of that. And I always put talking pounds per linear foot because our vineyards were in many different spacing and shoot and vine density. So you we can't talk tonnage, what we found in looking at the data that there were clear years where once we had yields over one and a half pounds per linear foot, then we saw some benefit of cluster thinning. But those years where we are barely at one or just over one, there really was not a benefit. And of course, that's because of the canopies being well maintained. The shoe density is not too high cluster density is not too high a cluster size themselves are smaller.

Craig Macmillan 26:36

What has been the reception so far, for both growers and winemakers because this goes a little bit against conventional wisdom, at least in my experience?

Patti Skinkis 26:45

It goes a lot against convention,

Craig Macmillan 26:47

I'm trying to be polite.

Patti Skinkis 26:51

Well, the nice thing is, you know, because along the way of doing a 10 year project, I was always giving presentations as the new data set came out and people in the industry would hear me give presentations about it. But I think the strongest impact was seen because I had grower collaborators, they saw the impact in their vineyards and in their wineries. And what we found was that people are much more willing to increase their yields. My answer is not that they they stopped crop thinning, surely that didn't happen. But they were allowed to evaluate and recommend higher yields than they had in the past. And this is a data set that was really hard to get directly from people. But we see it in our state yield reports that basically they've gone up 25% The yields have for Pinot Noir. Since the work has been started. When I talk to people who are contracting fruit or selling fruit. They said they definitely see that winemakers are more receptive to vineyard owners and vineyard managers recommending higher yields. And they're no longer saying it has to be one cluster per shoot, or it has to be two tons per acre. And I would say the 25% increase in yield is conservative I when we did ask the collaborators about the project, we asked them about three quarters way through the project said, What do you feel comfortable doing as a result of this work. And they said, we feel comfortable adding another half to one tonne per acre, which is about a 20 25% increase from what they've done before. And so that's really is really astounding, I think any if I hadn't done the project this way, I don't think that people would have been able to understand the true impacts or lack thereof, of doing cluster thinning. So it provided with them with more evidence that they can take this risk and or they they didn't feel like it was as big of a risk to leave more fruit out there.

Craig Macmillan 28:48

Which reminds me I know it's difficult to talk in terms of tonnes per acre. So we can talk through the linear foot, but the range in your work from the most aggressive thinning to the unthinned. What kind of a range is there, how big of a difference in terms of the crop load?

Patti Skinkis 29:04

In terms of the yield that they've had in vineyards, the lowest crop thinning level that growers did was half cluster per shoot. So that meant thinning pattern 0101 or 1010. The yields on those would be as low as one and a half tonnes per acre. But it depends on the vineyard that it came from because one of the vineyards that did it was a very high density. So their yields were actually pretty high even still, but I'd say the max that we got in any vineyard was probably close to about eight tons per acre. So clusters per linear foot were always pretty consistent unless they went to a double canopy. So we did have one collaborator in the study that was on a GDC or Geneva demo curtain. But that vineyard was actually pretty degraded so it didn't explain higher yields. What we saw was higher yields were from those vineyards that had high density meter by a meter and a half spacing. Normally we were at on a pounds per linear foot bed He says that the extremes were about two to two and a half pounds per linear foot. And so for those vineyards, they could be pretty substantial if they were in the high density.

Craig Macmillan 30:09

We are running our of time. So I want to ask you a couple of kind of closing questions. Is there one piece of advice or insight or one thing that you would tell a grower regarding this topic.

Patti Skinkis 30:18

It all depends on what you have for your vineyard, your rootstock, how the vines are trained. So the biggest thing that we came up from this research is that we don't want to tell people that they have to crop them or that they don't have to crop them that and that we don't have a real answer of how much it has to be. But one of the things we do have clear in the data is that we know when we've gone too much, a lot of people think that that's every year and it's not every year because of our climate is so variable, we don't know what we're gonna have, we can go and quantify fruitfulness. But really until we get through fruit set in June, we don't know what our yields look like. And so I always tell people to keep monitoring your printing weights, your yields, calculating your your your Rivas index or the crop yield printing weight ratio, and just keep monitoring it for your site to know what Max is going to be because some vineyards can handle more than others. And the last thing I would say is quality is dependent on the vineyard site and how that site is managed. And even if you have a good manager, you are never going to have a really high end wine if you don't have the right site or the right you know, selection of clone rootstock etc. So it all plays into that quality and just crap any is not going to guarantee you a high quality wine.

Craig Macmillan 31:41

Once again. It's a great big world with lots of different variables all of which have to be considered. I want to thank my guest Dr. Patty Skinkis she is a viticulture, extension specialist and professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Horticulture. Real pleasure this has been really, really fun. Like I mentioned, this has actually been kind of a pet topic of mine for a long, long time. And I'm really happy that you've been doing this work and I hope more people learn about it.

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Be open and authentic

The Internet has become an integral part of our lives and can be a wonderful tool for showing transparency and authenticity. Use your online channels (website, social media, eNewsletter) to connect, not just to market. We often pull up the Internet to fulfill emotional needs like decompressing, catching up with others, and exploring our interests. Use the creative platforms available to you to welcome your followers to learn more about your business -- things that a one-time visitor may not have the opportunity to learn. This will help your followers to form a stronger, more personal connection with your brand.

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Check out the show notes for a links to the Eco-Awkening and Full Glass consumer purchasing research, this article, research on consumer preferences, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

References:

• **SIP Smart Training online course
• 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine
• 3 Ways to Build a Strong Brand
• Did you know...?
• Identifying wine consumers interested in environmentally sustainable production practices
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• SIP Certified
• What Sustainability Means to Consumers by Morning Consult

Wood burns twice. The first burn takes wood to charcoal. The second phase takes charcoal to ash. Unless you remove oxygen. Josiah Hunt, Founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Befit Corporation explains that Biochar is made at a high temperature in an oxygen-limited environment. Organic waste is taken through the first burn phase and by limiting the oxygen, remains charcoal. The final product is buried in the soil where it improves water retention and fertility. And you can do this at your own ranch. Listen in to hear Josiah's tips on how to make and incorporate Biochar into your vineyard.

References:

• 56: Conservation Burning and Biochar
• Agricultural Benefits of Biochar
• Biochar in Viticulture Webinar (featuring Doug Beck, Monterey Pacific Inc.)
• Conservation Burning and Biochar
• Pacific Biochar
• Monterey Pacific
• SIP Certified
• "The Conservation Burn Technique" | Vineyard Team Technical Article
• Vineyard Field Trial with Biochar and Compost
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

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Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.

Transcript

Craig Macmillan 0:00

Today is Josiah Hunt, who is founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation. And we're going to talk about guess what biochar. Josiah thanks for being on the podcast.

Josiah Hunt 0:09

Thank you.

Craig Macmillan 0:11

Let's just get right into it. And let's start with some basics. What exactly is biochar?

Josiah Hunt 0:15

Biochar is a funny word. First. biochar in its most basic terms is biomass charcoal, which is redundant because charcoal is from biomass and the generation like where the word came from is even funnier in my opinion, the word biochar was born out of the word Agra-char. But in the world first Agra-char conference in 2007, a company came forward and said, Sorry, we've already trademarked that back to the drawing board. And they came up with biochar. That's that's the origin story that I've heard. I think one of the really interesting questions is, why did we have to come up with a new word for charcoal, and the reason for that is climate change. So I think the key differentiator from where the word biochar came from is part of an idea, rather than a simple material. And that idea is wrapped up in waste organic material used to create biochar, a biomass charcoal, which is then buried in agricultural soils, where it serves two important purposes, carbon dioxide removal by sequestering that stable carbon into the ground and long term soil fertility. So this helping address climate change mitigation by removing carbon and climate change adaptation by facilitating food security. So it's a lot packed into that concept. So the word charcoal just couldn't hold it anymore.

Craig Macmillan 1:39

Just couldn't hold it off. We're talking about charcoal, which people have been making for millennia, essentially. So how is biochar made and are there multiple ways of this different materials, etc.?

Josiah Hunt 1:51

High temperature in an oxygen limited environment. So you're you're basically reaching these combustion temperatures, but you do so with an oxygen limited environment. So a woodchip brought up to 500 degrees Celsius would become a glowing ember. Its molecules so excited, they're shooting off photons. Now, if that woodchip came up to five degrees Celsius, and there's sufficient oxygen, you would have complete combustion first, that woodchip would volatilize off the gases become a chunk of charcoal, and then the oxygen would come in and destroy that charcoal, releasing all of its energy, and leaving only the ash mineral residue. If you have limited oxygen, that first part occurs pyrolysis part where you go from woodchip to charcoal, but that second phase of burning from charcoal to ash can only occur with the presence of oxygen, and thus, the limiting of oxygen is the key component to making the material.

Craig Macmillan 2:48

And then second phase is where the carbon is leaving into the environment?

Josiah Hunt 2:52

A better way to put this is that wood burns twice the first phase of combustion and the first phase of burning would be from woodchip to charcoal. And the second phase is from charcoal to ash. And that second phase can only occur in the presence of oxygen. Therefore, if you can limit the oxygen, you control, whether you're generating charcoal or ash.

Craig Macmillan 3:16

So controlling the oxygen is important. If you have a way of stopping that process midway. That's obviously the key to this, you have to be able to stop at the end of the process step not going any further. Is that right?

Josiah Hunt 3:29

That's correct.

Craig Macmillan 3:29

How do people do that?

Josiah Hunt 3:32

There's two kind of main ways one would be we're working with continuous flow machinery. So the woodchips come enter a system in which they experience incredibly high temperatures and limited oxygen environment where pyrolysis occurs, the gases leaving gases go off and they have their own work to do. And then that carbon flows out of that hot chamber into areas where we maintain that oxygen control. And we allow the temperature to begin to drop down to temperatures that are ambient, essentially. And once you get that charcoal material to ambient temperature, it is safe, it's recalcitrant, and will will last for a very, very long time. So that's how we do it in a continuous flow. And then generally at the tail end of the process, we're adding water for dust control and safety. And if you had a batch process, you would initiate a paralysis to occur you initiate process to create basically start big fire, it would be one way to do that, and then allow it to go through that first phase where you'd have you know pyrolysis carrying wood becoming charcoal and then extinguish it, you got to stop it, you got to either completely cut off the airflow and snuff it out or introduce so much water that you would quench it that's also snuffing it out so that would be kind of a batch process approach to stopping it.

Craig Macmillan 4:46

So that's the the key stopping and along the way there and having some way of doing that. And that's what makes this whole thing essentially work. Now I've got this stuff. What is this charcoal, it used to be wood now what is it chemically? How was it changed, what do I have here in my hands?

Josiah Hunt 5:02

Biochar differs from the plant biomass that it was made from in that it has undergone a thermal thermal chemical conversion, an irreversible process where the associations of the carbon and other elements in there become completely reassociated, you have a wood chip that goes into a temperature range of 500 degrees Celsius plus and becomes a glowing ember shooting off photons. And those carbon atoms realign themselves into a different form that is highly aromatic versus aliphatic, meaning you're basically tightening these carbon rings here. And that helps the material become highly recalcitrant, meaning that it will have a persistence. In the environment, an order of magnitude are orders of magnitude greater than the plant biomass that was made from lasting hundreds to 1000s of years in the soil, and also with some very interesting changes to the surface characteristics.

Craig Macmillan 6:09

So that leads into the next question there. So we're talking about something that will remain in the soil for a very, very long time, which is one of the reasons it's of interest to agriculture. What are some of the applications why are people using this in agriculture? And how are they using this in agriculture?

Josiah Hunt 6:25

The charcoal material has some really interesting attributes some some really interesting characteristics. Other than just being highly recalcitrant, charcoal is the oldest known filter material, maybe most widely used over a long period of historical time, it works great, it can hold nutrients, it can hold plant nutrients, in this case, against a gradient, and it can hold plant nutrients in such a way that they will be resistant to environmental loss yet still plant available or biologically available, I should say, because sometimes it's the microbes or fungi who would access the material off the charcoal surface and make it available to the plant. And so that filtration characteristic is an incredibly important part of, of how biochar helps plants grow is it can help keep nutrients in the topsoil and resistant to environmental loss in a way that plants can still access them.

Craig Macmillan 7:24

And the same is true for water, correct?

Josiah Hunt 7:26

Yes, biochar material is incredibly porous. So a lot of the vascular tissue of the plant body remains intact. So it's really interesting, because you have this, you have this like, just completely dramatic molecular change, where the woody cellulosic material becomes a target material. And on a molecular level, it's so incredibly different. But on a structural level, most of the plant body remains. And so you can take a small piece of charcoal, and oftentimes a botanist, would be able to identify the plant species, it was made from

Craig Macmillan 8:02

Really?

Josiah Hunt 8:02

Yeah, the vascular. And in fact, this is an important piece of archaeology. So this is like in archaeology, they'll, they'll find little bits of charcoal, because it's highly recalcitrant. And they'll be able to identify what species of plant it was, because of the vascular tissue. And it can be pretty evident sometimes, I mean, it's really easy to tell the difference between oak and pine, you've got to be a connoisseur to be able to tell whether it's a Valley oak or red oak, yes, the vascular tissue of the plant body remains primarily, you know, largely intact. And so this is really interesting, you have a material that, you know, on a very, very micro level is very porous, but then even on a macro level, you have this vascular tissue of the plant body. So a lot of the a lot of the capillary action that the plants were taking advantage of transfers over to this biochar material, which is really interesting because now you have this highly recalcitrant material with incredibly high surface area, a functional surface of that and, you know, just incredibly intricate porous design determined by the DNA, that plant material, you know, it's just riddled with tubes and tunnels and nooks and crannies that help hold water and provide habitat for microorganisms.

Craig Macmillan 9:16

Is there research that's been done other findings about what quantity or type or whatever of biochar and how that relates to increases in water holding capacity or increases in soil microbiome populations or things like that? It seems like that'd be a pretty straightforward idea.

Josiah Hunt 9:33

I think I was looking at a graph this morning and I don't remember where it came from, but I think since 2007, there's been 28,000 research articles about that, that are related to biochar not specifically focused on biochar, but have biochar as a key word or an aspect. So biochar is is a you know, part of about 28,000 research articles. And a lot of that is focused on water because it's such an important part of the puzzle the dynamics between application rate and expected response get really nuanced. It comes down to what are the characteristics of the biochar material? And in many cases, what is really important, what are the characteristics of the soil, so you can expect to see a quite quite a range of different response, depending on the characteristics of the biochar material and the native soil that it's being applied to, you know, without any research articles, we're now at the stage where we're they're doing systematic reviews of the meta analyses, which begins to give you a lot of really powerful data. Overall, the water use efficiency, or there's so many different ways to measure it. And again, I'm a little bit undergunned the difference between plant available water and, and water holding capacity, you know, become existentially important to tell us that I probably don't have the same level of experience with.

Craig Macmillan 11:01

You may not need to be the expert, but you probably are the expert on where to find this information that helps. So if you can, if you can connect us with some things, even just general stuff, we'll pass that along to our listeners. And it'd be greatly appreciated. Because again, this is an ID the reason I bring this up is that, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, 2007 and whatnot. I remember the first time this was introduced to me, and it was probably around the year 2000. And it's from a college student. There was one of my students, and I was and they were like, Hey, that's a great idea. We should really try it. And I said, I don't know I don't get it. They're like that. And I said, Well, how much material do we need? And I'm thinking like tons per acre. They're like, Oh, no, no, we just use a little bit. We do this and I was like, Okay, that sounds like witchcraft to me. Show me the science. Well, now here we are 20 years later. And we do have a lot of science. This is not a story anymore.

Josiah Hunt 11:50

There's a lot of science and, you know, the water conservation part. I think that's just such a key component of of the value that biochar can provide, particularly when we're talking about vineyards in California. And so I think it's it's useful to spend some time on that. So a couple key points of, of biochar and, and water use efficiency or water conservation. One is just that the material itself holds immense amounts of water. I mean biochar alone, the biochar that we're working with, we usually hold about six, six times its weight in water. But then the real important thing is how does it affect the water holding capacity or plant available water in the soil, and in most all aspects, the results are positive pretty much across the board. And here's a few key metrics, I think that would be useful to mention and that I find valuable. A couple of key points of biochar and water use efficiency or water conservation. One is that one of the easiest ways to think about biochar is that it is pyrogenic organic matter. Perhaps that's a better word than biochar. It's a much more scientifically accurate word. And when we think about this material, it's not unique. Humans didn't invent charcoal, or biochar for that matter. In fact, it's been part of soil development, as long as plant life and fire have coexisted. And according to geologic records, about 350 or more years ago, biochar became a significant component of topsoil development. And that generally, soil organic matter is measured by loss on Ignition, which does not differentiate between charcoal organic matter pyrogenic organic matter and non charcoal organic and studies that have used some very expensive and kind of painstaking processes to identify the charcoal organic matter as separate from the non toxic organic matter have shown us that charcoal organic matter is prevalent in most all agriculturally important soils, and oftentimes greater than 10% of the total organic matter, and not uncommon to find it as much as 30 to 50% of the total organic matter. And in some of our most valuable soils such as the Midwest plains like in Iowa, some of those those those highly fertile molecules up there can be 30 to 50% of organic matter in the form of charcoal. So I probably went too long into that definition or that that that distinction. But one of the easy ways to to think about biochar is that biochar is part of organic matter is not separate from and so when we're thinking about how does biochar impact my soil? Usually, we can kind of just consider what are the impacts of organic matter and what are the impacts of increasing my organic matter, and then think of biochar as a stable portion of your organic matter. That will have a lot of water conservation and tilth benefits, but it will not be a significant source of nutrients. And that's one of the significant differences of charcoal organic matter versus non charcoal organic matter, but in so many other situations, that's an easy way to think about the effects of biochar. So With biochar, and water conservation, one of the really important elements would be the soil type in determining what the projected outcomes might be. And there's been some really interesting findings in this area. At first, the primary focus was in sandy soils, which have a very low water holding capacity. And it's an easy win small amounts of biochar can have large impact on coarse soils, large positive impact, improving the water holding capacity in coarse soils

Craig Macmillan 15:30

What's a small quantity, a small quantity?

Josiah Hunt 15:33

That's a great question. You opened up a big box there. Biochar is a three dimensional application not a two dimensional so like if you add nitrogen, your soil, it's going to disperse throughout your soil. So nitrogen is simply you know, pounds per acre, whereas biochar, it's not going to distribute itself through the soil on its own, it's wise to also consider the area cultivated. So for instance, two tons per acre cultivated only in the planting row is very different than two tons per acre, cultivated 100% of the acreage or two tons per acre and the top six inches versus two tons per acre, two feet down.

Craig Macmillan 16:11

Is the real metric, then like volume to volume may think in cubic yards to cubic yards,.I just use percent organic matter equivalent, what I've found the most useful and looking at Biochar application rates, and again, kind of going back to how I find it really valuable to just kind of consider biochar applications within the frame of I'm going to change my soil organic matter, I'm going to be adding some stable soil organic matter. How much do I want to add and why? And framing biochar applications in that I find very useful. And then also, when I'm looking at when we've seen successful applications, either through work that we've done, or in research articles, how do we translate that into another successful application that might have different cultivation practices. And what we found is the percent organic matter equivalent is the most transferable number. And so what that would mean is that the biochar is primarily organic matter, but some of it can have a lot of ash content. So that would reduce the organic matter content of the biochar. You know, most of biochar that we're working with 95% organic matter. So then you're looking at the effect of that biochar in the area cultivated, right, so let's say if we have 10 tons wet weight of biochar might be six ton dry weight of biochar, which might be you know, 5.5 or 7%, dry tons organic matter. And then if we're cultivating that in to an area of our soil, we measure the general area that we're cultivating into, and we can come up with an organic matter equivalent. So just as a rule of thumb, a number that I find useful is that if you were to cultivate nine tonnes per acre down to six inches, it would be equivalent to 1% organic matter.

Okay, yeah. So that gives us an idea that gives us that gives us a sense.

Josiah Hunt 17:55

If you're doing a quarter of your land, like say you're doing two, two foot wide planting rows, and they're eight foot on center. Now you're a quarter of your acreage and you're going down 24 inches, that's 1%. Nine dried tons per acre plowed to six inches depth would be equivalent to 1% organic matter.

Craig Macmillan 18:13

Now let's let's bring this back to the vineyards because I know that there have been some folks that have been doing trials and whatnot with this that I think you're familiar with, how would somebody apply this method? In a vineyard setting? We would want to get it close to the vine row. Can we do it in the middles? What what's kind of the strategy? Do you know?

Josiah Hunt 18:31

with vineyard applications, we've learned a lot over the past several years, and I want to, you know, provide a big shout out to Doug Beck with Monterey Pacific who has been instrumental in helping pilot you know, and pioneer, some some really successful applications of biochar and vineyards. In some of the early trials that we did. We found that with a pre plant, you know, with fresh plants going in the best utilization of biochar is in the planting row only Delve are plowed you know, right down the planting row only don't waste any the biochar on the surface broadcast. Keep it in the planting row only and take it to depth. That's one thing we learned. And so using biochar in pre plant has really shone as you're shown shown, shawn as past of shown I guess, is as a really successful way to utilize biochar, it helps get the plants up. And we've been seeing significant yield benefits, where the biochar has been plowed down the planting row. And the application rate in that we found to be quite successful is in the range of about a half percent organic matter equivalent in those field trials. Now, that doesn't mean that's the only successful application. That's just one that we identified early on as being quite successful.

Craig Macmillan 19:45

Are you familiar with or do you think there are ways to do things post planning?

Josiah Hunt 19:50

For post planting there's been a number of different approaches, and I can't say if I've seen any single approach rise to the top as being In the winner, and I think this might be due to how many different management practices there are after the vine's planted, which I think have a wider spectrum of variety than than the planting process itself. And so something that Monterey Pacific has been working on is applying it to existing. And I guess I'm not sure how much of this they've published and how much needs to keep quiet. So I better hold my tongue I'm getting describing exactly what they're doing.

Craig Macmillan 20:30

So here's an example. So one of the things that I've heard from other people but I haven't seen anything on is that they make biochar which when asked you about they make biochar and then they, they grind it essentially, or they break it up and then they mix it with compost, and then they they band that on in the vine or like they would have compost. Anyway, all they've done those, they've added some biochar to it, but it sounds like the incorporation is really crucial.

Josiah Hunt 20:53

Yes, you nailed it. That's it. That's how they're doing it. So basically, what what a lot of the folks are doing with compost applications in existing, they're simply just incorporating biochar as part of that. So rather than looking at doing compost, only, they're doing a biochar amended compost and applying the same method, and this works out really well.

Craig Macmillan 21:15

It does work out well. Okay, so I was gonna say it sounds like there may be some limitations there. But there are some benefits.

Josiah Hunt 21:20

Yeah, no, this works out really well, the biochar you blend it up with the compost, it flows through the equipment, no problem. And there's a lot of synergy to biochar and compost working take they work really well together. That that basically captures it however, using compost, you can consider including biochar as a portion of that. And then what portion becomes a really interesting question. A lot of people have been kind of in the range of between 10% to 30%. By weight when they're doing maintenance. That's the range that I most commonly see.

Craig Macmillan 21:52

So let's say I'm interested in this either as a pre plant or maybe as abandoned, I need to go with compost, can I make my own? And if so, what materials do I need? And what can I do? How hard is it to make biochar myself from a vineyard or winery? What do I what do I need to do this?

Josiah Hunt 22:06

Making biochar yourself by hand in the vineyard is it's hard work. But it's totally it's it's not rocket science, it can be done with some fairly rudimentary approaches. Commonly, what's done now is when a when a vineyard is gonna get ripped out, they'll go and they'll push all the piles up metal vines, the whole thing that push all the piles up right after harvest, and then they're gonna be aiming to replant by March, you know, replant several months later. Now, this is really tricky here, this is the biggest problem, because yes, you can make biochar to that material. But with that much moisture content in the biomass, it's gonna be really hard to do that. To do it in a rudimentary fashion, one of the easy ways to do this would just be push up those big piles, let them dry, which kind of requires that you fallow for a year, and then you come back the following year. And you can do what's called a conservation burn, essentially, it's the same thing. But instead of lighting the pile from the bottom on the inside, you just do a top lit pile. So you light it from the top, and then the flame starts at the top and the heat causes the wood underneath it to volatilize releasing its gases and the flame consumes all the gas is as it as it comes down. And it also kind of then works as a protector of the charcoal that's created. This conservation burn approach is cleaner burning. And if you quench it at the right time, you can get a significant amount of charcoal, but it does require that your vines have to be dry, which is in most cases that we've seen. It's going to take a year of fallow to get there.

Craig Macmillan 23:40

So I could do it with vine material.

Josiah Hunt 23:42

You can do it vine material, you can do it in the field without any fancy equipment other than just doing a top down burn, which just takes a little bit of a slightly different approach to it. And there's been some some farms that have really been doing a good job with this Kendall Jackson hosted a little workshop or something on this down in in the King City area a couple years ago, a lot of different vineyards that whose names are escaping me right now have been tinkering around with this method of biochar production, it's fairly easy, but it does require a fallow period and let that material dry. The other would be to potentially grind up that material and take it to another location where you could have a centralized biochar production facility. But the difficulty particularly in vineyards is is the metal content you just got you got a lot of of wires and steaks in there. And that makes that makes it tough.

Craig Macmillan 24:32

How would he do things need to be? Can I do this with landscaping waste? Can I do it with grasses? How much lignin do I need? How well would he do this step up to be?

Josiah Hunt 24:45

That's a great question. You know, you can make biochar with omega with biosolids, you know, which is not very woody. It'll just have very different characteristics. So woody biomass will have different characteristics than say grass biomass, the grassy based biochar can actually be really interesting materials, particularly because you have those monocots you have those really long, you know, the different type of vascular tissue. And so monocots makes some really interesting biochar, in my opinion. And you know, part of the question gets to what's the best use so if you have grass clippings, generally you have quite a bit of nitrogen content and grass clippings might be more beneficial in a composting pathway to because when you burn something to make biochar, it's hard to keep the nitrogen around a good chunk of that nitrogen is going to leave during the burning process. So sometimes you take your grassy materials and you manures and those can make good materials for anaerobic digestion and or composting, and then the materials that are kind of more woody content, harder to compost, and therefore, often prime candidates for biochar production, but you can use most any of it.

Craig Macmillan 25:48

That is fascinating and encouraging. I think there's a lot to be done here. It sounds like not only are we getting some science, we're getting some experience. And now we're also getting some application. I think that's really, really great. And that's a big part of any aspect of farming is people have to have some science to base it on, but then they have to try it. And it sounds like that trying is happening. And that's really, really exciting. Really, really encouraging. Is there one piece of advice or one thing that you would tell a grower related to biochar one thing say, Hey, that's a great idea. Here's either why or here's what you might want to do.

Josiah Hunt 26:17

No pressure, no pressure, no.

Craig Macmillan 26:21

I like putting you on the spot.

Josiah Hunt 26:24

The one thing Oh, my gosh.

Craig Macmillan 26:25

Career, take your entire career, boil it down to like two sentences.

Josiah Hunt 26:31

Biochar has shown to be an investment in your soil infrastructure, in that adding nitrogen is like fuel. You know, it's like putting fuel in the tank, whereas adding biochar is more akin to an infrastructure investment that is not necessarily putting fuel in the tank, but it's going to improve your fuel efficiency so that you can increase your ratio of output versus input with rising cost of fertilizer questions on the availability of water that becomes increasingly valuable. And I think those are the primary reasons why an investment in biochar would want to be considered.

Craig Macmillan 27:12

And I think that's great advice. And I think that's a really good way to look, we're not talking about a, an input the same way that we might think about something that, you know, goes away, this is an investment in infrastructure. And I think it's a really good way to think about it. Um, where can people find out more about you and what you do?

Josiah Hunt 27:27

The website for the company is Pacificbiochar.com. We've got a lot of information, I think we definitely have some room to improve how how well organized the information is, but there's quite a bit there. We've been working with vineyards for quite a number of years. And throughout the website, there are sprinkled different bits of information and case studies about some of the vendors that we've worked with.

Craig Macmillan 27:48

Yeah, and I want to underline that definitely, there's a lot of great information, including webinars and articles, the meta analysis that you've mentioned, it's a really great resource, and I encourage people to check it out.

Josiah Hunt 28:01

Yeah, we have a whole section on white papers and stuff that we've produced, you know, benefits of biochar and agriculture and, and other white papers that we've produced specifically to try and help provide these resources.

Craig Macmillan 28:11

Well, that's about all the time we've got. I want to thank Josiah Hunt, Founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation for being our guest today. Please check out their website, check out our website. They'll be more links and information, all kinds of resources there. As always, thank you for listening to Sustainable Winegrowing with Vineyard Team thanks Josiah.

Josiah Hunt 28:31

You bet Thank you Craig.

Can you hear my dog drinking water from the water bowl? He's a super he's like a water buffalo drinks a lot and loud.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Did you know… that searches for sustainable goods have increased globally by 71% since 2016?

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Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's specific sustainable practices into your messaging.

Check out the show notes for a links to the Eco-Awkening and Full Glass consumer purchasing research, this article, research on consumer preferences, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

References:

• **SIP Smart Training online course
• 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine
• 3 Ways to Build a Strong Brand
• Did you know...?
• Identifying wine consumers interested in environmentally sustainable production practices
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• SIP Certified
• What Sustainability Means to Consumers by Morning Consult

Composting is taking diverse organic material and making a habitat for the microbes that will process the material. Jean Bonhotal, Director of Cornell Waste Management Institute in the Department of Soils and Crop Sciences explains that there are three necessary ingredients to make a great compost. First, the pile should start with carbon-like woodchips to help move air through. Second, add in wet waste like food or pomace. And third, top the pile with carbon.

The most important factor in making compost is temperature. In fact, you do not need to turn piles. The organisms that break down compost generate temperatures that are about 90 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. A great example of this is seen in mortality composting, used for livestock. These piles are created by layering 24 inches of woodchips, followed by the animal, and top with another 24 inches of wood chips. The animal will liquefy and then everything starts to mix as the microbes work. In 12 to 24 hours the pile will reach the desired 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

While compost is not technically a fertilizer it has numerous benefits including imparting nutrients, pest resistance, helping with erosion control, and improving water holding capacity because it works like a sponge. Listen in to hear Jean's best advice on how to create great compost.

References:

• 1/20/2023 REGISTER: Improving Soil Health with Compost & Vermiculture Tailgate
• 53: Producing Compost and Carbon Sequestration
• 106: What? Bury Charcoal in the Vineyard?
• 151: The Role of the Soil Microbiome in Soil Health
• 153: The Role of Nematodes in Soil Health
• Aerated Compost Tea
• Composting Handbook
• Compost Use for Improved Soil Poster Series
• Improving and Maintaining Compost Quality
• Niner Wine Estates
• SIP Certified
• Testing Composts
• Tipsheet: Compost
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member
• What Is Animal Mortality Composting?

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Transcript

Craig Macmillan 0:00

My guest today is Jean Bonhotal. She is Director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute. And he's also a Senior Extension Associate in the Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Science Section at Cornell University. And we're talking about compost today. Thanks for being here, Jean.

Jean Bonhotal 0:13

Thank you.

Craig Macmillan 0:14

I like to start with basics when we're talking about a topic. And sometimes it seems kind of silly, but it oftentimes shapes what we talk about. Let's start with a very basic definition. What exactly is compost.

Unknown Speaker 0:26

So I'm going to start with a definition before I get into composting, and that is what is organic, what is organic? When I'm using the term organic, this is what it will mean something that was once alive and is now dead, and needs to be managed. That comes with all different types of quality. But we are usually looking for clean feedstocks, that are organic in origin. So we don't want glass and plastic and other materials that really don't break down and have put a lot of plastic into our environment, because they break down into little tiny pieces, and they're still there. So I'll start with that. Composting is basically taking organic material, all different diverse, organic materials, preferably, and making a habitat for microbes, the microbes that are going to process these materials. When we're composting, we can do all of the work mechanically. But it doesn't really work that well because composting is a process. And if we set it up so that we have our carbon and nitrogen ratios, well balanced. And those are browns and greens, wet and dry materials. So those are the things that we need to balance, then we will have a proper habitat for the microbes to work in and they will thrive. The microbes are what make the heat in a compost. When we're composting very small volumes, we don't always have heat. And that's because we don't have the volume that we need for that composting to happen in commercial scale, we generally will have enough volume. So as long as we balance that carbon and nitrogen, we will have a very good compost that will actually work mostly by itself.

Craig Macmillan 2:29

So you need different kinds of microbes for taking action on different types of materials, whether they be high nitrogen or high carbon or whatever. Where did those bacteria and fungi, where do those come from?

Jean Bonhotal 2:40

They come from everywhere. They come from us breathing on the medium that we're putting in there they come from the air, their bio aerosolized is what we consider. So these things blow in, and we really don't have to inoculate most composts. The only reason we might need to inoculate a compost is because we've shut it down. Either we've put something in there that's too toxic for the organisms to work with, or we've made it too hot in that pile. The organisms that we're working with are thermophilic organisms, they generate temperatures that are about 90 to 150. And the actual range for thermophilic is more like 130. Those are the temperatures that we really like to reach 130 to 150 is really degrees Fahrenheit is really the temperatures that we want to heat want to reach.

Craig Macmillan 3:42

And that's because those are the ranges where these particular microbes are the most happy.

Jean Bonhotal 3:46

Yes, and the microbes are actually generating the heat. It's like putting 55th graders in a room you don't have to heat. They're giving off lots of energy and have to do anything else. They're doing the work and metabolizing all of that material.

We were talking about a range, what if we're not generating enough heat? What kinds of things happen then? Or what can we do to change that?

Well back up because that is dependent on size. So we have to have that volume and that and if we look at physics, that volume is three by three by three feet cubed. However, when we're working in cold climates, that is not large enough. So everything will freeze really, we have to have everything so perfect with that three by three by three cube that we're not likely to reach those temperatures. So it's really balancing the carbon and nitrogen the moisture. And because if like in arid climates where everything dries out horribly, we need to make sure there's enough moisture retained in that because these are aerobic organisms that are doing all the work. And we really need to make sure that they have that moisture, or else they can't really work. People think that worms make compost, and to an extent they do, there's vermicompost. And it's a different than thermophilic composting that I'm talking about. But Vermacomposting is done with epigeic worms. It's done in a 24 inch bed. So you're making that compost in kind of a shallow bed so that it won't heat up, because the worms are actually doing all of the work in that system. When worms come into a compost, or thermophilic compost, that's at the end of the process, they can't tolerate the heat in the thermophilic process. But they do like to process those organisms that are in there. So they will go in and actually process some of that material toward the end. And in some ways, you can tell that you have a more finished compost, because worms are actually able to thrive in there.

Craig Macmillan 6:07

Where did the worms come from?

Jean Bonhotal 6:09

Generally from the ground, if you're composting in a vessel, you're not going to have worms in there unless you had like warm eggs or something that were already in the medium, and hatched or something like that. So that's where those are coming from. So like indoor facilities generally wouldn't have an earthworm coming in and processing. And the epigeic worms are surface feeders, so they're coming up, they detect that something's up there to eat. And they'll just come to the surface, eat it, pull it down, up and down, you know, they can actually handle above 54 degrees, where a lot of worms dry out and die there. As they get if it gets too hot, and they get too dry.

Craig Macmillan 6:57

You had mentioned the right mix or blend the right kind of connection of different materials and other recipes that that work for certain practical applications are given certain materials, you want certain ratios, how does that work?

Jean Bonhotal 7:10

There are recipes out there. But basically, you have to look at everything as carbon and nitrogen. So if you're a vineyard that wants to compost, the pumice, all your all your promise while you're squeezing all that kind of material, then you're gonna have to look at that and figure out whether that's going to work by itself, just that promise. But you do have grape skins, and you have grape seeds in there. So the grape skins and the grape seeds actually can work together to create a good habitat and actually make things work or you have a pH of about four or five in those pressings. That's going to deter worms for a while it is going to deter some other organisms for a while, but things will start to get going. And that's how we tend to do that. If it's really sloppy and wet, it would be better to add a little bit more waste, but another waste, marry it with another waste, whether you have some manure or you know the if there are some animals on site, if you can mix in manure, or some shavings, or I don't usually like to put wood chips in because it makes a coarser compost for a vineyard. And we want generally want to find our compost.

Craig Macmillan 8:30

Which actually reminds me of something. There were two things that I had learned and that they may not be true when I was coming up and we're talking like 20 years ago. One was that you had to have manure as part of the mix, some kind of a manure there was one and then the second one was forget about using any kind of wood chip vines, anything like that, because they're not going to break down. And that's not going to work. So how is that accurate for either this ideas?

Jean Bonhotal 8:54

No, we have to use all of our carbon sources. Honestly, we do have to use all different carbon sources in different types of composting. I'll give you an example of facilities that by regulation, they're only allowed to compost leaf and yard waste. So they're not allowed to bring in food unless they have a permit to bring in food waste. So there's a lot of different rules that occur over municipalities. Some municipalities got the idea because they needed more nitrogen, there's a lot of carbon and your dry leaves and your woodchips and your woody waste. And I generally will say if I make a pile of sticks, which is all carbon, so all all different sticks and just put them in a pile. If I go back six months later, what is it going to be?

Craig Macmillan 9:42

Dried sticks?

Jean Bonhotal 9:43

A pile of sticks, because I don't have any real nitrogen there is nitrogen in there but I don't have enough in there to make that break down. So I do like to size reduce those chips, the woody waste and that's chipping off or grinding or something like that. And that will make things go better. If you need to compost just leaves, what the municipalities were doing was adding chemical fertilizer to them. Because the chemical fertilizer would bring the nitrogen in, you have to decide do you want to use the chemical nitrogen, the chemical fertilizer, or not in your process, but that will make it work because their carbon and their nitrogen, and we can do that.

Craig Macmillan 10:27

Do I need to do some analysis on these materials and figure out what I actually have and then make calculations from there.

Jean Bonhotal 10:33

So the ratios that we want to use are two to three to one. So I have a good picture of a bucket. And it could be any bucket, think of a cottage cheese container up to us eight yard bucket, I want one bucket of wet material, a very wet material. And then three buckets of very dry material. That's how we balance those ratios. But we are really some of it is like It's like making bread, we don't dump all the flour and all the water in at one time, we put in a little bit of time, because we need to balance out what that recipe actually needs. And the same thing happens in composting, the operators get very good at knowing, okay, that's really, really dry material. And that's really, really wet material. And I might even need to make because we can compost liquids, I might need to make a bowl to put that liquid in there or that really wet material in there so that it can stay in the pile. So I can use that moisture, mix it with the woody waste, and allow that to happen.

Craig Macmillan 11:42

This is beginning to get kind of intimidating. I was kind of hoping that I just would throw a bunch of stuff in a pile and walk away and come back and magically I now have compost. Yeah, how do I figure this out, I guess we're gonna get my education?

Jean Bonhotal 11:58

So one of the ways we do small scale composting is we layer the materials in so we'll have a bin and we'll put carbon down at the bottom, make sure we have a good carbon layer because that's going to act as an air plenum on the bottom. So simple, just woodchips a pallet, something that's going to allow air to come in, then we'll put nitrogen or put in our wet waste, our food waste, our pumice, those materials, we're going to put carbon on top of that. So we never should be able to see what we're composting, it should always look like a pile of comp of compost. But I will talk a little bit about mortality composting and how we do that, because it really tells us how the whole thing is supposed to work. And what we do is we put down 24 inches of woodchips, then I'll put a cow in. And then I'll put 24 inches of woodchips over top of that, what happens in that is the cow starts to liquefy. And then it starts to mix with all of the material, all the all the microbes are starting to work. And everything starts mixing together in a very slow motion in 12 to 24 hours, I should have 130 degrees Fahrenheit in that pile. If I don't, then I've built it wrong. But generally even with we're composting right now with frozen animals, and we're able because of the size of our piles, we're able to do that, that heats up. So whatever the pile is, or the windrow is that heats up, and then the heat rises, and it actually convex around that that medium. So the organisms are getting all that and we don't have to do any turning. We don't have to turn at all. So we don't always turn and if I do that layering like I was talking about in a bin, if we layer it in a bin, then we will be able to do that and walk away and just let the rain and snow fall on it through the season. It'll be slower, but it will compost.

Craig Macmillan 14:11

So again, I had been under the impression that you always have to you have a regular schedule, you have to turn it to aerate it. And you also have to monitor the moisture. No you do not.

Jean Bonhotal 14:19

No. No. The only real tool that we use is temperature. We monitor temperatures in piles, we can tell everything that's going on in that pile is that making sure that it's working well or we need to add more water or we need to whatever we can tell that by temperature.

Craig Macmillan 14:39

If the temperature is getting too high. What do you do?

Jean Bonhotal 14:41

I do compost in arid places where our temperatures can get really high because our piles are too big. Okay, and then we really have to be careful because we can have spontaneous combustion. And our large ones I worked with some facilities in Idaho that around the Boise area, and they were in danger of combusting. And as they were like, what do we do? Well, if we add a lot of air real fast, we're going to be in trouble. If we add a lot of water real fast, we're going to be in trouble. So what we do is we, we will break those piles carefully, break those piles down, just deconstruct those, lay them in sheet, and then just make sure that they've cooled off, then we can build a pile again, but it can be a problem in hot and arid climates. And it can happen anywhere there are different manures like poultry manure will burn more easily than other manure because of the ammonia contents. Because of the just the nature of that material.

Craig Macmillan 15:45

What kind of temperatures are we talking about?

Jean Bonhotal 15:47

When we're getting over 170? I get nervous, especially if it's really hot, ambient temperature. We have to be careful about that.

Craig Macmillan 15:56

Excellent. Okay, that's useful. That's that we can keep that we can track that ourselves. Now, before we run out of time. We have time I just want to get to this topic, because I think there's a lot here. Now, oftentimes, compost is treated like a fertilizer, you say, oh, there's nutrients here. And we're doing it for that reason. But compost will do a lot of other things for you in terms of your soil.

Jean Bonhotal 16:18

Yes, and compost is not technically a fertilizer. So if I have a finished compost, it's not a fertilizer and doesn't follow the fertilizer rules. So there are rules that govern fertilizers and rules that cover compost, and so we have to be careful about that. So it does impart nutrients to our soil compost does impart nutrients to our soil, it helps with erosion control, it helps with water holding capacity, because compost acts like a sponge, and it will pull that moisture into the soil. And then the plants are able to use that when things get droughty. So we really want to use a lot of compost, if in my dreams, I would like to have three inches of compost spread on the whole terrestrial earth. Because I think we need it, it's the only way we can create or recreate our sustainable soils, our soils are very much bankrupt, we might put nutrients back on those soils, but we don't put the organic matter back on the soils, were able to take more of the corn crop. So less gets tilled in, and less of that organic matter is there so we don't have sustainable soils because of that. And compost can help us create and generate sustainable soils so that we don't have to do that. We don't have to constantly add fertilizer.

Craig Macmillan 17:49

Now that leads me to a couple of other things. So in terms of application in vineyards, it's very common to band compost right under the vines in the vine round and not in the middle. Some folks are experimenting with full on broadcasting across the whole surface, right and this has worked really well in range land contexts, which is interesting. And then there's a question about whether compost needs to be incorporated into the soil or does it need to be cultivated in what are your feelings about that for you know, a soil that's maybe a clay soil relatively dry.

Jean Bonhotal 18:23

I'll talk specifically for vineyards on this some vineyards will start their new plants their starts with like some vermiompost. And vermicompost is a pretty popular product to use when we're putting our starts in. And these are like five year old vines that are just getting planted. And we really want these guys to go. So that will help with nutrients. It will help with soil aggregation, it will just make healthy soil. I have had a poster up before as because it says compost don't treat your soil like dirt. And that's really what we want to do. We want to compost we want to add compost so that we're not just dealing with mineral soils. And I think it's really important for us to be thinking about that way. So the adding a you know, an eight ounce cup of compost vermicompost into the holes is supposed to work very well. And a lot of people in California have actually experimented with that. From what I'm told. What their plant responses are, I haven't followed those. So I don't know. Broadcasting I've seen people more put it in the row middles so that they don't end up with a lot of bull wood in their vines because if they get the nutrients up against the vines at the wrong time, that can be problematic. So sometimes they'll even take immature compost and put that in the row middles. That keeps keeps grass down keeps weeds down, you'll still have some cover there. But then it slowly works its way into the vineyard.

Craig Macmillan 20:06

When you're referring to row middles you mean under the vine?

Jean Bonhotal 20:09

I mean, between the, the rows.

Craig Macmillan 20:11

Between the vines. Okay.

Jean Bonhotal 20:12

Yeah, I've seen that done a lot in New York, where people are using it that way. And sometimes we'll use an immature compost because that we call it a killer compost, which we shouldn't, but it kills the area, and it won't encourage the growth in the row middles. And it keeps it a little bit away from the vine for a little while, then by the next season, that's all integrated into that soil system.

Craig Macmillan 20:39

Fascinating. Fascinating. Now, what do you think about banding underneath the vine?

Jean Bonhotal 20:43

By banding, you mean just putting it right against the wood?

Craig Macmillan 20:48

Generally, just underneath the vine, not in the middle, the strategy there, I think is I'm trying to get a higher concentration, if you will, and I want to put it where the vine roots are going to be in. So they're going to be predominantly in the vine row, not not exclusively, but they're gonna be that's where the highest concentration of roots is going to be. So the idea is, hey, if I'm going to put five tons per acre on, let me put it on in a narrow band, like 18 inches, as opposed to, you know, eight feet, you know, in terms of in terms of width, it sounds like you're kind of more interested, if you would kind of recommend, you know, putting it in the middle as opposed to under the vine.

Jean Bonhotal 21:21

I don't have enough experience with grapes to recommend. So I'm not going to make that recommendation. This is what I'm seeing in the vineyard, the way the growers are choosing to actually experiment and see what is getting the nutrients to the plant at the right time. So what strategy is, is working best. Using the vermicompost in the hole that's been very productive using some of the row middles. I'm not sure about banding I have no experience with that. So I don't want to speak on that. I'm more of the compost production cleaning up the best person. You know, what, when we get the calls, this pile over here, stinks by the neighbor, then I step in and and try to get everything more productive.

Craig Macmillan 22:13

That makes sense that makes tons of sense. One other application that I do think you can speak to is erosion control. What role can compost have an erosion control.

Jean Bonhotal 22:22

We do a lot of work with compost, and I'm gonna share with you some posters that will give you simple compost use instructions. We work in agriculture, we work in erosion control, we work in urban garden gardens and farms. So there's all different possibilities with all different compost and every compost, even the compost that aren't the quality that we want for our vineyard. Every compost has a potential use, even if it's just daily covering a landfill, so that we've taken those metals or those that toxicity out of the environment, and at least concentrated it in smaller places so that maybe it can be recovered at some point when we figure that kind of stuff out.

Craig Macmillan 23:07

And the way this is working is that the compost is binding this soil somehow or is it reducing the impact of the raindrops or what's the mechanism.

Jean Bonhotal 23:17

We do both compost blankets and compost socks and erosion control. So the compost blankets we have blower trucks that can spray compost, it's a big big hose, we spray compost onto a hillside, when we put that blanket down. When the rain comes if the rain comes in, it hits the soil, it hits the soil and it makes mud and that mud starts running down the hill. And that's erosion. When it hits the compost, the compost acts like a sponge. And that sponge will just keep sucking in that moisture. And then slowly release it like a sponge will. And so the plants can use it better and it doesn't create those rivulets and the erosion that other things do.

Craig Macmillan 24:10

What kinds of rates per acre per square yard or what are we talking about?

Jean Bonhotal 24:15

For it depends on per crop. When we put a blanket down, we'll put in out about a inch blanket. So that's a visual, and we want to make sure that it's well covered I'd put one or two inches down easily, because that will start incooperating. Remember I told you about those worms? The worms will come up and start processing some of that material. And that'll only be incorporated in the soil in that way. So we don't actually incorporate we will seed put the blanket down and then we might hydro seed on top of that blanket. And that'll create cover some kind of cover crop whether it depends on our goals. We'll put whatever cover crop we might put red clover on our roadside we might put, you know, depends on where we are what we're putting in, but usually a low grow local plant. So we don't want to take you know, a plant from New York and put it in California, it's not going to produce the same way. We want to make sure that we are in the right conditions. We have the right plantings and all that and Soil and Water Conservation Districts which are all over the country. They give you guidance on what should go on to slopes. What should go into row middles, it depends on the plants though, and cooperative extension does a lot of that, what application do we need for what crop. One of the things that we are finding with soil blends and stuff when we're trying to bring in topsoil topsoil has lots of different definitions, a lot of times it's sand. Because we can't get topsoil, it's very difficult, we've used up a lot of our topsoil, and we don't have that rich earth to bring to someplace else to put that topsoil down. So we're working right now on grow tests to look at what percentage of compost should be mixed with the mineral soil, or with close to mineral soil or with the soil existing soil. And one of the things that we're finding is that we can really use in most for most crops, and for soil sustainability to build those soils, we can use about 50% compost in all of those, and we're getting really good results with crops. It does depend whether we're growing cabbages or grapes, or we really need those soils to be more sustainable. If our soils are sustainable, they'll increase the water holding capacity, you know, through the compost application, but they also help with pest resistance. So we'll have more pest resistance, because we have healthy soils, we have more competitors that are actually able to take things out instead of working in a chemical system where okay, the cut worms came in, and the cut worms are really happy to be working in. There's nothing telling them not to. And similarly with powdery mildews and some of the other diseases, we seem to have better results with having a healthy soil. So not just dust that we've added fertilizer to.

Craig Macmillan 27:32

Sure. And that makes total sense of any there are a lot of folks that are looking at this kind of a holistic plant science, plant physiology approach, which is what you're talking about. And there's a lot of exciting things going on and talking about compost being a part of it is really cool, basically at aout of advice or what one thing would you like people to know as far as their own compost production goes.

Jean Bonhotal 27:58

If you're producing compost, you're a microbe farmer. And that's what you really need to consider create a habitat that they're going to thrive in, and they'll do all the work for you. And that is my best piece of advice to anybody.

Craig Macmillan 28:14

That's great. And where can people find out more about you and your work?

Jean Bonhotal 28:17

I'm with Cornell Waste Management Institute at Cornell University. You can you can google us pretty easily.

Craig Macmillan 28:25

It's easy to find information about you. Yeah, and about the CWMI. So our guest today was Joan Bonhotal. She is the director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute. And she's also Senior Extension Associate with the Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Science section at Cornell University. Lots of great stuff is gonna be in the show notes. Again, we encourage you to look into this topic. It's exciting. There's a lot going on. Wouldn't you agree there's a lot of new science every year on this topic.

Jean Bonhotal 28:51

There is a lot a lot going on in composting, a lot going on in sustainable soil production and if we have sustainable soils, we will be able to grow healthy food and sustain healthy people. So there's just so much going on with all applications of composting.

Craig Macmillan 29:12

Very exciting.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Did you know that telling your sustainability story can help you sell more wine?

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

Today we share three ways you can build a strong brand so that your customers will remember you.

Kathy Kelly, Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University found that describing specific practices and why there are important not only sets you apart from the competition but helps to create an emotional connection with your customers. It can even increase their willingness to pay more for a bottle of sustainable wine!

Elements of a brand

"Brand identity" is the personality of your business -- it's what people think about when they think of your brand. "Brand awareness" refers to general familiarity with your brand. Both concepts should be taken into consideration when creating a branding strategy. By cultivating recognition and understanding of your brand through design, messaging, and more, you can make your business and your customer experience more memorable.

Your brand's name, logo or symbol, tagline, colors, imagery, voice, and more -- this is how your brand is presented to the outside world. Maximize your brand experience by dialing in these key brand features.

3 ways to build a strong brand What makes you so special?

Every wine brand has its unique story. Whether it's a business passed down the generations of a family, a hobby that grew into a booming business, what started out as a weekend project for a couple of friends, or a drive to fill a hole in the industry, identifying what makes your brand different from the rest and including elements of this story into your communications and imagery is a great way create a more personal connection with your customers.

Understand your supporters

Define your target audience to help dial in the kind of messaging you want to send through your branding efforts. Do you want to create a playful feel with your brand? Are you after a more sophisticated and elegant aura? Talk to your clients and return customers about why they support your business and what keeps them coming back. Pay attention to the type of messages that seem to resonate most with your audience and clients through engagement and sales activity.

Consistency is key

Create a consistent experience each time a customer interacts with your product or service. This will help to reinforce the personal connection to your brand and maintain a sense of familiarity. Communication channels to consider include your website, tasting room, email newsletters, social media, and packaging. The tone and spirit of your messaging should be consistent to keep your channels harmonized.

New year, new opportunities

People want to support brands that share their values. Does your brand's messaging and imagery provide a clear sense of what your brand stands for and the kind of experience it wants to provide your clients?

The start of the new year gives us an opportunity to come back from the holidays with a refreshed perspective. It's a good idea to take some time to assess your brand's identity and be sure your messaging is in line with the impression you want to make. This can help you prepare for all of the opportunities in the year ahead to connect with new and returning customers!

Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's specific sustainable practices into your messaging.

Check out the show notes for a link to the interview with Kathy Kelley, links to this article, research on consumer purchasing preferences, to download the seasons of sustainability PDF, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

References:

• **SIP Smart Training online course
• 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine
• 3 Ways to Build a Strong Brand
• Cover crops make vineyards more sustainable; strategy can be marketing tool
• Kathy Kelley
• Identifying wine consumers interested in environmentally sustainable production practices
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• Penn State Extension Wine Business Management and Marketing
• Seasons of Sustainability
• SIP Certified
• What Sustainability Means to Consumers by Morning Consult
• Wine consumers' willingness to adopt environmentally friendly packaging practices at tasting rooms: An ECHAID analysis