Page 14 - Terroir_2014

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Napa Valley’s wineries are working in big and small ways to reduce their
carbon footprint. They encourage carpooling among their employees
and use hybrid company cars. They run their farming vehicles with
biodiesel fuels and compost their pomace. They focus on encouraging
biodiversity and preventing pollution. And they install compressors
that do double duty, capturing hot air and preheating facility water,
harnessing water energy as well as the sun.
It’s not by accident that Napa Valley looks and feels nostalgic. And this
visionary, well-thought-out plan was initiated in the late 1960s.
A HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP
In 1967, Jack Davies, then owner of Schramsberg Vineyards, served as
chairman of a citizens committee formed to support the creation of a
greenbelt to preserve the fertile valley’s land—the first of its kind in the
nation. To call the proposal revolutionary is an understatement, but it
was conceived out of genuine concern for unchecked development.
“My dad’s family moved to L.A. in the 1930s. At the time, it was the
number-one agricultural county in California. But how many oranges
can you find in Orange County today?” asks Hugh Davies, president and
CEO of the sparkling-wine property in Napa Valley. “When he went to
Stanford, the Santa Clara Valley was a much different place too, and that
changed dramatically in a short period of time. And so when he came up
to Napa, sharing this dream to make high-quality wines with a relatively
small group of people who were all moving in the same direction, they all
quickly realized that they needed zoning to be established before Napa
Valley ended up like those other areas.”
In 1968, the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve was established,
protecting the area from development by designating agriculture as
the highest and best use of the land. It was followed by a series of new
legislation over the subsequent years to offer further protections in the
form of conservation easements, zoning laws, and growth-management
ordinances. In 1990, the Winery Definition Ordinance was adopted.
By establishing that the unique purpose of a winery is to make wine,
the ordinance curtailed wineries creating side businesses: no weddings
on-site, no bed-and-breakfasts, and no restaurants on the property. It
also established a minimum parcel size for wineries and set local grape-
sourcing requirements. And in an effort to control traffic in the area and
the flow of people, the ordinance mandated tastings by appointment
only. All this in an effort to protect the integrity of the Agricultural
Preserve.
While the 1968 ordinance is currently extended to 2058 and requires a
two-thirds vote by the people of Napa Valley before it can be overturned,
Davies points out that the battle is never over. “The initiatives are only
as good as the voters, and the people who will be voting 20 years from
now are very different from those today. It’s an ongoing education that
isn’t always comfortable, and so we try to strike a balance—because if it
changes, it can happen very quickly.”