January 15, 2010

U.S. wineries now fertile ground for green building technology

ANGWIN, Calif.

Green wine is catching on. “We’re seeing a trend toward more sustainable wineries,” says Ashley Katz, spokeswoman for the U.S. Green Building Council.

The council doesn’t track industries specifically, but Katz says at least four wineries in the U.S. already have received LEED certification and more than a dozen more are going through the process. Wineries with Gold-certified facilities include Stoller Vineyards in Dayton, Ore., and Hall St. Helena in the Napa Valley.

Meanwhile, solar panels have become a common site across U.S. wine country and some wineries are rethinking water usage. Jackson Family Wines, makers of the popular Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, recently announced it will recycle water used for rinsing wine barrels and tanks, resulting in significantly less water and energy use.

In dry California, which has seen three years of drought, water conversation is the new frontier of winery design, says Roger Boulton, who is helping create a planned Platinum LEED-certified winery at the University of California, Davis.

“The real question in the future will be how many times did you use the water. And ‘one’ will not be a good answer,” he says.

The under-construction university’s teaching winery, privately funded and part of the UC Davis Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, is packed with sustainable operating features, including onsite sourcing and efficient use of both water and energy.

The winery, which aims to be the first to get Platinum certification will be fully solar-powered, including during harvest, the peak period for a winery’s energy consumption. Eventually, all of the water used for cleaning will be from large tanks that will collect rain from the adjacent academic building during the winter and use it throughout the year.

At Cade, which hopes to get its entire facility Gold certified by spring, solar panels cover 60 per cent of the roof, providing more energy than the winery uses nine months out of the year. The panels even run two electric car chargers for use by customers who have plug-in wheels.

“We’re thinking of everybody,” says Conover with a smile.

Steel used in the building was recycled and the concrete is 30 per cent fly ash, which is recycled ash from coal-fired power plants.

The insulation? Old blue jeans that were shredded and sprayed into the walls.

Another big energy saver: 1,400 square metres of caves tunnelled into the mountain that provide year-round storage for the wines with no heating or cooling. All landscaping water is recycled; bathrooms feature low-flush toilets, and for the gents, waterless urinals.

Jackson Family Wines, a supporter of the Davis winery, has also worked with Boulton and others to create a water reuse program using a filtration cleaning system that also retains heat. The company recently completed a yearlong pilot program and is in the process of implementing the system at the Kendall-Jackson winery in Sonoma County. Winery officials estimate a water savings of 27 million litres a year.

In some ways, what’s new is old in the wine industry.

In the days before power plants, wine country pioneers had no choice but to go green. “People built buildings that were aligned with the way the sun tracks in the sky; they aligned their building east-to-west to take advantage of crosswinds,” says Conover.

Cade designers took a tip out of that old book, designing the fermentation building to track daylight and maximize breezes.

“We’ve come almost full circle,” says Conover.

Associated Press

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