As a consumer who cares about climate change, you may be shopping for organic, local, or even regenerative food products. But does your support of sustainable agriculture extend to wine?
How does a winemaker earn the certified sustainable distinction? And what does sustainable viticulture look like?
Steve Lohr is President and CEO of J. Lohr Vineyards and Wines, a winemaking operation with vineyards in Monterey County, Paso Robles, and Napa Valley, California. J. Lohr is dedicated to sustainability and the environment, and Steve’s team earned the 2020 Green Medal Leader Award from the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Steve joins Ross to discuss J. Lohr’s sustainability practices, describing how an operation of scale can make large investments in sustainable practices in an attempt to move the needle, and why Steve believes in sustainability at any size of business. How much of a business attempting sustainability is cost-saving and how much is brand value?
Listen in for insight on how installing a solar tracking array reduced J. Lohr’s electric bill by an order of magnitude and get Steve’s advice on how to get started with drinking sustainable wines.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
J. Lohr’s Sustainability Initiatives
Paul Wagner on Reversing Climate Change S3EP10
Other Homes and Garbage: Designs for Self-Sufficient Living by Jim Leckle, Gill Masters, Harry Whitehouse and Lily Young
California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance
J. Lohr’s Certified Sustainable Merlot
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Today I have with me Steve Lohr, president and CEO of J. Lohr Vineyards and Wines. Thanks for being here, Steve. Oh, it’s great to be with you, Ross. I am happy to have you here. I’ve been greedy for any sort of viticulture winemaking shows. Lately, I have been around wine for a good chunk of my life, but only recently become somewhat more intellectually interested in it.
So I’m happy to have a chance to talk more about what it means to be sustainable within viticulture and what all that looks like. And it sounds like you’re doing quite a lot over there.
Steve Lohr: It’s an important thing for us. You know, when you think about it, sustainability is important not only in the wine industry, all industries, and for all of our lives. So the more we can understand that, the better off we all are.
Ross Kenyon: Certainly, I think that’s true. I think a good place to start might be to explain what Jaylor is. I imagine people are somewhat familiar with these labels if they’ve not actually drank your wines before. What niche do you see yourself as serving within the wine market?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, so we are essentially a Central Coast focused winery. We have a vineyard up in Napa as well, right in St. Helena. But we started off planting vineyards in 1972 in Monterey County. I was just a little guy at the time helping my father plant our first 280 acres. And at that time, We were doing cool climate varieties like Chardonnay and Riesling that Monterey has traditionally done, but we also wanted to plant some Bordeaux varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and such. And whereas our area of Monterey was fantastic, being cool climate for things like Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Riesling, Baldicchier, we were just too cool to properly ripen the big reds.
In 1984, we did a short thing, and that was to buy an existing vineyard right on the Silverado Trail in St. Helena. But then we were also really intrigued by some of the Cabernet coming out of Paso Robles. And so in 1986, we started planting Bordeaux and later Rhone grapes in Paso. Today, we basically have wines that sell anywhere from $13 to $100 a bottle.
Ross Kenyon: I think many people can imagine what it’s like to be the equivalent of being a farm-to-table producer with a winemaker who maybe manages only a couple fields, a pretty small operation boutique, one might say. But what’s it like having a much larger scale winemaking operation? What changes as you get bigger?
Steve Lohr: Well, you certainly need to understand your processes that much more because any mistakes you potentially make and You’re going to make them. If you’re not making them, you’re not pushing the envelope. Any of those mistakes get magnified and become more expensive. And especially when your last name’s on the label, you don’t want to do anything to mess that up because it takes at least a decade or so to really build reputation, but you can destroy it in one vintage.
Ross Kenyon: We had wine educator Paul Wagner on not too long ago, and he was saying that small winemakers, there’s a lot more variability involved. Sometimes they’ll capture lightning in a bottle. Sometimes a vintage will be very poor. And he was saying as scale goes up for winemakers, it’s really important to have consistency and have quality control in a way that is not present for smaller winemakers. Do you agree with that assessment?
Steve Lohr: Well, I would generally agree with it, yes. Doesn’t mean that small wine makers can’t have equal success. But one thing we are known for is our consistency. And in part, I would attribute it to my father. Both Jerry and I are civil engineers by education. So we very much are into analysis and understanding what makes something work on a small scale level. And then once we understand that, scaling it up. And it just so happens that our VP of winemaking, Steve Peck, is also a chemical engineer before he became a winemaker.
So having a thorough understanding of what makes something work and quickly being able to identify issues and solving them is very important for long-term viability.
Ross Kenyon: As I was reading through your materials, the engineering background certainly caught my eye. That seems much too Apollonian, an intellectual pedigree to do winemaking. But I guess surely one becomes, maybe you don’t like this framing, less of an artist, but more of an engineer and scientist as scale becomes more important. Consistency becomes more important. And you sort of have to treat it more as a science than as an art. I suspect you don’t like that, my framing of that, though.
Steve Lohr: Oh, no, that’s just fine, Ross. So really, I think of wine as half science and half art and best are both when they’re shared.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I certainly think that’s true. I’ve seen people attribute, especially with every wine out of Georgia, it being described as extremely wild. But I’ve also had more bottles of that I’ve found undrinkable. Maybe I’m just a naive and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I feel like the highs have been higher and the lows lower than some of the, I don’t know, the kinks are worked out more with a system that is a bit more engineered than, you know, I’ve heard it described as wild as the most common adjective I’ve heard for that region.
So maybe that applies here too.
Steve Lohr: Yeah. And you say Georgia, are you talking American Georgia or Russian Georgia? Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, Central Asian, Georgia, of their Amphora fermented wines.
Steve Lohr: Sure, sure. Well, you know, the nice thing is that wine is produced all over the world, and I love all the variations that come with not only the different grapes, and there are 5,000 varieties of grapes around, of wine grapes around the world. Some of them are just down now to a few acres or a few hectares. So it’s very important to be able to keep those because, you know, what worked a few hundred years ago may not be as popular now, but it could come back in 50 years. Plus, it’s just so fun to try all those things, but also the different cultural makeups.
Yes, winemaking is fermentation and that’s pretty standard, but there are little things that you can do to affect that fermentation to really bring out certain flavors. You know, whether you’re using natural yeast or yeast that you buy from manufacturers, so, so many different things that you can do. And we’re blessed to be here in California or, you know, the U. S. in general, because we have some great universities that specialize in grape growing and winemaking. And so that replicability to be able to make sure you’re doing things well year after year is coming right out of the students coming out of universities, and we certainly do a lot within our own wineries, both J.
Lohr and the wine industry as a whole, to emphasize that.
Ross Kenyon: Something you said caught my ear about 5,000 varietals out there. I think every so often, one or many of them will become rediscovered and they might just be on one family farm on some hilltop in Spain or something, and then the world will become obsessed with them. Is that understanding correct? Is that still happening? And if so, what’s coming next? Any ideas?
Steve Lohr: Absolutely. You have it, Ross. I think muscat is a great example. Tremendously popular in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And then it kind of disappeared for a while. And that really helped Riesling and Gewürztraminer, another similar suite to, they can actually be dry wines as well. But let’s just say off-sweet, off-dry, there’s that whole realm. They flourished in the 90s and nearly 2000s. But here, a number of years ago, Muscat made another run. And it really did a number on the Riesling category. Oh, my gosh. You know, we’ve been growing great Riesling out of Monterey for 48 years now.
And our sales took a hit when Muscat had its reign several years ago. But not to take anything away from the Muscat producers, but that kind of tidal wave has come and gone. And now Riesling is thriving again. So that’s just one of many... Examples of a grape variety that was strong, that went away, came back, and now is on the decline.
Ross Kenyon: Have you missed that wave? How long does it take to plant new vines to catch up? Or if you are thinking that way, are you too late by the time your vines mature?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, good question. There’s this kind of cycle. And when you plant a grapevine, let’s say you plant in spring of one year, You’re going to get your first harvest two and a half years later, and you’re not going to get full yields until five years after planting. And you hope to have your grapevine last on average 25 to 30 years. So it’s similar to a generation of a human. So you have to have a long term outlook on things. Problem is when these waves come and people start planting, By the time that fifth year comes around, maybe they’ve already hit the peak or the peak of that wave has ridden and you are dealing now with excess.
And traditionally, there has been a cycle in the wine industry about seven to 10 years where the overall industry goes through a boom or bust cycle. In other words, Grapes can be harder to get for wineries, and so growers will plant more. And then within three, four, five, six years or so, there’s a balance between what wineries need and what growers have. But because of all those grapes that were planted years before, now there’s an excess, which can be good for the consumer. Prices come down for the wines. Not as good for the growers because prices go down for their grapes.
And then people either don’t replace their vineyards that have older vines and then vines come out of production and then that kind of balance shifts. And now the growers are in charge with fewer grapes and they can charge more. So that whole cycle within the 25 to 30 year life of a vine production, You’re going to have anywhere from three to four of these cycles, typically. So it’s interesting to kind of forecast that. And one of the things I studied in college, I was an economics major and a civil engineering major, but in economics, you do a lot of forecasting.
So that certainly helps in our business.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, another piece of advice I got from Paul Wagner was that dessert wines especially are out of fashion right now. So you can get great deals on port and sherry and things of that nature. And so I’ve been enjoying finding very nice bottles for less than I would expect. I had a nice straw wine from South Africa recently that I found delightful. And I’m trying to take advantage of that until it becomes cool again to like sweet wines. And then I’ll have to find something else where that change is. Relatedly, were you well positioned to take advantage of the rosé boom or did you guys miss that one?
Steve Lohr: You know, it’s interesting, Ross, because we chose to miss it, quite frankly. We do have a small production of rosé, which is direct to consumer. In other words, it doesn’t make it out into stores or restaurants. But we saw this huge tsunami coming in part because France went through it earlier. And in France today, yeah, they have more rosé than they do white wine. It’s that big a deal. And when you go to your store shelves now, you see a huge diversity of rosés, and that’s great. It’s fun to choose from it.
But we looked at what our strengths were, and we figured, leave that to other people who are better suited for it.
Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm. I saw that you are growing, I saw some Grenache in there within this collection too. So it’s not like you don’t have classically rosé grapes, right? But you just said, we’re going to make just regular reds out of them.
Steve Lohr: That’s right. And we make a beautiful Grenache rosé. But again, it’s very limited in production. And because it’s not part of really what I would call one of our strengths beyond production, You know, 1,000 cases or 2,000 cases, we decided to focus our efforts on Cabernet and Chardonnay. So in Monterey, we’re primarily a Chardonnay house, but also have Riesling, Pinot Blanc, a very rare French red called Baldigier, which is like Pinot Noir on steroids. And then in Paso Robles, it’s those big reds like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot. As well as the Rhone, Syrah, again, Grenache Noir, Morte Vedra, Viognier, and such.
So we’ve got plenty. We make about 35 different wines altogether.
Ross Kenyon: For a couple of those varietals, are you forecasting big changes? I’ve heard some rumblings of, You know, I associate with California cab more tannin than you would ever really want in some cases, like really bold, really aggressive. And Chardonnay, oaky, malolactic fermentation, like aptly, buttery, things like this. Are people still leaning into getting as much of those flavors as they can or those experiences? Or is it changing somehow?
Steve Lohr: Absolutely. So that’s another example of a way. So back in the 70s and 80s, Chardonnays tended to be pretty buttery and oaky.
Ross Kenyon: And then over the years, maybe a little less oak.
Steve Lohr: And sometimes people would put a little more oak or oak, what we call adjuncts, which are little additives. Maybe they’re not aging their Chardonnay in barrels, which we do with 100% of our Chardonnay, but Quite frankly, that traditional small barrel winemaking, that’s only done with about three to 4% of all wines worldwide. And sometimes it’s by choice. For instance, that Chardonnay that is unoaked, that’s a big popular style where you’re just really tasting the fruit of the Chardonnay. And I encourage everybody to do that just so you see what Chardonnay tastes like without the oak.
And with Cabernet, You are so right. Again, when I was a young guy, it was all about how big can you make your Cabernets? And then we came into more balance. But writers often really give higher scores to bigger cabs. And so the key thing there, especially today, is to get a nicely extracted Cabernet. And I’m talking about fruit presence here. Without so much tannin that it just hits you over the face. And there’s so much that you can do in terms of how you ferment your grapes and how old the barrels are, how much time your Cabernet and other dread wines spend in barrels to affect that tannin.
The best wines are balanced wines where you have enough tannin there to support the wines. But not to overtake the grapefruit of the wine.
Ross Kenyon: Given your focus, at least partially, on Chardonnay, do you ever find ways to imitate Old World Chablis? Or do you try to stick to the California style?
Steve Lohr: Yeah. So Old World Chablis would be a lighter style of Chardonnay. And, you know, there’s a big demand for that. But at the same time, we don’t try to quite replicate that. Go for Sauvignon Blanc if you want something that has more acidity to it, more crispness. You want your acidity in your Chardonnay, and that’s one of the reasons Monterey and other cool climate areas within California, whether that’s Carneros or down in Santa Barbara or Edna Valley, all these great places to grow Chardonnay. All have a lot of natural acidity in those wines.
So with that acidity, you can balance it with some oak. Again, not too much. Otherwise, you’re going to clobber that grapefruit and acidity.
Ross Kenyon: The minerality that I associate with Chablis is in where you’re growing Chardonnay in California. Is it less present? Is that one of the reasons why you don’t do that as much? Or is it deeper than that?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, it can still be present. Absolutely. There’s great minerality in many California wine growing regions that’ll show up for Chardonnay or Pinot Blanc or a number of other whites. It’s just kind of what style that you like. And we tend to like a richer fruit style that goes beyond the traditional pear and apple and gets into the tropical with papaya, guava, and even passion fruit. So with that, there’s some oak to coddle that fruit and present it to you on a tray.
Ross Kenyon: You had mentioned additives. I have some mixed feelings towards, but again, I’m newer to wine and Paul Wagner also tried to talk me out of associating this too heavily with a sustainability focus or in thinking that it, like I felt like my framing of it was unduly favorable towards natural winemaking, whatever that means. I know people define it differently. Is there much interaction between this manipulation and additives and sustainability or is that a sort of holdover from how we think about organic food somehow?
Steve Lohr: Oh, that’s pretty cool. As far as additives, there are things you can add to wine, but in general, most, I would even say the great majority of people add very little, if anything, to wine. The best wines have really no additives. They’re just taking the grape juice, the yeast, whether that’s just natural, being on the grape skins or Floating in the air at the winery, we do some of our wines with natural yeast as well. Or for that consistency, sometimes you buy yeast. But there are certain additives that we would never do.
For instance, you can affect the color of the wine by adding a great concentrate, which will give you a lot more color and sometimes a higher alcohol. But to me, that is kind of cheating. You know, if you have a Pinot Noir, which is a nice, delicate red wine, don’t try and make a huge, big Pinot Noir by adding Syrah or, you know, this additive called Mega Purple, which is this great concentrate of something called Ruby Red. Because then you’re taking away from the pleasure of what is truly Pinot Noir and Similarly, for many other varieties of wine, best wines are ones that don’t have any additives whatsoever.
Ross Kenyon: Am I wrong to associate those practices with larger commercial brands? Is that typically where it’s found or is it everywhere or distributed?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, yeah. So I would say it’s distributed around. But, you know, people who have access or think about those, maybe not. Tend to go toward the larger side, but there are many of us and we don’t think of ourselves as large. We’re really kind of upper medium sized. But it’s one of those things that’s kind of like a badge of honor, you know, just don’t cheat.
Ross Kenyon: I’m amazed you use natural yeast or rather than commercial yeast. That seems like a huge risk for you. How do you, given your engineering and finance background, it seems like something that would probably make you pretty spooked.
Steve Lohr: Well, so what’s interesting is that we will have natural yeast and we’ll do this on many of our higher end wines, especially actually Chardonnays as we’re on the subject here. But then it’s fun to see what little differences that makes from one vintage to another. And then we do something that’s kind of a hybrid, if you will, in that we’ll take our natural yeast and then replicate it. So we have these yeast cultures, these tanks that are all about just growing more natural yeast. And so that way, if you happen to have a lot that comes in, a lot of grapes, that is, that doesn’t have much of that natural yeast, you can add some of it and still be natural, still get those wonderful natural Right.
Right. Right.
Ross Kenyon: I want to talk about water. We don’t talk that much about water on this show, and that’s probably a defect of mine that should be fixed. But I don’t think people associate water as a big problem for winemaking in general, except that maybe they’re in arid places, typically. I think in Mediterranean climates, I think that association is real. But maybe set the groundwork for understanding water and wine, and I’ll avoid the obvious Jesus joke. We’ll just move right past it. If you say those two words too closely together, people are going to think it guaranteed.
It’s impossible not to.
Steve Lohr: Right. Well, so water is crucial for winemaking. There are some vineyards that can be dry farmed, and that’s especially nice with some old Zinfandel vines that can get to be 60, 80, even 100 years old. Their roots are so deep, and maybe they’re in an area with a heavy enough soil and enough rainfall that They don’t need any other irrigation.
Ross Kenyon: Where is that? That’s amazing. I didn’t even know that happens.
Steve Lohr: It does. It does. And those are special, wonderful situations. But if we depended upon just dry farming, one, there wouldn’t be enough wine to go around and it would be super expensive. So most of the industry irrigates. And I say most, we’re talking like 98 plus percent of the industry here in California. We’ll do some sort of irrigation, even if it’s just once or twice during the course of the growing season. And one of the nice things about California is that because we tend to be a little drier than, say, other parts of the old world, we can dial in just what it takes to really grow the best tasting wine grapes.
You can have an issue with too much water. It can cause too much vegetative growth, which means your canopy, which are your canes and your leaves, are growing much more than the reproductive part of the vine, which are the grapes. And if the energy is being put into growing longer canes, the energy is not being put so much into properly ripening the grapes, and they’re not getting their sun exposure that they need to really increase their flavors. At the same time, water throughout California and throughout the West in general is becoming more scarce.
And I’ll say especially California. Oregon and Washington are a little better with their water sources. But here in California, it’s dwindling. And I know that when we came to Paso Robles in 1986, underneath Paso is one of the largest aquifers, which is like an underground water reservoir. But natural, one of the largest aquifers on the West Coast. And so many of us thought, oh, we have unlimited water here. But as more and more people planted and put their straws in the ground and pumped out groundwater, that has become more scarce.
So for sustainability reasons, as well as quality reasons, we look to always seeing what we can do to use less water and the best Wines are made from grapes that are stressed, and the key thing there is getting that very fine balance between stressing the vines enough so that they’re focusing more on reproductive growth, but not stressing them so much that you get shriveling of berries, which is going to give you more pruney flavors in your wine, more stewed fruit flavors, or worse, Is this stress level something akin to, I’m going to probably die, I should try to get my children off while I can?
Ross Kenyon: Is that the evolutionary impulse?
Steve Lohr: Absolutely, Ross. You got it. Yeah. Don’t let me die out before I can spread my seed. And that’s how grapes were traditionally spread. The whole reason for having the grapes is that so birds can come by and when it’s nice and sweet, they’ll pick at those grape clusters, get the juice and the process, swallow some seeds and they’ll go fly off somewhere and drop those seeds and that grapevine starts again.
Ross Kenyon: I planted a couple of vines before this summer. I planted a Pinot cultivar that is suited for the Pacific Northwest and a Gewürztraminer. But I’ve also been watering them a lot because we’re about to go into a pretty nasty heat wave here. I imagine you probably are too down there. And maybe I’ve been bibbing them too much. Maybe I need to stress them out and let them get scorched a tiny bit. I guess I don’t know where that limit is. I think I’m likely to overshoot one direction or the other though.
Steve Lohr: Yeah. Well, you know, here we are in July and where’s home for you, Ross? In Seattle. In Seattle. Yeah. Yeah. So whether you’re up in Seattle or down here in California, you know, this time of year, late July, you definitely shouldn’t have any growing shoot tips or having little tendrils at the end of your canes if If you do have either one of those, you’re watering too much and cut back on it. It’s best to let those basil leaves, which are the leaves at the bottom of the cane, start to die back a bit, become a little yellow and such.
But if you still have your cane tips growing, that’s a signal that let the water come back because now it’s time to ripen those grapes.
Ross Kenyon: If they’re still so young, I’m pretty sure they were started probably last year when I bought them. Yeah. So they’re probably close to a year old. So should I just be trying to get volume here and getting them growing in general? Because they’re not making any fruit right now. Yeah.
Steve Lohr: Okay. Then just forget what I said.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, so just let them rip. Okay.
Steve Lohr: Yeah. At this point, just go ahead and get that root system established. Being just a year old, it’s all about growing out, getting good photosynthesis so that you’re building up your stores of carbohydrates to get through your winter. But you do want to make sure that they’re still not growing when it comes to the fall. And whenever you get your freeze locally, you want those vines to be shutting down. You don’t want them to still be green.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, cool. Well, thanks for that advice there. So long as we are talking about watering and grapes, I’ve read various things about how water is priced in California, especially for agriculture, can be odd and strike an outsider as strong. I’ve heard water for agricultural purposes is I think an order of magnitude cheaper than for residential usage or something like that. Is that true? Does that encourage more water use than it really should? You’re an economist. You have a background there. Surely people respond to those incentives. Should we be growing as much as we do in California if water is not accurately priced in that way?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, good question. So 50% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables and 80 to 85% of the nation’s wine comes from California. So agriculture is huge in California. Now I know it’s big up in Washington state as well. You’re one of the largest producers in the country too. But how much water is charged totally depends upon where in the state you are. So when you get charged for water for your house, you’re typically charged by 100 cubic feet. And in agriculture, we think of acre feet. So in other words, an acre foot is, imagine one acre, which is 43,560 square feet filled up 12 inches.
That’s an acre foot of water. You know, in some parts of California that can be as cheap as 15, 20, $25 an acre foot. And some parts it’s well over a thousand dollars an acre foot. So it’s strictly a question of supply and demand. Sustainability really comes into play here as well, because you want to make sure that agriculture and residential uses both have access. But yeah, in California, about 80 to 85% of the water is used for agriculture. So there are always potential water wars that could heat up. I’d say that was more of an issue maybe 20, 30 years ago, especially when we were debating about canals taking Delta water, which is the area east of San Francisco, taking Delta.
Snowmelt from the Sierras and then sending that down south. We have the California Aqueduct, which is the single largest use of electricity in the world because we’re pumping all that water from the north to get it down to the south. And, you know, that’s fine. Everybody needs water. But, um, As far as how do you price it, that is very, very dependent upon individual either water districts or counties and the balance of water that they have.
Ross Kenyon: Well, tell me more about what you’re working on. I saw there’s a lot of work on solar, there’s water conservation work, a lot of biodiversity using natural pest control. Yeah, give us a little taste of that.
Steve Lohr: Yeah, absolutely. Solar is a big deal for us. When I was a student, I had this professor in civil engineering at Stanford. His name was Gil Masters. And he had this great book called Other Homes and Garbage. And, you know, this is back in the 1980s. And at that time, you know, it was certainly a lot about recycling. It was also about how do you site your home to take advantage of the sun. During the winter, but also have enough shade during the summer that you’re not having to run your AC so much.
But also, photovoltaics were really coming to play. Now, in the 80s, they weren’t economically viable yet. They were more just kind of an interesting thing that would happen in the future. But in the mid-2000s, we were putting on some Workshops with our local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E. And, you know, I just got to thinking. We have 320 days of sunshine per year in Paso Robles. It easily gets to 95 to 100 degrees during the summer. And we use a huge amount of energy for our fermentation tanks to keep them cool.
And also our barrel rooms, because we, like I said earlier, are highly dependent on using traditional oak barrel aging for the reds and fermentation aging for chardonnay. Start looking at solar and the possibilities. Do we go with a fixed solar or a solar tracking array where the panels face the east of the morning and then as the sun rotates through the sky during the day, Your panels are always facing the sun. In the end, this is now 2007, chose to go with a solar tracking array because it’s 15% more efficient than a fixed array, which is just always facing south.
And so we had a bill for our electric use of basically over half a million dollars a year prior to putting in the solar tracking array. And our first full year of use, our total bill was $250. So it’s certainly important for sustainability in that, yes, you’re not burning fossil fuels somewhere to power your winery. But what’s also nice is over the years, we’ve also had brownouts or blackouts. And if you’re creating your own electricity, you are now insulated from that in more ways than one.
Ross Kenyon: This show is certainly guilty of this, but there’s a tendency to fetishize the small and little boutique producers and farmers. I think if anyone’s ever worked at a small company before, I’ve worked at some that were quite dysfunctional and non-profit. And so I think there might be a back to the land ethos built into some of the listenership of this podcast. What things do you think improve with scale environmentally at an operation like yours? Or are there parts where you think, wow, this is a problem that would be much more solvable were we not nearly so large?
Steve Lohr: I support all levels of Whether it’s the one or two person small farm or hundreds of employees, everybody has their place. And one of the nice things about sustainability is you can be any size. I’m on the board of the California Sustainable Wine Drawing Alliance, which actually spreads best business practices for vineyards and wineries statewide so that they can become more sustainable. And the nice thing is you can be You know, again, a very small grower or winery, but you can jump on the sustainability train at any point. Just so happens that our CSWA book has 16 different chapters from soil health to water efficiency, energy efficiency, community, even because when we think of sustainability, we think of the three E’s, environment, Social equity, which is how you treat your employees and your community.
And then the part most people forget is economics. Because quite frankly, if you can’t make a buck at whatever you’re doing, you won’t be around too long. And by definition, that’s not sustainable. So anybody can start in on this point. But with scale, you’re able to do a few more things. So for instance, our Solar Tracking Array, when we built that back in 2007, 2008 timeframe, that was a $5. 4 million expense. And with scale, you can afford that because you can see that, yeah, after seven years, this is going to have a positive ROI.
In other words, we’re not paying any energy expenses or very little from year seven through 25, which is basically how long these These solar cells last. Another thing you can do with scale is water use. So when we first started really tracking our water use back in 2003, it was most typical for wineries to use five to seven gallons of water to make one gallon of wine. But as we took a look at what we could do to use less water and there is low hanging fruit such as You know, high pressure, low flow nozzles on your hoses, squeegeeing up your spills rather than spraying them with water down the drain.
Behavioral things such as how long does it really take to wash out a barrel? Properly time it and then keep track of that. And our friend fellow at our house roadways winery puts a little smiley face whenever people use less water than what’s expected on a calendar. So things like that you can do. Very quickly, we got our use from three and a half gallons of water to make one gallon of wine down to anywhere from 1. 3 to 1. 6 gallons of water to make one gallon of wine. And so in that sense, it’s a little more sustainable.
Ross Kenyon: I think anyone listening can hear the obvious cost savings of some of these longer term capital investments like a solar array. That makes sense. We’re also just using less inputs means that there’s either you can charge a lower price or you can charge the same price and have a higher profit. How much of that drives the decision making to be sustainable versus the marketing elements of being able to, for instance, come on this podcast and talk about wine people can buy. And if you were just a regular winemaker, There’d be less opportunity to come on podcasts or otherwise toot that horn.
I don’t know. Is it possible to determine which is wagging here? Which one is working? Oh, yeah. Tough question.
Steve Lohr: You know, sustainability in the long run is cheaper. You’re using fewer inputs and material costs as well as utilities, whether that’s electrical, gas, water. That’s only going to get more expensive with time. So to use less of it is a good thing, not only for your company, but more importantly, it’s just the right thing to do for your community and the world as a whole. For us at J. Lord, the latter is really what’s driving things. I mean, it’s nice to have a better margin, but this is a generational enterprise.
We want to make sure that we turn it over to our children in as good or better a shape than how we found it. With more people in the world using more resources, it’s just the right thing to do to use fewer of them and still make great wine.
Ross Kenyon: Is the marketing element of it not so valuable or less valuable than one might think?
Steve Lohr: You know, I would say it is important. Very important, really, because sustainability is more and more people understand it. And, you know, it’s a difficult thing to understand. It’s not as well defined as, say, organic. But it’s also much broader. So there are many things that you can do, and it gives you a little leeway. You can spray the occasional thing you may need to spray just to make sure something doesn’t blow up in your vineyard, either from a fungus or an insect standpoint. But again, you really try and avoid doing that.
But sustainability gives you that little bit of leeway to do it. But people want to support Companies that think like they do. And so if you care about the environment, if you care about the future, if you care about, you know, the health of and well-being of people in the community, yeah, you want to support companies who have similar ways of thinking. So I think it’s from a marketing standpoint, it’s absolutely crucial.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen much less organic wine than other types of agricultural products. I see more biodynamic wines, which is related, but a bit more esoteric and strange, one might say. Is winemaking just that much harder to never use pesticide or herbicide? Is it just one of those products that you’re really stuck and you might need these resources? Is that what’s happening here or is it something else?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, you’re on the right track there, Ross. And I think it’s also important to distinguish organically grown grapes from organically made wine. So organically grown grapes, power to you. That’s wonderful. If you can do it, do it. My fruits and vegetables that I buy are almost fully organic. With organic grapes, you need to be in certain areas and have certain conditions to year after year produce great quality grapes. And again, do it if you can do it, but it’s not an easy thing to do. And the next step to make organic wine is even harder to do.
I really take my hat off to those people who can do it, but without being at all I want to be very careful to my organic friends in the wine industry. Sometimes those wines cannot be as stable over a period of years. And so especially if you’re growing a wine that you want to age for a number of years, be careful. There are certain processes that you need to do in winemaking that Would disqualify you from being organic, but it’s the way the Romans were making their wines.
Ross Kenyon: You’re referring to sulfur, I think, right? You’re talking about sulfur? Why don’t you explain this to the listeners who might not know why is sulfur important? Is sulfur just forbidden in organic winemaking? Pretty much, pretty much.
Steve Lohr: But yeah, sulfur is important because it kills off little nasty things that could be growing in wines. And again, it’s not a bad thing. You want to try and use as small amount as you possibly can. And that’s why in winemaking, cleanliness is next to godliness. You want to make sure you don’t have things growing in your winery other than just, say, natural yeast. Because, you know, like Britannomyces or some other things that you’ll commonly find in older caves and In Europe, but here in the New World, in part because we are newer or also because I think we really want to make sure that we don’t have some of those characteristics that some people enjoy.
But, you know, I’m not looking for barnyard or manure in any of mine vines. And that’s part of brittanomyces. You wind up using some. And the key thing is, just like water, don’t use any more than you absolutely have to.
Ross Kenyon: What other processes are forbidden by organic winemaking that you think are either essential for good winemaking in general, especially for wine that you might keep for a long period of time, or for the amount of consistency and scale that you need to make your operation financially viable?
Steve Lohr: Well, so, you know, I take it back to the vineyards, actually. And in organic grape growing, you cannot use any synthetic insecticides, which I’m all for that. Again, sustainability gives you a little bit of leeway if you need to do some spot spraying. And depending upon what program you may follow or even be certified to, that will be a different level of flexibility. We prefer actually to keep a balance of natural predators like spiders and other mites that will eat dust mites and other Bad things for grapes. So we really don’t use, or I should say, very, very, very rarely use insecticides.
Also, if you’re organic grape growing, then that means you would never use an herbicide. And that too is good. We use cover crops so that we don’t have to worry so much about weeds. But also, when you do Have to use a tractor to till your vines underneath or the soil underneath your vines, then you’re using some sort of fossil fuel generally. And that’s creating more greenhouse gas emissions. So there’s this balance that you always have to take into account. And, you know, organic doesn’t really say anything about air quality.
And greenhouse gas emissions are huge. So that’s where sustainability gives you a bit of an edge.
Ross Kenyon: How much wiggle room is there for not being a monoculture? Is there room for having diverse fields of various types of crops or other plants? Or is winemaking constrained by the economics or geography somehow?
Steve Lohr: You know, it is good to not have a monoculture. For instance, we do plant pollinator habitats in some of our vineyards. So that pollinators and grapevines are self-pollinating. So having a nice beet population is not as crucial for us as it might be for some nut growers or tree fruit. But nevertheless, you do want bees to be around because they’re important for virtually everything else. And you want there to be a balance of beneficial insects. So yeah, we will plant lavender and other drought tolerant plants in certain areas of our vineyards so that those beneficial insects have a little resting spot, if you will.
It becomes a little hard sometimes when land prices have become so high and some well-known Appalachians, it’s hard not to have a monoculture. But that’s where keeping what forests you may have are so crucial. So that you do have a balance. If everything is grapes, yeah, on the one hand, that’s pretty, but it’s even prettier when you have trees and other things mixed into it.
Ross Kenyon: If someone listening wants to experience some of the wines, especially some of them that are coming from this sustainability initiative of yours, how should they buy them? Where should they start?
Steve Lohr: Yeah, well, so if you are going to your wine shop or maybe your grocery store, Check and see if they have a sustainable wine section. That’s a great place to start because typically, especially if you go into a nice wine shop or grocery store, you’ll have hundreds or even thousands of choices. And it can be overwhelming for most people. Now, where do you start? Maybe first you start in that sustainable section. And then there will be Cabernets and Chardonnays and Syrahs and Rieslings and Chenin Blancs that are all sustainably grown and or made.
So take a look for certain seals that show that vineyard or winery has gone through a process. For us here in California, we have lots of different groups. Again, California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance is kind of like an umbrella group. It’s where it actually, between it and the other regional groups, about 80% of California vineyards are certified sustainable. And about 80% of the wines are produced in a certified sustainable winery because many of us kind of medium to larger scale have really adopted it and pushed the industry forward. And about 35-40% of the vineyards are certified sustainable.
So look for those logos. Other ones here in California would be Vineyard Team has a SIPP, a Sustainability and Practice Program, or Lodi Rules for that area. Lodi, east of San Francisco, there’s Napa Green. Oregon has Oregon Live. I know you’ve got additional programs up there in Washington. Look for people who either have those logos on the bottles or maybe on their accompanying literature. Because one thing that at the California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance we stayed out of for many years was actually certifying the product. In other words, we would certify the process.
And by certification, that means a third party auditor comes in and looks at all your records and makes sure that you’re walking the walk. Because there are about 250 different criteria we have to fulfill to get certified sustainable. But we didn’t want to necessarily certify the product until just a few years ago. And that involves not only that audit of your vineyards and wineries practices, but then it also means that there’s not a trail for all the grapes that went into that bottle of wine. You’ll see a little circle that says Certified California Sustainable.
And that means a lot when it comes to sustainable wine. And again, lots of other great programs around the country, too.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to think of the wine shops in Seattle that I’ve been to and even bigger stores like Total Wine. I feel like they’re almost all organized by varietal, though. And I don’t know that I’ve seen that many sustainability or sustainable wine sections. Does that exist for wine shops where you are? Do you see that a lot?
Steve Lohr: We see it more and more. You’re right, Ross. It is primarily set by varietal. Then, yeah, you just have to do a lot of looking on the fronts or backs of those bottles. But more and more, you’re seeing sections of sustainable wines or, of course, as has been the case for years, restaurant menus. They’ll have a little mark that’ll say certified sustainable or certified organic or, as you mentioned earlier, biodynamic, which is still Another way to go about growing your grapes.
Ross Kenyon: And if someone wanted to buy specifically these sustainable Jaylor wines, where should they find them? Any bottles within this collection that stand out to you? We did a big testing at Nori and prep for the show. And the Merlot was our personal favorite. We like the combination of the more medium body, but it was quite spicy too, unexpectedly. I don’t get that with Merlot a lot. So we really enjoyed that one.
Steve Lohr: Oh, that’s great. Well, thank you so much because I know you grow a lot of great Merlot in Washington. So I really appreciate that, Ross. We have the majority of our wines certified sustainable. We were one of the first 17 vineyards and wineries in the state of California to become certified sustainable through the CSWA. But again, this product certification is relatively new. So out of our 36 wines, we have right now about 22 that are certified sustainable. You can easily go to our site, jlore.com, and we actually parse them out as to which ones are certified sustainable.
The Merlot is a prime example of one that is certified sustainable. Our major wine, our Seven Oaks Cabernet, that is getting really close. The only reason it’s not there yet And we do about a million cases a year of that one wine. Whereas with anything Jaylor, the great majority of the fruit will be grown by us. But with that one particular wine, we do buy from some other top grape growers in Paso Robles. And many of them are certified sustainable, but not all of them. So within the next year or two, we hope to have the Certified sustainable logo to that wine as well.
Ross Kenyon: Lots of luck with that. What’s coming next in wine? Can you make any predictions on the industry and what’s going to be the next big thing or some thoughts on where you see the industry going?
Steve Lohr: Yeah. Oh, boy. So that’s like key, key stuff there, Ross. Really, what we’ve been talking about here, sustainability is crucial. Whether it’s California, Oregon, Washington, unless you’re growing grapes in an area that doesn’t have water issues, that’s going to become more and more of an issue. And so I think we’re going to see a trend towards wines that tend to be maybe a little more balanced, if you will. In that yields won’t be quite as big as they once were because you won’t have the water to grow as big a vine.
And as a result, I think as a consumer, it’s going to be a good thing for you because you’ll get maybe slightly riper wines with smaller yields. That Merlot that you’re talking about, yeah, that grape blueberry and the other Kind of baking spices that come from the oak barrels that we age in. You’ll get more flavors like that. You know, it’s funny to think of a reduction in resources, improving the quality of wine, but I think we’re going to have to. We’re going to have to make better wine and maybe a little less of it.
And, you know, quite frankly, that trends with where people are going these days. They’re not drinking as much alcohol as they did. In the previous generation, you need to drink less and better.
Ross Kenyon: That’s probably just good advice anyways that people should be doing. You don’t always need to drink well drinks and go for volume. Sometimes it’s nice to drink a nice bottle of wine.
Steve Lohr: That’s okay too.
Ross Kenyon: That’s right. Well, thank you so much for being here, Steve. Links to everything is in the show notes if you’d like to check out some of those bottles or learn more about what J-Lore is up to. Thanks again for being here, Steve.
Steve Lohr: Oh, it’s been my pleasure, Ross. Thanks for all your curiosity about wine and all things sustainable. Loved being with you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I loved it too. If you can’t tell, I was very opportunistic about getting a chance to learn more about wine by getting paid for it at the same time. It’s part of my job. So it’s fun for me. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what we do here, please tell a friend, share it out on your social media presences and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated.
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