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With a busy week behind you and the weekend within reach, there’s no shame in taking things a bit easy on Friday afternoon. With this in mind, every Friday TriplePundit will give you a fun, easy read on a topic you care about. So, take a break from those endless email threads, and spend five minutes catching up on the latest trends in sustainability and business.
A few months back, we ran a roundup of the top 10 sustainable U.S. breweries. As the list made its rounds on social media, a few of you asked us to give a nod to the wine-lovers out there. You asked, we answered. Break out those glasses, and toast the weekend with a sip from one of these 11 sustainable U.S. wineries.
The brand has grown tremendously since it was founded in 1982, but the Jackson family, which still runs and operates the company, stayed true to their commitment of land stewardship and biodiversity. Less than half of the company's land holdings are planted to vines, leaving the remainder to nature. And, all of the Jackson Family vineyards are certified under the Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing (CCSW) and Sustainability in Practice (SIP) programs, as well as Low Input Viticulture & Enology (LIVE).
The panels produce 50,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year, making it the largest producer of solar energy in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Additionally, Fetzer's Hopland Winery became the first winery in California to go 100 percent renewable back in 1999. Thanks to the largest solar array in the wine industry -- an 899-kilowatt photovoltaic system atop the winery's production buildings -- the Hopland location now generates all of its own power.
Red Tail is still a fairly new winery, bottling its first batches in 2009, and its operators want to "wait until the vines mature before considering going organic or chemical-free." But they already utilize natural processes to reduce the use of pesticides and hope to continue cutting chemical use in the coming years.
Stonestreet also practices water-saving irrigation, and its vineyards are third-party certified sustainable under the Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing and Sustainability in Practice (SIP) programs.
Benziger combines biodynamic farming practices -- from cover crops to compost -- with technology such as soil moisture probes and leaf porometers to determine water needs and plant stress. It also recycled and reused 3 million gallons of water through its wetland process, where microbes naturally clean the water for reuse in the vineyard.
The company has also managed to cut its water and energy use by 30 percent in the last five years and emphasizes sustainable packaging.
"We truly believe that wine is made in the vineyard. We pursue a very minimalistic approach to winemaking; intervening only when we’re sure it’s absolutely necessary and allowing the fruit to express itself as it will," the company writes on its website.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post referred to Kelley Fox Wines' Oregon vineyard as Momtazi vineyard.
Image credits: 1) Flickr/Emiliano De Laurentiis 2) Flickr/Udo Schröter 3) Flickr/Alex Brown 4) Flickr/Maureen Didde 5) Flickr/Jordan Johnson
Mary Mazzoni is the Senior Editor of TriplePundit. You can follow her on Twitter @mary_mazzoni.
Mary Mazzoni has reported on sustainability in business for over a decade and now serves as managing editor of TriplePundit. She is also the general manager of TriplePundit's Brand Studio, which has worked with dozens of brands and organizations on sustainability storytelling. Along with 3p, Mary's recent work can be found in publications like Conscious Company, Salon and Vice's Motherboard. She also works with nonprofits on media projects, including the women's entrepreneurship coaching organization Street Business School. She is an alumna of Temple University in Philadelphia and lives in the city with her partner and two spoiled dogs.