Have you ever wondered what it means when a winery calls itself "sustainable"? We want to be "sustainable" when we build our winery and buildings on our site, and I've always had vague ideas about what sustainability is, so I was very interested in an article I chanced upon when I was rereading the stack of
Vineyard & Winery Management magazines that we have. I came across this article in the January/February 2010 issue called
Defining 'Sustainable' written by Bruce Zoecklein.
Zoecklein gives the following bullets from a talk on the subject given by Joe Chauncey at the 2008 Wineries Unlimited conference:
- Ecologically responsive
- Economically viable
- Good neighbor
- Bioregional
- Healthy and sensible
- Operationally efficient
More to the point, sustainble practices for wineries include the following:
- LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
- Use of eco-friendly building materials
- Earth-sheltered buildings
- Green roofs
- Building orientation/insulation
- Sun baffles or solar blocks
- Alternative energy, including geothermal, solar and wind
- Energy/heat capture and recovery
- Carbon dioxide capture
- Natural lighting and venting
- Rainwater collection
- Water recycling
- Materials recycling
This article advocates the establishment of benchmarks to evaluate progress in environmental and ecological sustainability. Later on in the article, Zoecklein writes: The link between economic sustainability and environmental sustainability will strengthen only through technology and the implementation of technology through education.
That statement gave me pause. I tranlated that to mean that faster is cheaper and better. Not that I am a Luddite, but I'm not at all certain that technology is the answer to economic and environmental sustainability.
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