What's Kim Kardashian's Butt Got to Do With It?
WTF is a microgrid, click-bait for climate resiliency, and Morgan Twain-Peterson is actually a wizard
If you’re joining this party here in the middle, I strongly recommend you catch up first on my last two posts, so you know where this cold shower of hodgepodge notes is coming from!!
OK? Here we are. It’s Day 2 of Napa RISE: Energy Efficiency & Savings, and I’m already exhausted from such rich and mind-bending content. I took another 74 pages of notes and hope no one talks to me in between seminars while I rub my temples and process.
Here’s some of what I wrote down and you might care about…
THE TLDR: OVERVIEW OF THE DAY (keep reading below, if you wish, for more detail):
First there was a workshop with a cape-wearing science guy who really, really loves electric vehicles (EVs). I do, too. You should get one, what are you even waiting for? They bring you a ROI by year 2—maybe sooner. You should also look at getting electric versions of your farm equipment.
Next I switched into a workshop about solar thermal energy and microgrids, and for 30 minutes I was so confused and spoken over that I just kind of slumped down and wallowed and gathered up enough energy to ask really super basic questions: “Sorry, what is a microgrid?” and “You mean solar thermal energy is not the same as solar electricity?” And then afterwards like 10 people from the audience thanked me for asking the same questions they also had.
HECK YES the Leadership award of the day went to Domaine Carneros, and Gita Mallya (woooooot, a Bâtonnage mentee, I could not be more proud!) did such a freakkkkinnnggg good job of explaining how Domaine Carneros put in a microgrid that—at last!—I understood microgrids and why they were beneficial. I got to talk to Gita after and told her how great she spoke, and she told me how she is a huge advocate for microgrids, and we joked she should be a “microgrid influencer.”
Ray Isle, author of The World in a Wineglass, gave the keynote on ENERGY. Point is energy is important and it’s everywhere, including in wine. He also said you can’t measure the energy of a person, BUT I and my dude Joe Dispenza beg to differ. Thankfully the energy in the room during this keynote was much higher than in yesterday’s.
Finally we heard from a panel trying to answer the question: “To till and EV or not to till and EV?” (So clever). Hot damn was this a delicious one, and I fell fully in love with all of the speakers and with no-till farming. The proof of its benefits are in the pudding (soil) and you need to talk to Morgan Twain-Peterson who is so smart curious thoughtful I could croak.
MORE DETAILED NOTES:
Workshop I: Solar Hot Water & Energy Storage: Looking Beyond Solar Electricity
Contacts: Will Drayton, Director of Technical Viticulture and Research Winemaking at Treasury Wine Estates; Wolfgang Weiss, CTO and Co-Founder of Ergsol; John Westerman, Director, Microgrid Project Development and Engineering at Schneider Electric
Solar Thermal Energy: not the same as solar electricity!
God bless Will and Wolfgang who are incredibly smart, but whom I really could not follow. I gathered that the two of them worked together to install a special, innovative solar-thermal-something system at a Treasury Wine Estates property—and it saves energy! I thought, “So we’re just talking about solar panels, right?” But I was wrong.
And super God bless Megan Scott of the Napa Green team who incredibly kindly and generously came up to me after I asked my #basicb!tch questions and promised she’d help me understand or talk at length with me more on all this.
Everyone on the Napa Green team is VERY willing to help anyone learn or connect people and help inspire and instigate. Truly. Reach out.
What they were talking about here has to do with harnessing solar and using energy from water instead of electricity. From Ergsol’s homepage:
“The fundamentals of solar thermal systems are simple – solar radiation is collected and resulting heat conveyed to a heat transfer medium – in this case water. The heated medium is used indirectly, by means of a heat exchanger which transfers the heat to its final destination (hot water).”
To me, this isn’t actually that simple, but… I like wine.
Schneider Electric makes microgrids. They installed one at Domaine Carneros. Here is info from their website on microgrids. And here’s what I gathered:
Microgrids are an on-site grid (instead of the big ol’ PG&E grid living somewhere out there).
They store your solar energy locally in a battery, so you can access it later in case you need it:
Power outages
Peak power-use times (i.e. 4-9pm) when normal power is more expensive
You can also sell your energy to the main grid and make $$$ off it
Microgrids are something you should speak about with Gita, the “microgrid influencer” at DC!
They covered a huge portion (70%??) of their energy needs, and their ROI was projected to be at year 10… now looking like will occur by year 7. Neat.
Asking the Critical Questions Forum: To Till & EV or Not to Till & EV?
Contacts: Andrea Robinson, MS; Morgan Twain-Peterson, MW, Owner & Winemaker At Bedrock Wine Co.; Margarita Postoronca, Viticulturist and Grower Relations At Chandon; Praveen Penmetsa, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder Monarch Tractor
Praveen is brilliant. He asks the overarching question: How do we make it profitable to be sustainable? People won’t care about converting to sustainable models unless you make it profitable. Enter: Monarch tractors.
Praveen told a story about how a winegrower told him, “You shouldn’t pay attention to us. We’re the pickiest customers you could come across, and we buy very few tractors overall. Don’t start your company here. Don’t start with us.” And Praveen’s response was basically this:
No one in the world spends as much time talking about how we farm and selling that story to the world than wine people, so this is actually the perfect place to start. We can use the wine industry as our base to slowly but meaningfully bring sustainability towards profitability.
This made me hopeful and excited: The wine industry and wine growing specifically are an absolute bellwether for resilient practices that can influence others around the world. Let’s show them how we do.
Morgan and Margarita discussed some of the challenges they experience using the Monarch tractors, especially with add-ons and with battery life; Praveen mentioned they’re constantly doing software upgrades to enhance and improve. The more feedback they get the better they can adapt. A lot of it is a learning curve, especially for older farmers.
Monarch can be used as a platform for other add-on applications; they can lower the cost of the platform by selling data to other companies developing these apps to improve sustainable farming as a whole.
Morgan got into the nitty-gritty of soil health: he obviously focuses especially on old vines, most of which have been traditionally farmed…
The saying has been that old vines become financially non-feasible due to their reduced yields, but a lot of that is because of the human farming input (or lack thereof) and its impacts on soil health(!!!!!).
The soils have 4-6% of the nutrients that they had 100 years ago. And the degradation of soil health results in lower yields. How do we get back to healthier soil???
We cannot continue to farm without manual input/labor, using only chemicals and mechanization, and expect different/better results.
Enter: no-till farming…
Chandon has reduced tillage as much as possible. Emphasizes importance of understanding that you can’t just apply one solution across the board; you have to understand each site.
They noticed some yield reduction when removing tilling.
No tilling plus dry-farming has been very hard.
Morgan says we need to consider vine health separate from soil health. He uses a term I love: denuded soil—and emphasizes prioritizing building back organic soil matter through regenerative farming. When the soil is healthier and richer in organic matter, the produce is better.
Morgan observes that an increase in soil organic matter also increases water retention of soils, resulting in a reduction of need for irrigation (!!!).
Tilled soil only has a 1/2” absorption capacity… so if it rains 1” in a day, the tilled soil can only absorb half of that, so the rest causes erosion.
Untilled soil has an 8-11” absorption capacity!
!!!!
Morgan mentions we’ve long had this “obsession with NPK” (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) and have paid too much attention to that instead of planting super diverse cover crops to help them support each other. We should stop thinking of cover crops as competition and more as shared support. Bedrock uses over 20 different plant species from 7-8 plant families as cover crops!
Somewhere, someone shared a quote or made the statement: “The answer to everything is more diversity.”
Instead of tilling, Bedrock uses a roller crimper to crimp/crush the cover crops and create a thick hatch that’s self-composting and protects and cools the vineyard soil as well as keeps out weeds.
I heard a crazy number comparing the temperature of the soil on a crimped plot versus a tilled plot. I didn’t get it written down but recall it was something truly wild, like 85°F versus 120°F or enough that my jaw dropped wide open.
Morgan considers alternative heat management solutions like more irrigation, shade cloth, or others, which feel like putting a bandage on a gaping wound that’s obviously causing the patient to bleed out. He points out: “Compared to the alternatives, no-tilling farming is a pretty easy transition.”
To read it better than I have put it, check out Bedrock’s website: https://bedrockwineco.com/bedrock-heritage/farming/
But: What about the finished wines? Morgan and Margarita agree that, while any tasting is subjective, they’ve been able to measure higher anthocynanins in the no-till wines, and they believe you can also taste more character and what Morgan calls “terroir density.”
EMOTIONS / KEY TAKEAWAYS / OVERARCHING FEELINGS:
Ray Isle made the statement that drives everything I do: “The world can get by without wine… but I don’t want it to.”
A lot of conversation has been swirling through the symposium (and my life) about customers simply not caring about sustainability or resiliency. They care about convenience and hedonism, and that’s what they’ll pay for. Winemakers say it doesn’t matter if they do everything right, because those stories or values are not of interest to consumers. Hmm. Personally, I am not sure if this is true, but I do think we’re not great at telling these stories in the right way. So I asked Ray, “But what stories of sustainability or resiliency get the most clicks?” After all, Ray is the editor of one of the foremost food/bev publications in the world, and I can 400% guarantee that F&W is 99% driven by clicks, so I was curious to hear more from him about how we can shape/change the landscape, since these stories are critical to our industry’s survival. Ray said (I’m paraphrasing), “What gets clicks? I don’t know, not really these stories. Kim Kardashian’s butt. If you can get Kim Kardashian to endorse a wine and talk about its sustainability practices, it will get clicks.” Think about that.
I’m circling back to double-down on something I wrote earlier: No one in the world spends as much time talking about how we farm and selling that story to the world than wine people, so this is actually the perfect place to start. We can use the wine industry as our base to slowly but meaningfully bring sustainability towards profitability.
The wine industry and wine growing specifically are an absolute bellwether for resilient practices that can influence others around the world. Let’s show them how we do.
PLEASE COMMENT! Did you attend Day 2 of Napa RISE?! What did you think? Do you have notes to add to mine (or more proper clarifications and fleshed out data)?
If you didn’t attend, any thoughts or comments back from my cold shower of notes above??
And what do you think about how we can get consumers to care more about climate-resiliency stories?
Yesterday I had a conversation with someone about how she revisited a winery she hadn’t tasted at in a few years. She said the wines were incredible and that she believes it’s due to a combination of more experience for the winemaker and that the winery has moved towards exclusively sourcing from sustainable, organic, and regenerative vineyards. I agreed. The last few years I’ve seen my clients make better and better wine and it’s because the quality of the vineyards they are sourcing from is better. If that’s not a case for more responsible farming practices, I don’t know what will do it.
sustainability will reach peak profitability when sustainable wines are the only decent wines that can be made. this may happen sooner than we think, because qualitatively, sustainably-grown wines taste better.
thanks for all your reporting on this conference. we need a big dose of this kind of thinking in the FLX.