Wine Market Council unleashed a treasure trove of data and promoted wine industry innovation in annual conference held at Copia in Napa on Thursday, featuring some organic and biodynamic innovators.
At Wednesday’s annual research meeting of the Wine Market Council (WMC), a leading research group for wine producers, WMC President Liz Thach saluted ten wineries who were innovating to increase visitation and revenues.
In a time of shrinking direct to consumer revenues (down 6% last year, according to Wine Business Analytics data), she said wineries have to innovate to gain market share.
Bringing the Community In | Brooks Winery
She praised Willamette Valley’s Brooks Winery in Oregon.
“They’re focusing purely on community engagement and building within the community,” she said.
“They’re one of the very first wineries to offer zero proof tasting alongside their regular wines. They’re the first to launch a reusable bottle program that’s really resonating in Oregon with locals. They are doing really deep DTC analytics, creating a quiz on their website so people can figure out what kind of wine they want.”
The 17,000 case winery has 18.5 acres of organic and biodynamic estate vines which make up about 20 percent of production.
“Another cool thing they’re doing is using their tasting room for community events, inviting the community to come to do lectures, to have discussions, whatever, and, of course, having some wine available,” Thach added.
Lower the Barriers, Be More Inviting | Baldacci Family Vineyards
Thach also called out Napa’s Stag’s Leap District family owned winery, Baldacci Family Vineyards, as an innovator, saying the family decided they wanted to attract newer wine lovers.
The 8,000 case winery has 46 acres of certified organic vineyards.
Said Thach, “They decided to start just refocusing on what they could do to attract the younger generation.”
“They started one of the first actually affordable library programs,” she added.
In a followup phone call, general manager Kellie Duckhorn explained the new library vintages wine program introduced this year.
Typically older vintages are marked up but under the Baldacci program starting this year, they are not.
“Our 2015 Napa Stag’s Leap District Black Label Cab ($125) sells for the same price as our current 2022 of the same wine ($125),” Duckhorn said. The new program encourages sales of library vintages.
Baldacci also now offer wine subscriptions with varying benefits and customizable wine selections. A subscription sounds “a lot less frightening for younger people to sign up for,” said Thach.
“One of the most successful things is their 15 minute concierge, where anybody can just online and get an answer to any question,” Thach added. Consumers can schedule a 15 min. video appt. online with one of their wine educators whose photos and profiles are also listed on the site.
Who calls? Duckhorn said the most common users are people who are new to Napa or second timers. A common question which of the many visitor experiences at Baldacci should they sign up for.
Other Trends
Other trends in the top 10 innovators list included:
• Lower calorie wines
• AI used to create new wine in half the time (Treasury Estates)
• Spritzes with real fruit juice and monk fruit sweetener (Saint Spritz) in cans
• Rosé, rosé, rosé
• A dog friendly, tasting room in a rural area with an outdoor patio that’s open in the evenings with campfires for guests to gather around and enjoy wines
In closing, Thach said academic experts analyzing economic data from all over the world looked at the future of wine back in 2023, using data from “every single country, on wine sales and consumer sentiment.” She said their work helped to predict the structural issues the wine industry is now facing, illustrating her point with this slide.
1. Traditional wine…”always there. There’s always a place for the small family vineyard connected to the land, but we see this whole new world of wine.”
2. Light, refreshing wines “that are more wellness focused, easy drinking, including soft reds with light tannins, chillable reds, and wines that are lower in calories–just refreshing.”
3. “Soft” Drinks (with Wine). “This is where we see wine cocktails and everything else growing up.”
“So this is an interesting study they did,” she continued, “and they literally have this quote at the end:”
‘The global wine industry is at a pivotal transition point, requiring a strategic response to evolving consumer preferences to maintain its market share.’
“They wrote this in 2023 literally not knowing how fast this would happen. The rate of change now is just incredible, and so the future warning is already happening right now.”
More coverage of the Innovation conference highlights to come in upcoming posts.
On the frontier of the regenerative movement: organic and regenerative leader Lonborg shared insights on an expanding, ecofriendly movement gaining a toehold in Part 1 of our WiVi regen panel coverage
What can growers do to be better farmers, preserve vineyard longevity, maintain yields amidst heat and drought challenges and apply new techniques to help them gain an edge?
A panel of impressive experts shared their experience and knowledge about these vital topics at last week’s WiVi conference in Paso Robles.
RVF Cites UN’s 2014 Warning: Only 60 Harvests Left
“We need to relearn how we farm,” said British born Stephen Cronk, co-founder of the London based Regenerative Viticulture Foundation (RVF), a global movement created to put soil health first in vineyards.
Cronk moderated the panel Beyond Sustainability: How Regenerative Farming Drives Quality and Growth Case Study held March 12.
The RVF approach is a lower risk path than organic, encouraging a starter kit, toe-in-the-water approach it calls the 1 Block Challenge to get growers to recognize the inherent water saving and heat resilience building benefits of trading compost for fertilizer, reducing or eliminating tillage and using diverse cover crops as forms of biological control.
Other flavors of regenerative–ROC–require organic certification in combination with regenerative practices.
Cronk reminded the audience that in 2014, the United Nations warned that farmers have only 60 harvests of soil fertility left.
Sustainable Versus Regenerative: Central Coast’s Regenerative Leader Jordan Lonborg Weighs In on Soil Health Frontiers
Jordan Lonborg, regenerative consultant at Coastal Vineyard Care, knows a thing or two about regenerative, biodynamic and organic viticulture, as the former vineyard manager at Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) poster child Tablas Creek, which in 2020, became the first vineyard to be certified both organic and regenerative by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (which oversees the ROC certification program).
The roots of the regenerative organic movement have significant overlap with the organic and biodynamic movements that preceded it. The non-organic regenerative movement is a newer development aimed at galvanizing more growers to improve soil health and adopt better practices.
In the Central Coast, where “sustainable” viticulture far outnumbers regenerative or organic, Lonborg diplomatically compared two different systems.
Sustainability “forced farmers to think about farming in a more thoughtful way, thinking about the process itself, reducing inputs, trying to use softer chemistry when needed, and even a social aspect…” he said. “There’s a lot of crossovers between what sustainable is and what regenerative is. Whether you’re talking about cover cropping or compost additions or biodiversity, these are all pieces of both practices and philosophies.”
Lonborg: A Checklist (Sustainability) Versus a Systems (Regenerative) Approach
He explained there are distinct differences between the sustainability mindset and the regenerative one.
Sustainability programs. widely adopted by large scale producers, and therefore popular among Central Coast growers and corporate wineries, do not meet the standards and goals of the emerging regenerative movement, which is raising the bar for soil health. But the regenerative approach offers all growers the opportunity to benefit from improving soil health, he said.
“Sustainable is a checklist,” Lonborg said. “It does not necessarily take into account whether or not you’re putting down the right compost. You don’t know whether or not that cover crop you’re using is beneficial for your soil, or if it’s actually using some of the carbon or the nutrients that you had stored up for your grapevines.”
“Regenerative is is a systems based approach where life is the most important thing, promoting life and growing life through continuous improvement.”
The system approach never ends, he said, and requires a lot of ongoing data collection.
“You’re never ‘done’ as a regenerative farmer. You don’t check any box. You have to keep improving. You have to keep measuring your soil, you measure your carbon, you measure your organic matter. Year after year after year, and a lot of the time you’ll figure out that maybe some of these practices that you thought you had the best intentions of performing on your property might actually be harming your soil.”
Sheep grazing, for instance, is one of those, he said, characterizing the use of sheep grazing in vineyards as “a trendy thing.”
“If done poorly and if done incorrectly, without the context of actually building biology in your soil, you can burn carbon, you can create compaction,” he said.
Look to the Biology, Not Just the Chemistry
The intellectual roots of modern chemical viticulture come from Justice von Liebig, who in the 1840s came out with the law of minimums, Lonborg told the audience. “This is the concept of NPK, right? That’s all you cared about. As a farmer, what you take out of the field you have to put back in.”
“What he didn’t take into account was the role that biology plays in this system.”
The Advent of Rhizophagy: Studying Symbiosis and Its Benefits
Lonborg lauded recent advances in plant biology championed by John Kempf, a global leader in regen ag.
“What we’re finding out, and I think as recently as maybe 2019 or 2020, a process called rhizophagy…And this process shows us and tells us that plants are intelligent. They speak a language. They communicate with the bacteria and the fungi in the soil. If you preserve that relationship, the symbiotic relationship, you are going to create a truly healthy plant, which in turn will fight pests, fight virus, fight disease.”
He criticized the western approach of “see the bug, kill the bug. We’re not asking ourselves, why is the bug there in the first place?”
“We’re able to now measure a lot of these data points. We’re watching bacteria be consumed by plants that bacteria has absorbed certain minerals, certain nutrients, and the plant is telling that bacteria where to go within the plant and where it’s deficient. That bacteria then moves back out of the plant and starts mining nutrients again. So this plant is communicating with the biology in the soil, the reward system we talk about photosynthesis, right?”
A Different Lens: Be The Puzzle Solving Participant, Not the Puppeteer
Lonborg said the process of improving photosynthesis leads to a virtuous cycle.
“The better the photosynthesis, the more carbon it releases; the more carbon it releases, the healthier the biology,” he said. “What we’re what we’re seeing across crops of all types right now is that we…need to think about fertilization and fertility through a different lens. We’re not recognizing that how intelligent this natural design is, and if we step back and say, ‘Hey, maybe we can just be a piece of this puzzle, rather than the puppeteer, we can create truly healthy crops and truly healthy vines.’”
Using the mealy bug infestation as a data point, Lonborg pointed to synchronicities that may suggest causal relationships–and solutions.
“I think it’s a very interesting coincidence that when we started using systemic fungicides and systemic herbicides, not long thereafter, we started seeing explosions of red blotch. We started seeing explosions of mealy bug. We started seeing explosions of leaf hoppers. I think they are synonymous. I think there is a relation here.”
“And I think that there is through regenerative practices and regenerative inputs that we may be able to reverse or withhold or withstand some of the pressures that we all deal with as farmers.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 which features more coverage from regenerative leaders speaking on the WiVi conference panel.
The farmworker movement continues, despite the shocking sexual abuse revelations (with minors as well as adult women) made public today in the New York Times.
It is hard for the world to process the shocking news that Cesar Chavez abused and raped underage girls as well as adult women, including his fellow farmworker organizer Delores Huerta, who is about to turn 96 in June and only now breaking her silence.
This wasn’t the first time such facts surfaced. For anyone who read or listened to Miriam Pawel’s critically acclaimed biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, there were hints of sexual misconduct (and other misconduct). But none were as definitive as that testified to today by the two women who were under age when Chavez raped them.
In honor of International Women’s Day and these historic revelations, several artists posted loving portraits of Huerta, which I am sharing here. See more from the talented artists on their instagram feeds.
@artbyannaalvarado
And another here:
@thedesigningchica
These images are so heartfelt and uplifting. One can only hope overdue changes heal all involved. In keeping with Giselle Pelicot’s revelations and trial, and the Epstein victims crusades to open the files, abuse is coming out of the shadows and into the light.
Renamings to Come?
Fresno State decided to cover up the monument of Chavez
As for the streets named for Chavez and the national monument created in his name at the former United Farm Workers (UFW) headquarters in 2012, it will be interesting to see how advocates wish to revise and refine historical storytelling.
Here’s an Instagram post (fictitious) hypothesizing changes, since it would be simple to insert Huerta’s name for Chavez’s.
Fresno State took this approach – covering the statue on campus.
The National Monument
I visited the national monument in 2014. It was a long drive from the Bay Area and I was on my way east to New Mexico. I listened to an audiobook version (no longer available - I have no idea why because it was quite good) on the journey to Kern County on the way and was impressed with the book which revealed so much of Chavez’s dark side and many political compromises from his early days and on into later stages of the movement. Still I’d drunk the koolaid.
At the monument I bought a commemorative water bottle with his name on it. Who knew how bad it would get more than a decade later?
I wanted to recommend that audiobook to you but I guess I can’t, but I CAN recommend the book itself.
Here’s the publishers’ description.
Author Miriam Pawel
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Winner of the California Book Award A searching portrait of an iconic figure long shrouded in myth by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of an acclaimed history of Chavez’s movement. Cesar Chavez founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to national icon, becoming one of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino leader in US history. Yet his life story has been told only in hagiography-until now. In the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. Chavez emerges here as a visionary figure with tragic flaws; a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled; and a canny, streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his elusive, soaring dreams. He was an experimental thinker with eclectic passions-an avid, self-educated historian and a disciple of Gandhian non-violent protest. Drawing on thousands of documents and scores of interviews, this superbly written life deepens our understanding of one of Chavez’s most salient qualities: his profound humanity. Pawel traces Chavez’s remarkable career as he conceived strategies that empowered the poor and vanquished California’s powerful agriculture industry, and his later shift from inspirational leadership to a cult of personality, with tragic consequences for the union he had built. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez reveals how this most unlikely American hero ignited one of the great social movements of our time.
I’d be curious to hear what Pawel’s reaction is to the current revelations.
For now, we can settle for an interview with her from the initial publication of the book. Early on, he sacrificed truth for myth making, as she documented in great detail. Like so many others, he was complicated.
From My Email lnbox: Super good deals from one of my favorite wineries.
Barrel Tasting is a time when you can purchase wines in advance for a 30-35% discount...before they are released.
The official event was March 6-8, but the discounts are extended today through the end of day on March 31st, 2026.
Since many can't make it in-person to Barrel Tasting, Porter Creek is making it easy to order your favorite wines at these significant discounts, either by responding to this email, or by calling us. The offer stands now through entire month of March, or for how long supplies last, as we have a certain volume for each wine that we can do at these prices.
The wines/prices offered for Barrel Tasting 2026 are:
2024 Russian River Chardonnay
• 1/2 case for $200, Full case for $350
2024 Fiona Hill Pinot Noir
• 1/2 case for $285, Full case for $500
2024 Winegrower's Reserve Pinot Noir
• 1/2 case for $340, Full case for $600
2024 Hillside Pinot Noir - Old Vine
• 1/2 case for $400, Full case for $700
2024 Carignane - Old Vine
• 1/2 case for $180, Full case for $280
2024 Syrah - Estate
• 1/2 case for $210, Full case for $380
If you would like to place an order, or if you have any questions, please drop a note back or give us a call. The above whites are
released about a year from now, and the reds 12-16 months from now.
If you have purchased barrel samples from us in previous years, please drop a note back or call to check on release dates
so we can arrange for pick-up or shipping.
Thank you, always, for your support.
Cheers,
Jonathan & Alex
Porter Creek Vineyards
(707) 433-6321
--------
Here is what I wrote about Porter Creek this year in the brand new Slow Wine 2026 Guide, available online for purchase.
"Beloved winery with die hard fans, it exemplifies best practices in farming and winemaking and the first class wines that comes from them.
LIFE - A classic, it's as close to Burgundy as the Russian River Valley gets–family led, farmed organically and biodynamically, with transparent winemaking. Pioneering founder George Davis purchased the land in 1978. Son Alex became a true vigneron (schooled by Georges Roumier), pruning the vines for 50+ years. His daughter Fiona, a new Cal Poly grad, has just spent time in Burgundy.
VINEYARD - The hillside estate contains some of the oldest Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines in the Russian River (dating back to 1973 and 1981 respectively) and they are still producing. New estateplantings are high density. The vines were first certified organic and biodynamic in 2003. Newly planted, Viognier began producing in 2024. They also use an ultra low soil compacting, rubber track tractor, which is particularly valuable during wet springs.
WINES - Old World style learned from Burgundian masters. Davis uses classic techniques. New oak use is around 30%.
Russian River Valley Pinot Noir Winegrowers Reserve 2022 (Red 150 cases; 78 $;) The richest estate Pinot, this is a special selection from within the Fiona Hill Vineyard planted to Swan and Mt. Eden clones. Red and dark fruits predominate. Well integrated and beautifully balanced.
Russian River Valley Hillside Vineyard Old Vines Pinot Noir 2021 (Red 281 cases; 92 $;) Among the oldest Pinot Noir vineyards in the Russian River Valley, this was planted in 1973 with the Martini (#13) clone, the only one available at the time. Dark fruited with spices and silky tannins.
Russian River Valley Fiona Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir 2022 (Red 475 cases; 65 $;) The flagship Pinot Noir (Wadenswil clone planted in 1997) grows on steep hillsides, digging its roots into hard clay topsoil underlain by fractured bedrock. In the mouth, soft tannins frame notes of cherry, wild berry and spice.
