In this third post, two renowned organic vintners discuss their paths in regenerative and organic wine grape growing, winemaking and selling at a Napa Valley Grapegrower event.
This is part 3 in a series. Scroll down for Part 1 and Part 2.
Thanks to the Napa Valley Grapegrowers for this entire series of workshops and this public conversation, held at COPIA in Napa. Following the conversation, attendees enjoyed lunch served with both Tablas and Matthiasson’s gobsmackingly wonderful wines.
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Napa’s Opportunity: Messaging Wines’ Green Farming for Values Driven Millennials
“How many seminars have we heard of Rob McMillan telling us that we’re not doing a good job reaching out to millennials?…” said Steve Matthiasson, a famed Napa vineyard consultant and vintner who has been an organic leader in the community for decades. “…And we know what millennials want. They want to buy things that they believe in from a values perspective, and they vote with their dollars.”
Costs of Organic Viticulture
In the Q and A portion of the program, one audience member asked if it costs more to farm organically.
Matthiasson responded, “it’s very site specific in terms of whether we’re talking more expensive or not. For input substitution, which is sort of like what people think it is in the first phase of converting to organic, it can get expensive because the organic materials are pretty much all more expensive, other than like sulfur or something.
“But the idea is to start rethinking the way you do things.
“If you start going down the list, essentially, we’re still growing a cover crop–that is just part of good winegrowing at this point. So that’s just a wash.
“Mildew materials are more expensive. I think there’s a lot of room for using integrated pest management for powdery mildew now. I tend to think that we overcontrol mildew in our industry. We’ve gotten to a zero tolerance, and it doesn’t need to be a zero tolerance. The contracts all have 2% in them. You know people who now say 2% mildew in your vineyard [means] you’re a fail, you’re a terrible vineyard manager.
Matthiasson: “There’s no reason you can’t have a small amount of mildew, and the difference between a small amount of mildew and no mildew can be a lot of sprays, basically.
So again, site specific… in Carneros, we barely hang on mildew-wise, and we’re treating all season. But in Calistoga, we’re getting by in a typical year with three sprays organically…”
“Weed management. If you’re down by the Napa River and you can hoe plow once, that’s pretty cheap, probably cheaper than applying herbicides. If you’re weed whacking up on a terraced hillside, then that’s really expensive, and so that’s site specific.
“Hedgerows–we’ve been able to get grants for almost all of our hedgerows, and so like we just got a $20,000 grant for a hedgerow we’re putting in in Carneros, so the hedgerows don’t have to be super expensive.
It’s unfortunate that organic wine grapes can’t command the organic premium other organic crops can, he added.
Employee wages were another topic.
Pay is, “an individual decision for everybody, but I feel that transcends the discussion of regenerative organic,” Matthiasson said. “It’s what kind of community do we want to live in, and what quality work do we want, and what can we afford…That’s just [something] everyone has to make that decision for in their own businesses, basically,” he said.“But the way the market is now, it’s not about premiums. It’s about getting a buyer.
Jason Haas of Tablas Creek quoted his farming costs to the discussion. “We harvested 387 tons. So where we were, at two two and a half tons an acre, more or less.”
“Our total farming costs were $1.765 million, so that’s $12,600 per acre, or $4,564 a ton at those relatively low tonnages, and this is ROC gold certified, so paying all of our people full living wage and all of that.
"I don’t push back on the idea that farming regeneratively is prohibitively expensive…there are some additional costs. There are paperwork costs. There’s time costs. There’s training costs. There are transition costs for sure if you’re not already farming that way."
“But it’s not like Monsanto is in this for our benefit. You also are replacing products that you have to pay for every year with processes that become self-regulating, and that has some real benefits.”
Tablas’ Dry Farming Strategy Amidst a Drought: Bigger Spacing But More Crop Per Vine
“We dry farm a whole bunch of different grape varieties…almost every variety,” Haas said.. “Everything else we have done in at least one dry farm block at this point. The big difference is spacing.
“So instead of our trellis blocks, which we used to plant eight by three, we’re now planting eight by six.
“The dry farm blocks are either 10 by 10, 10 by 12, or 12 by 12 diamond spaced. So we can’t cross cultivate. We do get lower yield per acre on those blocks, but not as much as you would expect from the lower vine densities. Because the vines are so much healthier, we can allow them to carry more crop. We feel like that reducing the number of vines per acre, but increasing the crop per vine, also helps for balance, because that slows down ripening, slows down sugar accumulation.
“For us, we feel it gives more elegance to the wines.
“We feel that that [high density] model, which has been transplanted out of Burgundy, where you’re trying to put the vines as close together as possible to compete with each other [typically 1 meter by 1 meter] or reduce the crop per vine to get intensity and get ripening…
"That’s not what we need in Paso Robles."
"We’ve got plenty of ripening, we’ve got plenty of intensity. We want to be doing the opposite to slow things down and give us more balance.”
New Organic Requirements for Its Patelin Growers
Haas said that Tablas Creek changed the grower requirements for their Patelin, non-estate wines–which is about a third of their production–to organic farming or certification. The Patelin Paso growers all planted the Tablas clones, the original grower criteria for Patelin. [Patelin means neighbors in French.]
In 2021 Tablas Creek told its growers, that “within five years, we were going to require them to be farming organically for us to continue purchasing from them, and that we would offer our own our help of our own team, as well as a 10% increase in what we were paying per ton, if they made the conversion to organics.
“We were able to get that through in three years rather than five. So since 2024, everything that we’ve been buying for the Patelin tier has been from organically farmed, not all certified, but all organically farmed sources.
Tablas also has a second tier called Lignee de Tablas that comes from other vineyards planted to Tablas clones around California, and, “those are all farmed organically or better,” Haas said.
Certification can lead to discovering new growers, he added, illustrating the point with a case study.
“We just added a new vineyard from Lodi this year, which is the first regenerative organic certified vineyard in Lodi [Vino Farms]. We would never have bought from them if they had not gone through that certification. They would never have landed on our radar, so I do think that there are brands who are specifically looking for that [ROC certification] and who will pay more for it,” Haas said.