I've just taken a look at the most viewed blog posts of the decade (well, only back to 2011, which is when I started this blog), knowing not much but wanting to learn a lot. Look where our collective curiosity has taken us, from zero to 450,000+ page views.
I've never been one to try to get page views (if I was, I would have been much more active on instagram et al), but it was helpful that Google Blogger counted them for me and could show me all the posts that got more than 1,000 page views. There were more than 25, so I've grouped them into major topics. Here's today's topic, which got the most page views as a group.
1. Wine Industry Green Marketing aka Greenwashing
Is the wine industry great a green marketing or what?
From rebranding government enforcement guidelines (Napa) to declaring 100% victory (Sonoma), the industry sometimes really outdoes itself.
Examples:
• The original Napa Green vineyard certification was a rebranding of the Fish Friendly Farming guidelines (which combined federal, state and local fish protection regulations), laws that were already in effect on growers. (Napa Green was modified over the years, but not a lot).
But wineries got to put a green logo on their websites and claim they were creating green farming programs.
Now sustainability is a great movement and a good goal, but the vintners proved to be extremely adept at overstating their accomplishments and understating what really changed in quantifiable terms, despite their annual sustainability reports. They also obscured the fact that sustainability doesn't have much, if anything, to do with pesticide reduction, which was not their program's primary goal.
And they were so successful that they were able to pay higher grape prices for sustainable grapes (versus organic grapes), leading to a reduction in organic grape production in Mendocino and leading Bonterra to court walnut farmers in Lake County (offering 20 year contracts for organic grapes) in an attempt to grow its organic grape supply chain.
• Sonoma's been the most visible offender in overstating what is not obvious to consumers. Their sustainability programs are so diverse even for one county that no wine professional (good luck to you WSET types) or consumers can even discern what they mean.
Sonoma lowered the bar as far as it could possibly go, letting growers and wineries choose four different standards (some with teeth, mostly not) for their vineyard certification and three other standards for their winery.
What Sustainable Means: Lots of Consumers Think It's Organic (But It's Not)
The two standards with teeth (that Sonoma recognizes among four total) were originally regional programs--Lodi Rules and SIP (Sustainable in Practice, from the Central Coast]--developed at the local level and not meant to get everyone into the tent, but to set a high--or medium high-- bar. They really were a challenge to do better.
Then Big Wine got into the game, and they've got a lot of power and money. Companies like Walmart decided to adopt sustainability requirements and required all their suppliers to meet them. Big Wine had to have a dress to go to the ball in.
So the Certified Sustainable Winegrowing program was created. The experts on using less in the vineyard were, of course, the organic folks, like Andy Hoxsey and Paul Dolan, who took leadership roles in trying to get their brethren to stop using so much water and so many chemical fertilizers.
But the CSWA program eroded the medium high bar, replacing it with a notion of continuous process improvement and until recently permitting anyone to use the worst neurotoxins on the planet (paraquat, chlorpyrifos, etc.) and be CSWA certified if they promised to do better next year.
But the CSWA has a lot of money to do marketing and suddenly there was a glossy book on sustainability for consumers and self promotional videos on what a great job sustainable farmers were doing (without ever mentioning pesticide use). And they continue to "educate" the wine industry in free seminars at the SF Wine School and elsewhere, which the organic and biodynamic folks never get to do.
Just like Trump voters, "persuadable" consumers were easily convinced to the point where the industry's own marketing studies find that 43% of consumers think sustainable means organic, an impression the sustainability industry does nothing to correct. In the case of the Sonoma growers, it is an impression they, in fact, actively cultivated (with Marimar Torres).
As the devoted Napa land use lion and organic grower Volker Eisele (who was influential in my education) put it:
"The wine industry is focused on "sustainability" - and not pesticide reduction - because the wine industry is the most adept at marketing and they know the market. The market wants something green. And so this is why you have all these euphemisms. You call it "sustainable" farming practice. You do all these things.
"I say, "sustainable" farming practices is counting the bugs before you spray them. It is undefined. Nobody knows what sustainable practices are because the obvious thing would be that ultimately if you are sustainable, you get rid of poison. And you would have to have other standards - erosion prevention, and habitat restoration, and all of those things - they should come automatically. But it's all very nebulous."
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| Sonoma Certified Sustainable press conference amid vines that have nothing but BARE SOIL (a sustainability no no) between the vine rows. Green cover is recommended. These rows have either been extensively sprayed with herbicide or tilled until the soil is dead. Let's hope 99% of growers don't do this or we're not going to see any carbon drawdown.) |
6,687 page views
• Dark Side of Sonoma's Sustainability Movement: No to Organics, Deep Deception and When is a Standard a Standard? (Part 1)
(I removed this from the blog for 18+ months and only restored it as an archive post this week).
3,237 page views
• Part 2
1,855 page views
• Sonoma Gets Its (Toxics) Closeup: What's On Those Vines? A Look at Carcinogens, Neurotoxins, and More
1,057 page views
• The Emperor's New (Green Marketing) Clothes: "Sustainability" Program Ramps Up in Sonoma - Headed by Marketing Professor
Extra:
557 page views
• Sonoma's Certified Sustainable Glyphosate: Average of 81,319 Pounds Each Year for Four Years in a Row
Other stories include:
1,304 page views
Your Tax Dollars At Work: UC Davis Professor Dr. Carl Winters of UCCE Shares Song "I Sprayed It On a Grapevine" with Sonoma Growers at DPR Accredited Educational Event--"No Problems with Glyphosate"
The most wild ass video of the decade had to be the Sonoma viticultural "education" event that featured Carl Winters trying to get a group of growers to accompany him in singing his last song (while on the government's pay roll, but he still gets a pension), "I Sprayed it on a Grapevine" sung to the tune of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine."
Despite the latest medical reports on glyphosate's connection with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, thousands of lawsuits (three of them successful at the time) and UC medical research on the connection with liver disease, Winters told growers there were no problems with glyphosate and dismissed the UN scientists' assessement of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. (The IARC scientists, who tend to be conservative, are generally regarded in medical circles as the gold standard).
1,286 page views
In the New York Times, Another Greenwashing Story About Wine: Why?
Painful to witness was a New York Times piece written, not by a wine professional, but by a reporter apparently offered a junket by Kendall Jackson. (I am assuming actually that the paper would have paid for all of his expenses). Having been mentored by a former top NYTimes editorial board member and editor (James P. Brown, now deceased), I was particularly appalled.
Did David Gelles, a business reporter, really have no idea how he was being played?
My dream is that good folks at Columbia Journalism Review and journalism schools everywhere would use this post as fodder for how not to cover an industry. Gelles seems to have taken everything at face value and includes no corroborating sources. The part where the Jacksons take him on a helicopter ride should have been a clue as to how sustainable they really were. (And why are they meeting with the National Wildlife & Fisheries guy? Did they do something wrong?) If only Greta had been there.
I'll continue to on to the other major topics in The Decade in Review in the days to come.
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