New materials have made organic wine grape growing much easier and lower cost, the long time vineyard expert said.
Transitioning to organic is easier than it used to be, said long time vineyard manager Garrett Buckland in a Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ organic vineyard education series held at Baldacci Family Vineyards in the Stag’s Leap District AVA July 8.
This year the program has been expanded to three field days and one final half day session (July 29 at CIA at Copia in Napa). The remaining July field days take place at Quintessa and Opus One.
Raised in Napa, and a U. C. Davis grad, Buckland has been a long time NVGG board member and past president. In 2023, he was voted Grower of the Year. A partner at Premiere Viticultural Services for more than 20 years, he and the company farm 2,000 acres of top tier vineyards.
Baldacci transitioned to organic farming in 2021 and certification in 2024 (after the obligatory three year transition period). The family has 19 acres of Cab on the Stag’s Leap site. Additionally it has a Calistoga estate site where it has sheep and goats it uses in season for vineyard mowing and fertilizing on both sites.
“It's a real easy thing to transition to organics nowadays, with the different types of products we have, and the cost is coming down as well,” Buckland told the group of about 25 attendees.
Organic Materials Improved in Effectiveness and Lowered in Cost
“Being able to use more soybean related stuff for nitrogen these days–that actually works–has been a real help for the properties that we have a harder time getting canopy to grow on,” Buckland said.
‘We have great fertilizers. Organic injectable fertilizers have come a tremendous way. We have so many more options now than we did 10 or 15 years ago. You can get whatever you want and have it be almost a replacement for a conventional product–maybe not as fast acting, but in terms of the total nutrition added, we can get a pretty comparable amount,” he said.
Another big helper is Nema-Q.
“One of the one of the things I don't really worry about in choosing rootstocks is nematodes,” Buckland added. “We have Nema-Q, one of our best products for parasitic nematodes…It's worked so well that we use it in conventional stuff. And it's totally affordable,” he said.
Organic growers must use OMRI certified organic compost, but Buckland cautions against paying too much for compost.
“I think sourcing a lot of nutrition for your compost is a mistake–that's just a personal thing…We don’t want a lot of fertility out of most of our vineyards. We’re looking to just grow canopy and then stop, basically. And so our inputs on this property are pretty minimal.”
The vineyard manager said the team has been able to reduce water used by 50-60 percent over time. Wastewater reuse contributed to the savings effort.
Novel Rock Disposal Termed a Sustainable Initiative
The group also toured the newly developed cave at Baldacci. Buckland advocated for burying excavated rock from the dynamited caves under a heavy clay vineyard that was already being dug up. The money saving move avoided the huge expenses of trucking a total of half of the material offsite. The team buried the rock chunks seven feet under the soil at a ratio of around 50/50.
Certification
He also recommends that if a grower is growing organically, it pays to get certified.
“Even saying you are farming organically is tough if you’re not in a certification body,” he said. “So I think everybody, if you’re interested in it, should really look at certification that’s going to collectively help everybody else who’s part of the certified body.”
“We chose to go with CCOF. They’ve been around the longest, and we’re pretty comfortable with their services. It doesn’t cost much either.”
“We should be honest about what we’re applying all the time, and so a way to be honest is to be certified.”
Water, Tilling, Cover Crops
Water is a chief concern on this site, as it is for many others in the appellation and county.
“Tilling was a very useful tool for us to really reduce [water] stress early and keep a lot of native soil moisture around,” Buckland said. “What we've done instead is shifted some of the cover crop to not be as competitive, and then we really work on mowing and termination timing of that to make sure that we don't dewater too much.
“In terms of cover crop, if you can keep it and there's no downsides to having it like pest habitat or something, I'm certainly a big fan of it.
No till is not a no no all the time, he said.
“There's a lot of hype around–’don't ever touch your soil.’ The idea is in a long-term sustainable program, having a permanent cover crop is great, but if you're trying to solve one problem that's creating more, you should probably take it out…The dogma about being afraid to till your soil, should probably go away.”
Buckland prefers mowing cover crop to crimping.
“I don't like crimping because we have to grow such big grass to crimp it properly, that it's hard for us with some of these smaller types of trellises. It's certainly appropriate for people to do that. It's hard to get the right mix of grass that crimpts well. I'm relatively indifferent for it. If you have a vineyard where you can grow a six foot tall Merced rye, and then lay it over, like that's pretty cool. In practice, it's been pretty hard to do, and I think the lot of people that are doing it well around here have pretty tall trellises. But if you're getting on a property too early, or you're using that grass in the wrong way, you're probably going to do more damage to it.”
Asked about measuring the effects of regenerative outcomes on soil health, Buckland said, “Soil diversity and what's growing in there is less important than people think. That's a personal thing. We can grow a grapevine anywhere. For other crops, it's very important to have some of that, but for a grapevine, it doesn't have to be so. A focus 100% on that, I think, is missing some bigger goals.
“If we’re putting animals on a property at the wrong time just to have animals, that’s a really big problem. We’re creating compaction issues, we’re creating water runoff issues, we’re creating stuff that sounds cool and maybe is cool, but if done at the right time can actually be a major detriment.
“So making sure that we’re not creating problems first is something that I always think about anytime we’re implementing any farming strategy, whether it’s conventional, regenerative, biodynamic, or organic, and that’s what just good farmers do. So I think that’s it’s baked into what we do.
“I don’t like other people capturing that space and saying the negative component of it, which is like, ‘if you’re not this way, then you’re bad.’ That’s what we don’t want to have. You’re good already being a grape grower. There’s ways to be better, and that’s up for an individual choice.”
Davis based attendee Danyal Kasapligil, Vice President of Dellavalle Lab, Inc., said he does receive some inquiries about soil health testing from food producers and advised anyone who wants to pursue testing to be sure to take samples from the same exact spot over time.
“We like to do small composite zones, not just one spot, but pick a zone–it might be space that's taken up by 50 vines–but if you can go back to that area [mark it with GPS],” he said.
Buckland said wine quality was a good measure of what is working.
“The impact of whether I disc or not disc is a very fine, distinct change to measure in the first place. From a wine standpoint, where we’re really interested is what overall at at the 50,000 foot level thing do I get out of it?
“Am I now able to lignify my canes earlier than I normally would? Am I able to run a level of limiting nutrition that I’m looking for? They are big multi year types of stuff that we look at that are almost more important than what is the nematode count right now.
“In the end, if we’re not making the better wine out of it, we shouldn’t be wasting our efforts for things that that don’t serve the end goal, and that end goal is very different for a lot of people.
“It should be our end goal is to make the best wine and do it in a very sustainable fashion, and do it within the box of organic, which works.”
“I think what resonates for a lot more people is making sure that you can do it in a style of farming that you can use as a marketing component as well, but there’s probably a bigger change in how the story at the winery gets told with our organic change than it used to be before,” he added.
Tasting Room Conversations
Michael Baldacci said in the tasting room, when it comes to organics, customers want to know more. He stresses that the grapes are organic, but not the wine. [That is a confusing subject for many.]
The bottle labels make no organic claims that the grapes are organic [which is language that could legally be added to the back label if all the grapes are certified organic.]
[Note: As an example, Storybook Mountain uses the legally allowed language “ingredients: organic grapes” text on the back of its estate wines, as do a number of other wineries. Ridge did that on its first organic bottlings.]
Said Baldacci, “The customer is curious. Marketing not why we did it, but I would say that the biggest effect has been in the tasting room, and the conversation about it there, and I guess we have a vehicle to tell that story there. Definitely over the last few years, seeing just how much people are curious about it has been interesting, and I would say as much as wine quality aspects.
“I hate to say marketing, because we’re not marketing it–it’s definitely something that has brought in people.
“I’m pouring at a wine event on Tuesday for CCOF. There’s a lot more knowledge about grape growing and organic and CCOF in the grape growing space, and in the wine space.”
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