The Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ final event in the four part series of organic education month (July) hosted a conversation with certification experts from ROA and CCOF, along with a Paso winery.
At the closing session in the Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ organic series event held in late July at COPIA in Napa, Paso Robles based Camille Cherry from Villa Creek and MAHA (left) talks about her family’s certification journey with organic certifiers Alania Lindquist of Regenerative Organic Alliance (center) and Jessie Beckett Parr (right) from CCOF.
See this post on Substack for photos.
Question | Tell us why did you all decide to be organic, and then what led you to be regenerative organic?
We have been farming organically since the very beginning. We acquired our estate property, MAHA in 2001 when it was a organically farmed walnut orchard. And organic has always been the pillar of how we live.
Growing up, my parents always bought organic produce, acquiring the the cleanest possible products that we could consume, and so when it came time to plant our vineyard, we farmed always with the attention of being certified. There’s a lot of greenwashing these days, and getting that third-party certification just helped solidify what we’re doing, and it lets the consumers know that we are farming the way that we say that we’re farming, without having to greenwash our way through life.
Question from Audience | What does that [greenwashing] mean?
[Greenwashing means pretending to be green when you are not}.
By having the third-party certification, you get an inspection once a year. You have to keep methodical records of everything that you’re doing, all of the inputs, whether it be a compost lay down or spraying something in the vineyard.
In my experience, there’s a lot of wine brands that are out there that say they’re doing something, but you drive through in the spring and everything is yellow. It has been sprayed out with some sort of glyphosate product, even though they’re saying that they’re farming organically.
Being able to have that [organic] certification is letting the consumer know that we are actually doing what we say we are doing. We’re not just saying that we’re doing it and doing something else. It’s just kind of solidifying what we are as a brand, and it is who we are.
So false advertising is greenwashing?
Yes, pretending to be green.
Inside an ROC Tasting Room | What Do Consumers Want to Know?
Question | Camille, can you talk about managing your tasting room and a lot of your consumer-facing work? Tell us about your consumer research and what people assume when they walk in, and how the different labels that you carry–organic and now ROC–change that conversation for folks.
Camille | Probably about a quarter of the people that walk into the tasting room find us because they’re searching for wine that is certified [organic or regenerative organic], or they’re looking to make a change in how they consume wine.
I think in the general population, eating organic has been around for decades, and a lot of general consumers don’t, or haven’t in the past, put that same consideration into what they’re drinking.
Over the last five or six years, people are getting to realize, oh, ‘there’s a lot of stuff that goes into conventionally farmed wine,’ and whether that’s in the vineyard application or in the cellar… and the health benefits that people may or may not feel when they’re drinking an organic wine versus a non-organic wine have kind of changed the general mindset of the consumer, so they’re starting to look for organic wine as opposed to just picking a pretty label off the shelf, and they’re putting more thought into what they’re consuming on the beverage side of things.
Jessie | So it sounds like people are seeking you out…they’re coming to find you. Yeah. That’s great. That’s what we want. We want people to seek you out.
I’d love to pivot into Camille and talk about the trade-offs when you’re thinking about certification. It sounds like you all started as organic, but when you’re going into our ROC, what did you weigh? Cost, increased labor costs, timeline, yield. You know, how did you kind of progress through that journey and in deciding how far to go? What were the main barriers to entry?
Camille | I think barriers are always on a sliding scale depending on how you’re farming and what size your production is, and for us, it there weren’t really any barriers. Honestly, we’ve basically been practicing all of these things already. [The vineyard and winery were Demeter certified biodynamic for years].
I think the biggest part that was that’s created the biggest struggle is the paperwork. My mom was the one who who filled out the application, and it took probably the better part of nine months. We are a small-scale, family-owned and operated team. There are seven of us total, and we cover tasting room, office, vineyard, and cellar. And when you have a limited amount of time, based on what you already have to do, that super intensive application can kind of be prohibitive, but in the long run, it’s worth it.
Jessie | What surprised you or your parents as they were transitioning towards regenerative organic certification? Like, was there anything in the process we were like ‘Didn’t expect that to happen.’ Sounds like the paperwork. But beyond that, what surprised you about the process? It could be biological, too. It doesn’t have to be about the certification itself.
Camille | Yeah, I think what shocked us the most was how quickly things changed. We farm with the idea that we’re just borrowing this land from future generations, and we want to be able to leave it in a better position than we found it.
When we implemented no-till farming, for instance, and utilizing the cover crop, which then slows down the water runoff, and which increases the water absorption. That also and then, as Jason [Haas of Tablas Creek] was talking about the soil temperature and having during our extreme heat waves that we see in Paso–having the vines be more resilient when it comes to extreme changes–I think that how quickly that changed the wine. Like we have a block of Carignane that is diseased with red blotch, and that specific block, the year that we changed over, it was the cleanest fruit that came off the property that entire vintage. So I think it was amazing how quickly everything became more resilient once we fully implemented all of the practices.
Alania | I just wanted to respond to the record keeping challenge that you expressed, and this is definitely something that’s hurt. People get paperwork fatigue, and we’re constantly looking at ways to help improve that aspect of our certification. One of the things that occurred to me when you were saying that is that that’s really the meat of this work, and that’s where the story of how you’re applying the regenerative practices is really happening.
There’s definitely some good juice in there that you can leverage as your storytelling as well…What are we doing? How is that changing every year? So it’s kind of a fun part, too. Not saying paperwork is fun, but like there’s like good nuggets in there.
Camille | Oh, I just had a memory come back to me.
My brother has always been a very enthusiastic ornithologist, and one of the parts of the application for ROC is tracking migratory birds and migratory critters that come through your property. And I think my brother had quite a blast tracking all of the birds that that come through the property, and that now we’ve been certified since 2022, he’s kept on with that process, that practice of bird watching.
See this post on Substack for photos. See the photo of Henri here on Substack. CAPTION Camille Cherry’s brother Henri Cherry pouring at the Mindset conference in June pouring the family’s Clairette Blanche
He now leads a once a month bird watching hike around the property, which I think is kind of cool that we get to incorporate the benefits of farming this specific way and showing people, ‘oh hey, there’s this migratory bird that is only here for three weeks out of the year, but we didn’t used to see it, and now we do.’ And being able to just kind of see those super cool, the critters and the various native plants that might crop up now is really fun to see.
Jessie | So ROC has bronze, silver, and gold tiers. Can you talk to us about a reasonable entry point for a grower that’s just starting out?
Alania | So the idea behind the tiers is to make the certification accessible and meet you where you’re at, and encourage you to continue to improve along the way.
Looking at a practice like rotational cropping, for example, or cover cropping. For the bronze level, you might only have three [cover crop] species required, and at the silver level, five species, and then at the gold level, it’s like 10 to 15 species.
Another factor is how much cover crop is being left in the vineyard. At the gold level, it’s 100% year-round coverage. Whereas bronze, I think, it’s maybe more 25 to 50%.
Jessie | For somebody who’s already certified organic, because there’s a bunch of growers here [at the event] that are already certified organic…Roughly, how does how long does the process of getting into ROC take?
Alania | Some organic growers are already incorporating a lot of these practices into their operations already, and so that’s going to be as simple as submitting your application to the Regenerative Organic Alliance.
We are going to review the application, and then we’re going to send it over to your certifying body of choice. They’re going to review it and then reach out to schedule an audit.
Ideally, you’re able to bundle your organic and regenerative organic audits together, so that auditors are coming to the property once.
I think that our estimated timelines to achieve from the time of application to receiving your certification is between three and nine months. But it depends. If you’re having to kind of start from scratch–conventional organic–you’re going to need to incorporate some practices. It might take you a little more time.
Jessie | So, Camille, just back to the tasting room experience. We’re trying to thread the needle here between organic and regenerative organic, and find out what will work for this audience as they’re exploring their pathways.
So, how do you describe the difference between organic and regenerative organic in a couple sentences to somebody who’s just coming in to drink wine? They’re just there to drink wine.
Camille | My basic tasting room spiel is organic.
The base elements are no synthetics, whether that is herbicides or pesticides, and then with regenerative, you’re throwing in soil health, social fairness, and animal welfare.
And from that point, we then get into mostly the soil health aspect of things, the no-till, using cover crops, crimping to help replenish the soil, creating a nice batch of organic material that then lowers the soil temp, increases water retention, all of that good stuff.
Jessie | And do people usually lean in wanting more, or do their eyes glaze over?
Camille | They do. I’ve been working in the tasting room since I was 18…But being able to kind of read the guests in the tasting room and whether or not they’re engaged in wanting to know more versus a a couple that walks in that’s on their third date and they decided to come up from LA to do a weekend in Paso and they only want to talk to themselves.
It’s a fine line between educating the guests that come in, and also ensuring that they have a good time because in this wacky world of wine, you want everything to be enjoyed, whether it’s wine or blending the lines of enjoyment and education.
Question | Well, I have a question: when you’re sharing your practices and some of the concepts of farming on your property as you’re tasting wine, how are people connecting those things? Or how are you messaging the connection between the way that you’re growing grapes and how the wine tastes?
Camille | Kind of a hard question to answer. Every vintage is different. Mother Nature is a very fickle business partner, and so whatever like every vintage is going to show different things in the bottle, and so it’s kind of hard to to explain to a consumer what you might taste differently. Every palate is different, so it’s hard to pinpoint one specific thing that might that they might pick up.
Wine is all very vintage specific, it’s site specific, and it’s bottle specific.
My dad likes to say ‘there’s no bad wine. There’s only bad bottles of it,’ and so taking that same concept into how the wine is perceived based on its farming practices, if that makes sense.
Question | You said the words “red blotch’, and everybody’s going to want to know what was the practice you changed that made the red blotch disease pressure less?
Camille | I think it really came down to the soil and the soil health and the root health.
Question | Right, but you’ve been farming biodynamically and certified for a long time... So, what changed?
Camille | What changed was going from discing the vineyard rows to mowing and crimping instead. And I don’t know the science behind why the red blotch toned itself down, but from what I’ve observed, there’s something that’s happening underground that made the vines a little bit happier.
They’re less stressed during the heat spikes, which is when our vines tend to show their the red blotch the most. They do tend to shut down sooner, but the fruit itself is cleaner. It’s cleaner and higher yield.
Alania | I just wanted to add on. This is somewhat anecdotal. I was recently at Bedrock Vineyards in Sonoma Valley, and we were looking at vines planted in the late 1800s. And when they did tissue analysis on these vines, they found that they basically carried every pathogen and virus that you could imagine, but they weren’t expressing that because of the resiliency and the immunity that was actually in the vine. So maybe there’s something to that.
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