Green Options

[Image credit: Freshtopia at Flickr under a Creative Commons license]

It’s that time of year! There are parties and big meals to plan, gifts to get together, and travel plans to finalize. How is a person supposed to live green during such a busy time of year? This week, we’re going to take a look at ways to have a fabulous holiday season without giving up those Earth-friendly ideals. It doesn’t have to feel like a sacrifice!

Have you ever cracked open a bottle of your favorite wine to find it didn’t taste as good as you remembered? 

Or taken a sip from the House wine at some fine dining establishment, and tried to quickly recover from the pursed lips that would reveal it tasted a bit sour?

You probably chalked these experiences up to simply a bad bottle, or the Sommelier at the restaurant likely whisked it away uttering something about the batch of grapes that particular year. 
But did you know that the culprit was most likely the continually changing climate?

Experts say that grapes grown to make wine are more adversely effected than any other crop, making it even more critical for wineries to focus on reducing the negative effects on the environment.  So, from organic wine (wine that has been produced from organically grown grapes) to biodynamic agriculture (organic farming that excludes the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants), the wine industry is committed to this important initiative. 

In addition, certified ‘green’ programs like the ‘Napa Valley Green Certified Winery’ are popping up all over the world, establishing sustainable and green business practices for wineries.  Certified wine production facilities demonstrate a commitment to conserving water and energy, reducing waste and preventing pollution with the primary goal of reducing their overall carbon footprint.  The result is less carbon emissions and more flavorful grapes.  

Pictured here are images of gifts offered by Traidcraft, the UK’s leading fair trade organization with a mission to fight poverty through trade, practicing and “promoting approaches to trade that help poor people in developing countries transform their lives.” Traidcraft’s unique structure - a trading company and a development charity working together - gives them a unique how trade can be made to work for the poor. How is fair trade defined?

“Fair trade seeks to transform the lives of poor producers in the developing world by enabling them to use their skills and resources to trade their way out of poverty. It seeks to challenge injustices in trading structures and practices that so often lead to the exploitation and marginalisation of poor people.”

Pictured above from left to right:

This morning as I woke up to my clock radio, the one minute Project Green segment came on the Rush Limbaugh leaning KNCO AM. It reported on a recent meeting of California wine growers, all 26 of which are talking preliminary to major efforts to green their operations, product, and packaging.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. Vintners are acutely aware of the health of their environment, their plants, and the resulting product. With the refined and particular tastes of many of their consumers, a lackluster wine will lead to lackluster profits. Beyond that though, their customers are, I would venture to guess, more likely to be of the LOHAS mindset, choosing what they consume based on more factors then simply the cheapest available. They want everything they touch to have thought, consciousness, and a lighter impact on the planet factored into them.

How can a wine be green? The grapes themselves can of course be organic, the growing method biodynamic. But what else?

One of the hardest things about planning my upcoming wedding is figuring out what to serve - we want to offer a full bar and local fare, but how far do we have to go to ensure that it’s organic, free range, local and so on…as if we didn’t have enough details to handle in the first place?

Summer is my favorite time of year. The days are long and perfect for hiking, traveling, going to the beach, or just sitting on the porch. And summer is the season of my favorite fruits: berries, plums, and melons! I grew up picking huckleberries every summer in Idaho and am always on the lookout for wild berries. Free, fresh-picked fruit is always the tastiest, and wild blackberries and plums happen to be just ripening for the picking where I live on the Mendocino coast of California.

We took a walk to the beach the other day through an orchard overflowing with ripe plums. Further on, the path was lined with tall blackberry bushes. Needless to say, we had an excess of blackberries and plums for a while. Add to that the fact that a local organic wine was on sale this week, and I naturally just had to make sangria!

My sister lived in Spain for a semester last year, and I had some amazing sangria when I went there to visit her. Of course she knew a recipe for sangria, which the one below is based on. (Thanks sis!) So, with a little local foraging, some fresh-picked seasonal berries, and some local wine, I made a yummy summer drink that can be adapted for any kind of fruit that’s in season.

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Vineyards are perhaps one of the most entrepreneurial of ventures. Long the dream of many a corporate worker and the fulfillment of one by celebrities and those willing to spend lots of hours and lots of dollars to make it successful, wine is in the green news this week.

The recent announcement that Almaden and Inglenook wines will switch form 3-4 liter jugs to Bag-in-Box (BIB) packaging was a big one.

The company bills itself as “the world’s most cost and carbon efficient vintner” for its use of BIB packaging, which it claims has less than half the carbon footprint of bottled wine in terms of energy needed for glass production and transportation.

“The positive impact to the environment from making the shift to BIB packages will be huge, simply because the volume of these two brands combined account for 10 million cases of production,” David Kent, The Wine Group’s CEO, said in a statement.