The rapidly growing wine industry in the Finger Lakes Region of New York has been attracting a good deal of attention for the quality of its wines. One winery is looking to make a name for itself both for its wines and its commitment to the environment.

Red Tail Ridge Winery, in Penn Yan, N.Y., will break ground this spring on a new wine making building designed to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standards. It would be the first New York winery building to earn LEED certification, according to a search of the USGBC’s online LEED project database. Husband and wife owners Mike Schnelle and Nancy Irelan opened Red Tail Ridge after moving to the region from California, where Ireland worked for Gallo wineries. Their tasting room opened in August 2007.

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The 1.2 megawatt solar system, built by Pacific Power Management, will provide about 50 percent of the winery’s total energy and putting those numbers into environmental benefits will be equal to planting 2500 acres of trees o put another way taking 2,083 cars off the road.

Even though we applaud the massive move toward solar we’d like to see more wineries move toward other sustainable aspects and not just energy related ones. We don’t expect all wineries to start creating organic wines, however several wineries have moved to biodynamic practices or even grow organic grapes. Some wineries continue the sustainable movement with social justice practices such as maintaining a fairly paid, year round labor force instead of hiring lower paid seasonal workers.

We’re all for the tipping a few glasses of solar produced wine but that’s only the first step in bringing a winery to the next level.

To help the Napa winemakers and wineries worldwide oversee their crop irrigation and management, Sebastian Payen and Thibaut Scholasch, of Fruition Sciences have turned the science of hydration monitoring into an art. The business partners’ techniques come from the marriage of research and technology that they have developed over more than seven years working at prestigious universities and with premier vineyards.

Using a proprietary technology, Fruition Sciences is able to monitor real time viticulture information and deliver the statistics via a web-based application to the winemakers instantly. The ability to monitor the vineyard status in real time allows vintners to make decisions about irrigation and canopy management that can have immediate repercussions as well as a long term effect on the crop.

The team is currently working with winemakers around the world in California, France and Spain to monitor vine conditions. Implementing this technology at some of the large producers worldwide could have an interesting impact on water usage and vine care and maintenance by leaving a little less up to chance and putting a little faith in technology.

Among the wine-makers using solar power: Far Niente, Frog’s Leap, Fetzer, Domaine Carneros, Ridge and St. Francis, among others. According to one solar company executive, the region’s wineries are going solar 40-plus times faster than any other type of business in California.

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