Drought-Weary California Tries to Make Wine out of Less Water
We’ve seen plenty of drought villains in the last four years, since the rains first dried up in California. Almonds, alfalfa, and the Bel-Air resident using 11.8 million gallons of water a year have all been a straw man for water waste at one point or another.
Wine grapes, however, still enjoy a good public reputation—but with around half a million acres under vines across the state, even this relatively drought-tolerant crop has a sizable water footprint.
The state has nearly 6,000 wine grape growers and more than 4,000 wineries, and those facilities use a lot of water in the winemaking process, from irrigating the vines to cleaning the tanks, barrels, bottles, and winery floors. Typically, most wineries treat the water and discharge it, and while some reuse it to water their lawns, few have considered reusing the water for their vineyards, given that wine grapes are a high-value cash crop and delicate to boot.
Estimates of how much water it takes to make a gallon of wine vary widely, but a University of California, Davis, estimate puts it at between 2.5 and 6 gallons, not counting water used in the vineyards. The amount vines are irrigated depends on a host of circumstances: grape variety, location, rootstock, soil conditions, temperature, and local rainfall.
While the media may be captivated with the idea of dry-farming grapes—relying solely on rainwater instead of managed irrigation—it may be that less romantic conservation measures, such as watering vines with wastewater, are the best opportunity to achieve industry-wide conservation.
While some wineries, including Francis Ford Coppola’s, are already using recycled water to irrigate vines, concerns range from the stigma associated with using wastewater to valid worries about how it will affect the quality of the grapes and the flavor of the wine.
Research from UC Davis shows that it is possible to reuse that water, although there are some caveats. Maya Buelow, a soil scientist, studied winery wastewater samples from 18 wineries in the Napa and Lodi wine regions and found that it could be reused—under certain conditions.
Her team of researchers found that certain types of soil did well with wastewater that had sodium-based cleaner, while others fared better with potassium-based cleaners. She hopes that wineries and growers will use her research as a baseline to test their soil and decide whether it’s safe to reuse the wastewater they generate.
“In the quest for sustainability, most wineries are going after the low-hanging fruit,” Buelow said. The wineries she and her team researched “use high-pressure water heads that use less water on their hoses, hot steam to clean their glassware instead of water, and drip irrigation instead of sprinklers, while one winery is dry farming.”
In the world of spirits, the wine industry is not alone in reevaluating its water use. The state’s beer industry has endured scrutiny for quite some time, given how much water it uses: Beer is 90 percent water, and California’s 500-plus breweries consumed 651 million gallons of water last year. But breweries are looking at various ways to cut water use, from reducing the time taken to clean tanks to installing software that tracks how much water is used.
John Williams, owner and winemaker at Frog’s Leap Winery in the Napa Valley, has been dry farming—relying only on rainfall—since he began the business 30 years ago. He laughs at how the media has been trotting out the term as the latest buzzword, because Napa’s industry was built on dry-farmed vines.
“Prior to the '80s, everyone in the Napa Valley dry-farmed,” Williams said. “Irrigation was only introduced in 1976 in Napa and became popular in the mid ’80s, and now most people will tell you they can’t farm without irrigation.”
What changed? He explained that drip irrigation was introduced to the U.S. from Israel 30 years ago, and when winemakers were promised better yields if they irrigated, they switched to watering their vineyards.
It is estimated that 20 percent of Napa’s wine grapes are dry-farmed, but the region gets more rain than the Central Valley, which is home to more than half of the state’s vineyards, where even dry-weather-loving grapes need irrigation. Even for those in Napa and Sonoma who are growing grapes to sell to winemakers, irrigation provides the kind of certainty that farmers crave: If they have so much water, and so many vines, they can expect a harvest of so many tons.
So while a winery that grows its own grapes can arguably get a better product by turning off the irrigation and spending less on water, the amount of wine it will be able to make in a given vintage is left up to nature—a risk not all growers are willing to take.
Irrigated vineyards tend to produce more fruity wines, which, combined with a large dose of oak, make for wines that long have appealed to American consumers. But palates are changing, and the earthier, nuanced flavors that are associated with dry-farmed vineyards are in vogue.
So it may be shifting taste in wine, rather than the drought, that has the most potential to increase the number of dry-farmed grapes in California.
Related stories on TakePart:
• 34 Surprising Facts You Need to Know About California's Drought
• Can a Rain Barrel in Every House Help Ease the Water Crisis?
Original article from TakePart
