Wine gets better with age.
What if the Earth could, too?

For decades, we’ve looked to reduce impact from our waste stream through several coordinated efforts. Since 1990, we’ve reduced our annual waste sent to landfill by more than 98 percent, striving to prevent unnecessary material from entering our operations and maintaining comprehensive recycling, reuse, and composting programs.

Following the winemaking process, we collect pomace—grape skins, stems, and seeds—and reintroduce this material into our vineyards as compost. Our commitment to a zero waste approach is championed every day by our team members, who play a key role in implementing our waste diversion policies and coming up with creative solutions to reuse, recycle, or eliminate materials. Additionally, we look for upstream solutions, working with our dry goods suppliers to identify opportunities to remove waste and non-recyclable materials from our production stream.

In 2014, we became certified Zero Waste by the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council (now Green Business Certification, Inc.’s TRUE Zero Waste Certification).

This designation goes to companies that show a certified track record of results in their commitment to changing how materials flow through society—with the end goal of optimizing resource lifecycles and leaving no waste behind.

Reducing the climate impact of our operations is essential to our overall commitment to regeneration and net positive operations. In 2005, we began voluntarily and publicly reporting our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to The Climate Registry, in a first among U.S. wineries. From that time forward, we’ve reduced our overall GHG emissions through a variety of initiatives, including energy efficiencies, improvements in how we treat wastewater, and diverting over 98% of our waste from landfill or incineration. In our most recent reporting period, we achieved a 19% reduction in emissions.

In 2020, we officially declared a climate emergency and committed to being accountable for sharing our progress aimed at limiting global average temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and to becoming climate positive in our business operations by 2030. In addition to our B Corp commitment to be Net Zero by 2030, we are more than halfway to our goal of being climate positive by 2030. How? Our Fetzer and Bonterra brands—more than half our California-crafted volume—are both Climate Neutral® Certified, with 10% more offsets purchased to achieve effective climate positive status. We continue to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and support a variety of pacesetting offset projects, all designed to help our winery—and the world—keep building toward better.

To help ensure that our efforts have a greater impact than we can achieve through improvements to our business alone, we also support climate-smart policies around the world, raising our voice in state, national and international arenas for forward-thinking legislation and agreements that help pave the way for a low-carbon future. We partner with the Ceres BICEP (Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy) coalition to raise the collective voice of business to call on the U.S. government to pass broad, bi-partisan energy and climate legislation, and we lend our voice to global climate conferences, including the landmark COP21 and COP23 events.

With water scarcity growing in California, we are committed to pursuing a comprehensive approach to water stewardship that allows us to conserve and reduce water use whenever possible. Since 2015, we have decreased our water intensity by almost 25 percent, from 3.65 to 2.75 gallons of water used in the winery per gallon of wine produced, as a result of using water efficiently and continuing to think outside the box about water stewardship.

This 25 percent reduction comes from a combination of innovative new technologies—we use worms and microbes to efficiently treat our wastewater, and use cloud computing to monitor for water leaks—and ongoing, iterative improvements to our operations.

Additional initiatives that contributed to our reduced water footprint include: the ongoing use of peracetic acid in the winery, which eliminates the need for a second rinse during sanitation; the installation of waterless urinals; upgrades to our centrifuge system to recirculate cooling water, which reduces the water required during a key winemaking process; and the installation of our new bottling lines in 2017, which not only increase efficiency and packaging flexibility, but also reduce the water volume required for sanitation processes. These efforts allowed us to exceed our 2020 water reduction goal by 10%, and to do so two years ahead of schedule.

In partnership with forward-thinking businesses across industries—including Danone, Levi Strauss & Co., and Salesforce—we support the Connect the Drops initiative led by Ceres, a nonprofit dedicated to tackling the world’s biggest sustainability challenges, including climate change and water scarcity. In partnership with Ceres, we support water efficiency measures like California Assembly Bill No. 1668 and Senate Bill No. 606, two initiatives that ultimately passed, helping make water conservation a way of life in California.

With a warming planet and increasingly urgent research highlighting a shrinking window to address the climate crisis, the challenges before us are numerous and real. Yet there is promise in an approach to agriculture that focuses one of the planet’s most abundant resources to help recover the planet’s health: the soil beneath our feet.

Regenerative farming practices support greater water retention and enhance each farm’s vibrant, biodiverse ecosystem. Simultaneously, this approach promotes land’s natural power to keep carbon in the ground, which helps to rebalance the carbon cycle—a key element in the effort to slow climate change. Given all of these benefits, it’s probably no surprise that regenerative farming is catching on.

We practice this type of climate-smart agriculture on all 960 acres of vineyards in Mendocino County that we farm for Bonterra Organic Vineyards. At the heart of our regenerative approach are beneficial farming practices that include planting cover crops, reducing tillage, applying compost, planting for biodiversity, and using planned animal grazing.

The benefits from this approach to farming are manifold: increased soil fertility, drought resiliency, and biodiversity levels, and support for soil’s natural ability to reintegrate carbon from the atmosphere. It’s not only a smart way to farm—it’s the right thing to do for the planet.

In 2020 we declared a climate emergency and committed to becoming Net Positive by 2030, ultimately ensuring we operate in a way that puts more into society, the environment, and the economy than we take out. We’re now more than halfway to our goal, thanks to our Fetzer and Bonterra brands both achieving Climate Neutral® Certification, with 10% more offsets purchased to achieve effective climate positive status.

As a reflection of our regenerative approach, we are committed to supporting employees’ personal and professional development, and to enhancing our surrounding communities. In addition to health and wellness benefits, we offer employee programs that promote quality of life, education, and continuous improvement.

Beyond our winery doors, we seek to engage with communities throughout the U.S. and across the globe through strategic partnerships with select nonprofits.