Photo courtesy of Clif Family Winery.

It is out with the old and in with the new for Napa Green, which is now the first winegrowing certification program in the world to redevelop and overhaul their sustainability standards.

The organization’s new model — called the Napa Green Vineyard program — officially replaced the Napa Green Land program on Jan. 1, and the 42 members transitioning will have a year to adapt to the new regulations.

According to Napa Green’s Executive Director Anna Brittain, these 42 participants represent about 5,200 vineyard acres in the Napa Valley area.

“This all launched in 2004 with Napa Green Land, and at the time, those were really cutting-edge practices to prevent erosion and sediment runoff,” said Brittain of the now-defunct model. “In 2017 — and this is kind of what you want to have happen — those became a regulatory compliance requirement, so we sort of hope that with our new cutting- edge standards, in 10 years those will be a compliance requirement.”

At a basic level, the revised Napa Green Vineyard program looks at issues that were not at the forefront of the certification when the first version was drafted, most notably including climate action, regenerative farming and social equity. As a result, the program now has six main elements: conservation burning; tree and forest preservation; restricted pesticides; water efficiency; carbon farming; and inclusion — each of which has a set of mandatory and optional actions to take to meet certification requirements.

“It was time to really level up,” said Brittain. “But what we say to everyone is you don’t have to be an A-plus student to get certified … Everyone has to be like, B-plus to A-minus as I put it, and then they get an action plan.”

This action plan thus consists of tangible changes the vineyard crews can make, whether it be infrastructurally, administrative or mental. Such items include implementing annual performance reviews for staff, hiring farmworkers year-round rather than seasonally, installing flow meters to track water use, replanting with drought-tolerant rootstocks, and many, many more.

For Clif Family Winery, president Linzi Gay says no major changes were necessary on their end, but that the new certification is definitely “more rigorous” and is optimized for accountability.

“The work is never done, and we can always be improving, both in our individual organizations and collectively as a wine community,” said Gay. “It is important for us to keep track of our progress and achievements, and to have accountability to these best practices if we want to see real impact.”

Read the full article on Napa Green’s certification program here. And see how one Napa winery puts sustainability goals into action.