As sustainable viticultural practices spread, vineyards grow greener every day. But what about the wineries? Several recent projects have grabbed attention: Sanford Winery's complex of Mission-style adobe structures in Santa Barbara, the energy-efficient Carlton Wine Studio in Oregon's Willamette Valley, Ridge Vineyards' straw bale barrel facility in Sonoma's Dry Creek. Along with these bold, statement-making ventures, below-radar movements toward sustainable construction rumble along, for example, caves and other underground facilities using natural temperature control instead of electricity-devouring air conditioning. The rising cost and uncertain availability of power and water slowly but steadily make resource-conserving alternatives more economically attractive.

In many ways, the forces behind a greener direction in building and design resemble those affecting viticulture, a combination of idealistic pioneers, broader but less glamorous trends, potential public image benefits and cold, hard economic calculations. Yet while the methods and materials for sustainable construction of wine facilities are readily available, their adoption is at a much earlier stage.

High-Profile Projects

Sustainable construction projects have shown the f lag in the wine country for at least the last 15 years. In the late 1980s, Napa's Long Meadow Ranch winery was built from dirt removed when the caves were dug; the facility won a commercial design award from the American Institute of Architects in 1989. Rammed earth construction techniques were used at Sonoma's Ravenswood Winery at about the same time. In 1995-96, the Claiborne and Churchill winery in San Luis Obispo debuted as the first commercial straw bale building in California.

After two decades of warehouse winemaking, Sanford Winery held its 2001 crush in the first of several new buildings painstakingly constructed from tens of thousands of adobe bricks (made from the soil on the Rancho Rinconada property) and held up with recycled old-growth timbers (salvaged from an abandoned lumber mill in Washington state). The straw bale construction at Ridge's Lytton Springs facility is nearly as complex. In a multi-phase project, a "U"- shaped ring with plaster-covered straw bale walls is being built around an existing metal building; different sections of the outer tube will eventually house barrel storage, tank space, a tasting room and so on.

And then there's Fetzer, a major industry player with a well-known commitment to green approaches. Fetzer's Paso Robles facility, opened in 2000, incorporated innovative technologies to increase energy efficiency within a standard metal and concrete structure. But the winery's new 10,000 square foot administration building in Hopland employed a full-f ledged green design: a strong emphasis on recycled and/or local materials, stabilized earth walls, onsite solar generation of most of the building's electricity, and no need for air conditioning.

In Oregon, Sokol Blosser Winery's new underground barrel storage facility became the first wine-related building to receive certification through the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program in December, 2002. And the Carlton Wine Studio, a facility housing several small, prestigious labels, is in the midst of the LEED certification process. What LEED adds to the process (see more below) is a first attempt to give objective definition to fuzzy terms like "green" and "sustainable."

This representative sample of green oriented projects is weighted toward the usual suspects, wineries with a strong, pre-existing environmental commitment. "Susan [Sokol Blosser] is always pioneering something," says architect Logan Cravens, designer of the Sokol Blosser barrel room. "We took our beliefs in sustainable and green practices one more step, that's how we farm, how we eat," says Eric Hammacher of the Wine Studio.

The green philosophical outlook is grounded in the fact that a huge amount of the planet's resources are affected by construction decisions. According to David Eisenberg of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology, "Buildings account for one fourth of the world's wood harvest, two fifths of its material and energy usage, one sixth of its fresh water usage. In the past 100 years the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen 27%, one quarter of which has come from burning fossil fuels just to provide energy for buildings. During the same period, the world lost 20% of its forests."

"The momentum comes from a concern about resource depletion," says Robert Mehl of RPM Architects, responsible for a number of sustainable design projects in the Santa Barbara area, including the new Sanford winery. But the desire to make a visible public statement also comes into play: "Winery owners and winemakers are creative people interested in the art of wine, and that transfers to the art of building and an interest in green design." Straw bales and hillside caves shape a winery's image as much as the label on the bottle.

Not surprisingly, most of the green pioneers are pleased with the results. "We're deliriously happy with how it feels and how it looks," says Clay Thompson of Claiborne and Churchill. Besides saving money on electricity, Patrick Healy, Fetzer's environmental manager, says the administration building "is featured in a graduate-level architecture textbook for green construction, it's won a couple of EPA awards, and we get tours from all over the world."

Materials and Methods

Tools and techniques for moving beyond the showcase stage are readily available. Both for the construction phase and the ongoing functioning of facilities, there's a smorgasbord of materials and methods out there, not just in supplier catalogs but in real world applications.

Proponents of organic agriculture point out that up until the rise of the petrochemical industries a few decades back, all agriculture was by default organic, and the same applies to construction. "In the old days," says Robert Mehl, "people had to design with nature, they had few other options." Relying on local materials is a basic principle of today's sustainability, largely because it reduces the need for burning fossil fuels for transportation; in an earlier era, local was all that was available. Before the advent of air conditioning, wineries burrowed into hillsides as the handiest solution for temperature control, not to save the planet.

Rammed earth construction-the broader term is "stabilized earth"-has a long track record in both commercial and residential settings. The PISE system developed by David Easton of Rammed Earth Works is a recent twist in which a mixture of earth and concrete is sprayed through hoses into forms, much like the "shotcrete" familiar in mainstream construction. (The Fetzer Hopland administration building is an example of PISE construction.) Techniques exist to reduce the proportion of cement in structural concrete, important since cement production is extremely resource-intensive. Substances like fly ash, scraped from smokestacks in coal-fired power plants, have many of the same binding properties when mixed with concrete.

Thick stabilized earth walls can provide all or most of the temperature control needed for winery facilities, especially in conjunction with fan systems to bring in cooler nighttime air. Straw bale construction offers the same thermal advantage, plus making use of a waste product, typically in California, straw from rice growers, who are prohibited from burning the straw because of EPA pollution controls. Straw bale walls are normally reinforced with rigid structural supports in earthquake-prone areas. But according to Tim Owen-Kennedy of Vital Systems (consultant for the Ridge barrel facility), recent engineering trends are "moving from having materials that resist the earthquake load to those that absorb it," giving straw bales a possible seismic advantage.

Recycling lumber saves trees, but can also mean access to first-growth wood that is no longer available and the creation of a distinctive look in a public space. The lumber market now offers a wide array of engineered wood products, glulam, paralam, oriented strand board, in which large sheets or beams of wood are constructed from smaller pieces and adhesives, relying on small, young, renewably farmed trees, not mature old growth forests.

Wheat board is an alternative to old-fashioned particle board that doesn't require toxic formaldehyde in its production. Trex decking material is made from waste wood fiber and plastic film sheeting, and is in many ways superior both to all-plastic lumber and all-natural wood for outdoor decking. Recycling in another form underlies the Rastra and Blue Max systems for concrete forms, made from recycled post-consumer polystyrene waste (i.e., used soft drink cups).

More familiar entries on the menu of resource-conserving options include active and passive solar energy generation, energy-efficient lighting, radiant floor heating and the recycling of wastewater for vineyard irrigation. For every green itch that might occur to a designer or winery owner, there's a tested product on the market to scratch it.

Gradual Trends, Remaining Barriers

Plenty of "sustainable" construction happens without any banner being raised. David James of James Nolan Construction, which does 60% of its business in the winery sector, says, "I'm no expert on green building, but it may be occurring just under my nose. Building a cave is itself green building, you're doing right by the environment." Similarly, gravityf low winery design, praised for its gentler handling, also moves wine around with less electricity. Every winery tries to cut the use of power and water.

Observers like Portland architect Laurence Ferar, with winery design credits in Oregon, Washington and California, feel that worrying about a "green" label is often "trendy, and done for marketing. The truest part boils down to common sense, and what a good architect would do anyway-take advantage of the site, use natural thermal insulation. A lot of 'green' things I've seen are things we've always done."

Still, there is something short of an industry-wide rush to adopt sustainable construction practices. If the cost of water and power is a major economic driver, if the methods and materials are available, and if common sense is on the side of environmentally-sensitive building, what are the barriers?

The first stumbling block is the need for education at every level, from carpenters to contractors to designers to county building inspectors. Structural engineer Fred Webster, a rammed earth specialist, says "There's nothing in the building code that addresses it, so you always have to re-prove it to building officials." Nor do construction crews automatically take to new and unfamiliar materials, which may require different tools and procedures and project delays for training. "Some of the wood we used was old and really hard," remembers Fetzer's Healy. "The carpenters cursed me on it-said they needed a gun."

But the chief obstacle is cost, or at least the perception of cost. "I always thought this trend would be irreversible," says David Easton of Rammed Earth Works, looking over two decades in the business, "but it's not. It's not yet cost effective. For people who manufacture green material of any sort-sustainable lumber, rice straw- there's such a small market segment, they don't have the benefits of mass production, volume discounts, huge distribution, to compete with the much bigger industry that takes virgin materials."

Easton's generalization is probably accurate, though there are counterexamples. Low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) paints used to be exotic specialty items, but safety concerns have made them standard in most new construction, and available off the shelf at any paint store.

Others emphasize higher labor costs, the price of financing a learning curve. Fred Webster says rammed earth construction is highly labor intensive, and notes that California's seismic concerns ratchet up the price of building, especially compared to the more vibrant industry in Arizona and New Mexico. For straw bale, Tim Owen- Kennedy argues "It's the labor cost, not the material itself. The usual math is one third labor, two thirds material; for straw bale, it's the reverse."

Complexity is another important variable. Alternative techniques "can be less expensive with simple architecture," says Mehl. "The best use [of straw bales] will be in larger agricultural and industrial buildings, structures without many penetrations or openings," says Owen-Kennedy.

Susan Sokol Blosser and Richard Sanford readily admit they launched their projects out of conviction, not to save money. But Eric Hammacher says the Wine Studio "came in below the average cost per square foot of Willamette Valley wineries. We used simple technologies and tied a lot of them together." Patrick Healy says the Fetzer admin building "came out midrange for office buildings that size."

Part of the calculation is deciding how to count long-run savings and intangibles like image enhancement in relation to up-front construction bills. Most obvious is the energy savings from thermal-minded construction. Alternative construction "can be competitively priced," says Robert Mehl, "if you figure in the payback and operational costs over maybe ten years," and others agree.

Putting a dollar value on good public relations isn't easy, but shouldn't be ignored. "It's a great story," says Clay Thompson, "which has given us good recognition and publicity." "You can't buy that kind of exposure," says Hammacher, citing a long list of domestic and international media feelers.

And what's costly today may be a deal tomorrow. "A lot of people are looking at solar very intently, for new facilities and retrofits," says Dave Kincaid of Facility Development Corporation. "We're on the verge of solar being good enough and dependable enough to become a primary source of power." Architect Scott Bartley of Hall and Bartley agrees: "Solar was hot in the energy crisis of the '70s, but faded out because of the cost of systems and the payback being so long. But it may come back."

Gary Workman, director of wine production services for Robert Mondavi, is responsible for the design and construction of a Central Coast facility, a project just coming onto the drawing boards. "Everything is on the table," he says, including rammed earth, solar generation, even harnessing wind power in the Salinas Valley. Part of the conceptual mix is Pacific Gas and Electric's Savings By Design program, which offers cash incentives for energy-efficient design and construction. For the utility, the cost of building power plants is so prohibitive that it's preferable to encourage large commercial and agricultural operations to roll their own.

LEED Strives For Definition

The Sokol Blosser and Wine Studio projects are giving the wine industry its first experience with the Green Building Council's LEED certification process. The aim of LEED, through its standards, checklists, ratings system and requirement of a third party audit, is to apply objective criteria to "green" claims. "Measurability is what LEED is all about," says Logan Cravens.

LEED evaluates projects within five broad areas: sustainability of the site, water usage, energy usage, environmental quality (mainly for the humans involved), and materials. True, wineries are hardly LEED's stock in trade. Some of the expectations appropriate for urban office buildings-for example, keeping temperatures in the 70s and humidity levels down for employee comfort-don't fit barrel rooms.

The benefits of the LEED process can be time consuming and expensive. "The application process alone costs thousands of dollars," says Russ Rosner, Sokol Blosser's winemaker. After a long search for sustainably-grown lumber, Rosner found a source certified by an agency LEED did not recognize, costing points. But Susan Sokol Blosser, Rosner and Hammacher of the Wine Studio (which is in the final stages of LEED paperwork) all say it's worth the money and trouble. As icing on the cake, gaining Silver-level LEED certification (as Sokol Blosser did) qualifies for an Oregon tax break.

How Green Are the Prospects?

Highly sustainable new construction makes up an extremely small percentage of the total, and most of that is residential, not commercial, (It's quite possible there are more "green" residences among winery owners than "green" wineries.) David Cooper of ZIFA, architect for the Ridge project, thinks however that "green is more prevalent in the wine industry" than elsewhere, because of the intimate connection to agriculture and the land.

"Power and water conservation has always been a big factor," says Dave Kincaid. But that pressure does not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for explicitly green practices. "The big boys" he says, "are more concerned with keeping utilities down, controlling waste products, being stewards of the land, having things last. But it's not yet cost-efficient to do green."

Robert Chrobak of Kennedy/Jenks Consultants, a winery water issues specialist, sees gradual movement, "partly coming from the sustainability practices direction, but also from regulatory agencies." Robert Mehl adds that county governments play an important role, particularly on site issues. Santa Barbara County, he notes, "promotes innovative, energy-efficient approaches. We have a board for innovative building review, which helps speed up the approval process and reduce the fees."

Bottom line: the materials and methods are there, and the economic arguments for resource conservation are powerful. But it still takes a concerted push from winery decision makers to give the green light.