Producing Reds And Whites And Being Green

Canadian Winery Tries To Turn Out Top-Tier Wines While Being Good To the Earth

(CBS)  Paul Pender knows it's not easy being green but, as part of a team operating an eco-friendly vineyard and winery and ensuring the eventual end product filtering into thousands of bottles is of top-tier quality and good for the Earth, it's well worth the effort.

Soon after taking possession of the land nestled on 32 acres in the Niagara region, Tawse Winery made a commitment toward growing organically.

Since producing its first wine some seven years ago, the business, owned by Moray Tawse, has gone full throttle in greening almost all aspects of the operation.

When it comes to preserving the grapes, Pender, Tawse's winemaker, acknowledges it can be challenging under normal circumstances. But in organic farming, it poses additional obstacles in terms of what can be used to protect the crop.

"I don't want to be ingesting huge amounts of chemicals, and there's lots of chemicals sprayed on grapes. It's kind of like the dark side of the wine industry," Pender said. "We spray a lot, even with organics we spray a lot, because grapes are really prone to disease in our climate."

Instead of using herbicides, Pender said they opt to spray the crop with copper and sulphur, which are allowed under organic viticulture. But since they act solely as surface protectants, the moment they wash off the plant, it loses its protection.

"You've got to be a lot more on top of it," he said.

"We also don't have that same arsenal in terms of if we get a disease, getting rid of it. We need to keep the plant healthy, because if we get disease pressure we can't get rid of it really, we're struggling with it forever, or it could wipe out our crop, so you really have to be in the vineyard a whole lot more and you're spraying more."

The winery has also been moving toward biodynamics, in which the soil and farm are regarded as living organisms and the focus is on maintaining and preserving soil life.

"You'll go into vineyards and some places and you'll see moss growing on top of dirt, because it's dead. There's no more biological life there," Pender said. "You need that biological life because it allows oxygen to get down to the plants and to be healthy."

If the soil isn't alive, you may be able to make good wines but not a top-shelf one, Pender said.

"For us, that's the main reason we're here," he said. "There's a lot of good wine on the market, we don't need any more wine, but we do need more wine that has that distinct sense of place."

When it comes time to ferment their wines, they try to use indigenous or wild yeast that comes from wines as opposed to buying it.

As for storing the product, their three cellars dug nearly 12 feet deep with six to eight feet of earth over top help maintain a temperature between 50 and 60 degrees, aiding in keeping barrel-aged wines at a consistent temperature.

"They're very moist, which is good, because it controls your evaporation, and they're just naturally controlled so you don't use any energy at all," Pender said.

"If we were to build a shed out back, you'd be air-conditioning it all summer long and we'd be humidifying it, then we'd be heating it all winter," he added. "It's very, very efficient, just using the ambient temperature of the Earth to help the wine storage."

Even how the facility is heated and kept cool gets the green treatment.

A geothermal energy system uses heat pumps to control temperatures at the various levels of the winery with the large pond situated out front acting as a heat sink.

A heat pump works on the same principle as a refrigerator, Pender said.

"You condense a liquid to get rid of the heat and you send the heat off, so that's condensing and evaporating the liquid - you either create heat or you create cold," he said.

"In the back of the fridge you have that fan where you blow all the heat off. We blow all our heat off in the pond. So if you take out all that freon you have in your fridge, you have glycol that runs in the pond and it just dissipates into the pond."

"That liquid comes back in, it's already 10 degrees colder, and then we drop that again through the heat pump, and then we can essentially run it backwards in the winter and we heat the building with it."

Pender said they save about 80 percent on energy costs. A study conducted two years ago monitoring their energy usage found they were averaging $17 daily in the middle of winter to heat the nearly 1,700-square-metre facility and cool the tanks.

"You're basically heating the winery and cooling it for the cost of running a few pumps because there's no gas boiler, there's no electrical heating element."

Despite all their efforts toward sustainable farming and implementing eco-friendly measures, don't expect to see the details stamped on their bottles.

There is nothing on the labeling of their wines that indicates it's organic - and Pender said he likes it that way.

"For me, organics has to be about knowing your producer, getting in touch with your grower, having a trust in that relationship - not to have a government stamp on it."