An
April 13, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
announced

the four winners of its second annual
“Growing Green” awards, which honor leaders in the sustainable-food
world in four categories: “thought leader,” “producer,”
business leader,” and “water steward.” I interviewed
“thought leader” Fred Kirschenmann
here

and “business leader” Karl Kupers of Shepherd’s Grain here.
Now I turn my attention to Mike Benziger, who brought home
the “water steward” prize for his work at Benziger Family Winery.

When Mike Benziger and his family began growing grapes and
making wine in 1970s-era Sonoma County, the prevailing agricultural
style could be described as
“scorched earth.” Agrichemical concoctions fed the vines, killed the
pests, and flattened
the weeds; plentiful well water provided easy irrigation.

But such practices not only kill soil, they also deaden
wine. Over time, the Benzigers began to rethink modern viticulture. One
motivation was improving the product, making it stand out from the
gusher of wine
coming out of Sonoma. Another was the sinking water table on Sonoma
Mountain, where the family keeps its vineyards. Faced with surging water
costs,
the family began searching for new farming methods that didn’t treat
water as a
cheap and easy resource. Thus started an odyssey that inspired the
family to
convert its Sonoma property to biodynamic
growing practices in the
mid-1990s — and that won Mike Benziger recognition from the NRDC as a
“water
steward.” I caught up with Mike last week via phone.

Q.
Tell
us about how Benziger saves water.

A. It
all started because we were running out of water — our wells were
dropping.
Necessity really was the mother of invention. We’re located on Sonoma
Mountain,
and water recharge was not happening anywhere near as fast as we were
using
the water. The bottom line in California is there’s probably not going
to be
enough water to go around.

So,
what are we going to do to address that? You throw climate change into
that mix,
and the problem gets that much more critical. There’s a saying in the
wine
business: wine is for loving, but water is for fighting. But it turns
out that
when you use significantly less water in the field, you can actually
raise the quality
of wine. There’s not a tradeoff between water use and wine quality. Of
course,
there are economic benefits, too — one of the biggest costs we incur at
our facility is for pumping water out of the ground.

So
we looked to the vineyard first. Far and away, our growing practices
used the
most significant quantities of water. So, by designing vineyards that
needed
less water, by not planting in areas that had an excess demand for
water, and
by planting plants that were smaller, by planting plants that were less
thirsty, by planting plants that had rootstalks that went deeper and
pulled
water from lower soil depth, we saved a lot of water.

And
we quickly found that by irrigating less and using less inputs, our
grapes,
olives, and other products were more concentrated in flavor, higher in
quality,
and had a longer shelf life to it.

Q.
Benziger
is well-known in the industry for being certified biodynamic. Talk about
the relationship between
biodynamic growing practices and water conservation.

A. When
we first moved into our property in 1980, we hired the best advisors.
And they
told us, “Hey, you better get rid of all of the natural things in your
vineyards and push them out to the other side of the fence. We don’t
want any
competition in your vineyards. Let’s get rid of all the insects, let’s
get rid
of all the weeds, let’s get rid of all the birds. We need to have this
under
control. Only vines should be in a vineyard area.”

Over
time, we did a pretty good job of killing everything. One day, we went
outside
and we didn’t hear a peep: we didn’t see an insect, we didn’t hear a
bird, our
soils were eroding because they were dead, and quite frankly, our wines
were
hit and miss. And that’s when we knew we needed to look for some farming
practices
that maybe treated the land with a little bit more respect.