05/19/08 Wine Sustainability

Wine Sustainability. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. I was recently in Washington DC at a conference where we had a wonderful evening meal and a wine tasting. Nothing too extraordinary in that with the exception that one of the wines was a 1929 vintage dessert wine. Besides being fabulous it really brought home the idea of sustainability for the wine industry. Our sommelier was Bernard Wolff with BASF. WOLFF: Sustainability is when you are able to store wine. In BASF wine cellars we are very proud that we have the vintages back to the foundation year of BASF, back to 1965. Wolff calls this sustainability for your tongue. When we think of the wine industry in the northwest we see a business still pretty much in its infancy. But roll the calendar forward 20, 50 or 100 years into the future and we will see sustainability in action. The dessert wine was a classic example of what we can expect. WOLFF: Just imagine that the vines were planted before 1850. They were harvested, the grapes in 1929. Then the wine was stored in glass balloon flasks outside and then decades in barrels. It was filled into bottles 5 years ago and waited for the occasion yesterday night. I can only hope that I can live long enough to sample some of the early vintages from the Pacific Northwest in say, oh, another 50 years. The wine industry truly is a business built on sustainability. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.