Vineyard Neighbors See Only Wrath From Grapes
At a distance they resemble nothing so much as freshly dug military cemeteries, these baby vineyards with their precisely regimented rows of metal stakes marching up and down the Central Coast hills.
Under the winter sky they are bare, save for patches of grass sprouting between the long lines of vines.
It is a view Lorraine Scarpace sees from her patio, down the road and on the drive back to town, hill after hill, acre after acre, all the same.
“I’m really so turned off by the whole thing,” complains Scarpace, who lives in what has traditionally been cattle and grain country but is fast becoming wine country. “Just rows and rows of all that. It’s devastating. I don’t know. I wish the market would be saturated. I almost would rather see houses than that, it’s so bad. At least [developers] plant trees.”
Up and down the state, heretical voices are being raised against California’s hallowed wine industry. As the demand for premium wines drives a vineyard boom in such coastal counties as Sonoma, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, the look and feel of chunks of rural California are changing. And not everybody likes it.
There are mutterings about the invasion of “grapescape,” and the “savage” transformation of oak-studded grazing lands into monotonous acres of cabernet and chardonnay and merlot.
Increasingly, from Napa to Santa Barbara counties, there are calls for greater regulation of vineyard installation and even suggestions that some particularly scenic and environmentally sensitive places should be off limits to the vine.
“There’s a growing sense here that we have crossed the line of too much of a good thing,” said Mark Green, a Sonoma County environmentalist who recently helped draft an ordinance that would regulate hillside vineyards there. “We all like vineyards. But we also like hills without vineyards. And we like oak trees.”
California has added about 100,000 acres of wine grapes in the past decade, a 30% increase in vineyard land, according to a statewide Allied Grape Growers estimate. The value of the wine-grape harvest has leaped from $647 million in 1988 to $1.7 billion in 1997, state agricultural figures show.
Real estate signs in emerging wine regions boast not of subdivision potential, but of the land’s suitability for wine grapes. The names of obscure hillsides and creeks that a decade ago would have been known only to back-country locals are showing up on the labels of $30 bottles of wine.
Weighing the Impact
In San Luis Obispo County, where large wine companies, affluent professionals and even ranchers are converting 2,000 acres a year into vines, land with good vineyard potential sells for $7,000 to $12,000 an acre. In the current market, wine growers can easily make annual profits of $4,000 an acre or more once a vineyard is in full production.
An economic boon to be sure, particularly in ranch country that has struggled for years under stagnant or dropping beef prices.
But an increasingly vocal faction sees it is a boom with a cost--both to the environment and a way of life.
“Certainly the wine industry brings wonderful things to San Luis Obispo County,” county Planning Commission Chairman Pat Veesart observed. “But there’s a growing concern that we need to take a look at what we’re losing in this process.”
In wine districts around the state there are complaints about everything from loss of wildlife habitat and the destruction of stately oaks to hillside erosion, vineyard use of herbicides and pesticides, and even laments that the countryside is beginning to look nearly as boring as the Central Valley.
“It’s a very sterile environment. It’s just as sterile as a cotton field,” said Irv McMillan, a Paso Robles cabinetmaker and rancher who keeps a photo album chronicling “the slaughter” of oaks by area vineyards.
“It changes the whole landscape in a way,” observed Tina Salter, who lives on the outskirts of Atascadero. “Places where it used to be fields or cattle grazing, all of a sudden it’s been graded out. The irrigation pipes are put in and the posts and the wires to grow the grapes on--and you have grape-ification.”
The notion of vineyards as a blight on the landscape is not without its ironies. Wine grapevines have been planted in California for 200 years, and there is perhaps no agricultural product in the state as romanticized as wine.
A good part of that mystique involves a near worship of soil and place--the terroir that gives a fine wine its particular character. The industry’s self-image is wrapped up in nature, sun and earth.
“In general the vineyard industry is very confused,” said Jim Caudill, vice president of public relations for Kendall-Jackson Winery. “Why are people picking on me for providing beautiful view sheds?”
Kendall-Jackson has been picked on plenty since it bought a 1,400-acre Santa Barbara County ranch in view of U.S. 101 and ripped out hundreds of oaks to plant vines in late 1997.
People were furious, furious enough to launch a county initiative regulating oak removal. The measure narrowly failed last year, but county supervisors are considering a wider-ranging set of restrictions on vineyard and agricultural development.
The oak destruction was a public-relations fiasco for Kendall-Jackson, something the company has become all too aware of.
“Wine, beyond the flavors, is all about image,” Caudill pointed out. “So I have a very big self-interest in being seen as an envirnonment-friendly, listen-to-the-consumer kind of guy.”
Yes, he said, the company took out oaks--though not as many as people say. But it is also leaving 800 acres of the ranch alone, replanting trees, and leaving a wildlife corridor running through the vineyard, he added.
Since the Santa Barbara uproar, Caudill acknowledged, “We are much more sensitive to whether there is a way to develop a vineyard without cutting that tree.”
Growing a Conscience
Grape growers say they have become more environmentally aware in recent years. Instead of stripping the ground bare between the vines, they are planting cover crops to reduce erosion and control weeds. They are trying to use less herbicides and pesticides. And many leave oaks standing amid the vines.
“It’s changed,” said Kris O’Connor, executive director of the Central Coast Vineyard Team, a grower-backed group that evaluates vineyard practices. “It really has improved.”
But the creation of a vineyard is still not a pretty sight. Big earth-moving equipment scrapes the ground bare, grading and sometimes contouring. Huge mechanical hooks are used to “deep-rip” the soil, digging as far as 5 to 6 feet to loosen the earth for the vine roots and to improve drainage. Sometimes the soil is sterilized to guard against disease.
Irrigation pipes are installed, along with metal stakes to support the vines and wires to lift the leaf canopy above the grapes. “Some of these vineyards have so much metal in them they look like an Erector set,” one winery manager quipped.
On steeper hillsides, elaborate underground drainage systems can be installed. Deer fences are common. Noisemakers and netting are used to keep birds at bay.
“There is a classic California landscape, and it’s not straight rows with netting and 12-foot fences and pesticides,” complained Janet Cobb, executive officer of the California Oak Foundation.
In Cobb’s view, vineyards are just as destructive as housing or commercial development and therefore deserve some of the same environmental reviews.
“We’re allowing them to go wherever they please, and that should not be the case,” said Cobb, who is lobbying for oak protections and speaks of launching a statewide initiative if legislative efforts fail.
While winemakers are heavily regulated in terms of what they can put in the bottle and how they label it, they enjoy much more freedom in the vineyard, where the relatively loose land-use rules of agriculture apply.
That may be changing. Sonoma County is drafting a hillside ordinance that would ban vineyards on steep slopes and require erosion-control plans and setbacks from waterways.
In Santa Barbara County, where vineyard acreage has more than doubled in the last six years, the county board is considering rules requiring environmental review of new vineyards if they impact such areas as oak woodlands, wetlands or streams.
Rancher McMillan was involved in a recent San Luis Obispo County effort to require permits for oak removal, as well as replanting to offset tree loss. It was softened into voluntary guidelines, but he said if those don’t work, oak-lovers may try an initiative.
Even in Napa County, the heart and soul of California’s wine industry, there is a move to strengthen a 1991 ordinance regulating hillside vineyards by placing certain areas off limits.
Supporters got the attention of county supervisors by marching into a meeting with enlarged aerial photographs showing vineyard clear-cuts on out-of-the-way, steep slopes.
Perhaps because the regulations are emerging regionally, there is no single response by the wine industry. In Napa, county soil conservationist Dave Steiner said he has heard all manner of reaction from winemakers, including hints of support.
Working Within the Rules
Mark Neal, who manages and installs vineyards on the North Coast, agrees that there have been problems. “There have been some cowboys out here that have been pretty rough with the land, have destroyed habitat and creeks, and we all have to pay for it.”
But he thinks the answer is better enforcement of Napa’s existing rules, not more of them.
Similarly, Santa Barbara County vintner Richard Dore calls the county proposal an overreaction. “It’s amazing,” he said. “It’s some of the most stringent policy ever suggested at the county level.”
More broadly, vintners argue that while they may be bringing change to the countryside, it’s still countryside.
“I can empathize” with concerns, said Meridian Vineyards viticulturist Don Ackerman, who oversees 600 acres outside of Paso Robles. “But I don’t think we’re changing the landscape all that dramatically. At least we’re keeping Paso Robles’ agriculture viable and keeping the town viable.”
Planning Commissioner Veesart, the executive director of a San Luis Obispo County environmental group, is not entirely immune to that argument. Like most environmentalists, he has supported agriculture as a way of maintaining open space. He finds himself pausing over his vineyard reservations.
“But it’s occurred to me that in order to preserve wildlife habitat and watershed in the county, something has to be done. We can’t convert all this land” to vines.
What is the “something”? Perhaps zoning that would set areas aside for vineyards and others for grazing, an idea he knows would set off a political firestorm. Smiling, he quotes another environmentalist who recently wondered if they should all consider boycotting wine and eating more beef.
Indeed, as long as cattle prices remain low and the price of premium coastal county wine grapes remains high, the vine planting will continue. “How do you stop it?” asked Allan Ramage, a San Luis Obispo County rancher who leases 30 acres to a new winery next door and is planning to put in his own vines.
It’s not that he’s been seduced by the vineyard life. He hates deer fences and speaks of how many of the wealthy newcomers have little regard for the locals.
“If you don’t have a PhD or bachelor’s, they’ve got no time for you,” said Ramage, whose family roots in the region go back for more than a century.
Still, he mused, vines are better than houses. And his 50 head of cattle don’t even make enough to pay his taxes. “Cattle ranching is a very poor way to go. You can’t make a living anymore.”
