Sustainability at Brian Carter Cellars: Hand Harvest, IPM, and WA Certification

Sustainability shows up in nearly every decision we make, from how we pick the grapes to how we ship the bottle.

For me, the goal has never been a single buzzword. It is a long list of choices about the vineyard, the cellar, the packaging, and the way we sell the wine. Some of those choices are dramatic. Most of them are quiet. All of them add up.

In the Vineyard

100 percent of the grapes we use are hand harvested. Once delivered to the winery, they are hand sorted before fermentation. Every red fermentation is hand-punched in a small open-top fermenter rather than pumped over in a large tank. That is a slower, more labor-intensive way to make wine, and it is what we have committed to.

More and more of the vineyards I work with have signed onto the Sustainable WA program. The program takes a comprehensive view of vineyard sustainability: the health of the air, the water, the vines, the workers, and the business itself. I served on the board that helped develop it, and I encourage every grower I work with who is not in the program to join.

A central piece of Sustainable WA is Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. IPM is the practice of carefully monitoring pest and disease pressure and only using pesticides when the crop is genuinely at risk. The growers I work with understand that when you spray pesticides, you usually kill the predators of those pests at the same time, which sets you up for a worse outbreak later. The vineyard is an ecosystem, and most of the time the best move is to walk it, observe, and do nothing.

Specific IPM tools we and our growers use include:

• Mating disruption with pheromone dispensers
• Beneficial predator releases
• Cover crops to support insect diversity
• Spot treatment rather than broadcast spraying

In the Cellar

We try to minimize how much machinery sits between the grape and the bottle. Most of our reds go through native fermentation, with the yeast that came in on the grape skins, rather than an inoculated commercial strain. We use real oak barrels rather than oak extracts or chips.

We do use sulfur dioxide, because the alternative is oxidation and microbial spoilage and we are not willing to compromise the wine. What we are careful about is the level. We monitor SO2 carefully and never add more than we need.

Energy use is another front. We are conscious of how much fossil fuel we burn heating and cooling the winery, and we keep working to bring that down.

Packaging

Packaging is one of the bigger carbon footprints in any winery, and most of it is glass.

We used to buy heavier bottles imported from China, which meant long ocean voyages to get to Washington. We now use lighter-weight bottles sourced from manufacturers on the West Coast. The lighter weight and shorter shipping distance both reduce the carbon intensity of every bottle that leaves our cellar.

We have also eliminated capsules. The plastic or tin sleeve over the cork has no impact on the wine. It exists for decoration. Removing it took out a manufacturing step, a material, and a piece of waste at the consumer end.

How We Sell the Wine

We have deliberately built the business around direct-to-consumer sales. Roughly 75 percent of our wine is sold direct, either through the tasting rooms or by shipping, which means a much smaller share is moving through the three-tier system of distributors and retailers. Less truck freight, less salesperson travel, less warehouse handling.

Most of our tasting room visitors live within 50 miles of Woodinville. For the customers who ship, we use 100 percent recyclable shipping boxes made from paper pulp.

Washington Certified Sustainable

For years there was no statewide sustainable certification in Washington. I sat on the Sustainability Committee of the Washington Wine Foundation to help change that. The program is now live, and Washington vineyards are working through the certification pipeline.

Brian Carter Cellars is committed to having all of our vineyard sources certified. The work is ongoing, and as our growers complete the certification process, the result will eventually show up on our labels.

Why It Matters

Customers ask if any of this changes the wine. The honest answer is yes, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger ones. Native fermentation gives you a more complex aromatic profile than a clean commercial yeast. Hand-sorted fruit gives you a cleaner ferment. Careful SO2 monitoring keeps the wine pure. None of these are giant leaps on their own. Together, they are most of what makes our wines taste the way they do.

The next time you pour a glass of Solesce, Byzance, or Oriana, know that the choices behind it stack up.

Brian Carter