Hello, We are Napa Green
Driving up Napa Valley, with vines heavy with this year’s vintage to your left and verdant tasting room gardens to your right, you might also notice the NAPA GREEN signs hanging in front of some wineries… But what does that sign even mean?
Hanging a Napa Green sign is the grand finale for growers and vintners after completing the most rigorous winegrowing certification in the world. Our industry-leading certification was born out of a grassroots initiative in the early 2000s by a concerned group of vintners in response to the California EPA’s declaration that the Napa River was impaired due to the impact from agriculture - mainly sediment from soil erosion.
What began as an erosion control program, has evolved into a holistic certification leading climate action in the wine industry over the last 20+ years. Napa Green’s ongoing mission is to continue to lead the evolution of sustainable winegrowing by defining and advancing the highest standards that regenerate the environment, strengthen vineyard ecosystems, improve winery practices, and advance social equity in our community, all while setting the global benchmark for resilient winegrowing.
We have three main areas of focus:
Certification: We provide direct, boots-on-the-ground support and expertise for both wineries and vineyards to help implement practices that help businesses with their triple bottom line of sustainability: enhancing the environment, resilient finances, and supporting the health and vibrancy of our communities.
Education: We provide practical resources and education including technical workshops, best practice toolkits, a digital resource library to help growers and vintners meet their environmental goals, and, most importantly, someone to call when things get hard.
Community Resilience: We help foster a strong, connected community through networking events, membership and knowledge exchanges, and celebrating member achievements with wine drinkers from all over the globe.
To achieve these goals, Napa Green has both a vineyard and a winery certification, addressing holistic sustainability from the soil to the bottle: water use, energy efficiency, packaging, farming practices, biodiversity, forest management, and, most importantly, employment practices that respect and elevate our community members doing the hard work. Another major part of our work is technical assistance & education: providing workshops, seminars, and our biannual RISE symposium to present cutting-edge initiatives and technologies to our community and raise the bar in the wine industry at large. What does that look like in practice?
Napa Green Vineyard Certification: The Vineyard Certification provides a science-based, whole-system regenerative roadmap and climate action framework for viticulture that covers the entire agroecosystem. You may see this when you drive up the valley in the rich quality of the soil, in the diversity of cover crop blooms, the adorable sheep grazing, the bluebird boxes that are home to chattering pest control. In short, you will notice a vibrant, diverse ecosystem living among the vines.
Napa Green Winery Certification: The Winery Certification is a rigorous sustainability certification for Napa Valley wineries, covering the entire facility from production to hospitality. It requires meeting standards for water and energy conservation, waste reduction, and climate action, focusing on soil-to-bottle sustainability and social equity. You may see this in a pollinator habitat or native garden as you approach a winery, in the solar panels that adorn the roofs of many of our incredible tasting rooms, or when you pick up a lighter weight bottle of wine when you are at the store.
Workshops & Events: Our workshops and events are essential for providing practical education on implementation practices that drive change. These gatherings cultivate a supportive community, encouraging vital peer-to-peer and expert-to-peer learning to accelerate and sustain progressive industry actions, and encouraging growers and vintners to adopt regenerative and sustainable practices. More than that, they provide a place for the community to gather, share information, stories of success and warning, and work together to create a broader impact.
At Napa Green, we say that you can’t manage what you don’t measure so we implement science based practices to measure continued improvement over time. But we also see the benefits of our program in other ways - in the health of the community, in the increase of birdsongs sung in the vineyard, by the questions that visitors ask showing that they care about the people and the land that their wine comes from.
We believe that the best wine in the world can enhance and regenerate the communities and ecosystems in which we farm and live. The stories of what happens in Napa are heard around the world, and we are committed to ensuring these stories are ones our grandchildren will be proud to tell, maybe over a glass of sustainably certified wine.
For more information follow us on Instagram, visit NapaGreen.org or email: Team@NapaGreen.org