Stephanie Bolton ~ Sustainability and Bogle

Jody Bogle sits down with Stephanie Bolton, Program Director of the Lodi Rules for Sustainable Wine Growing Program.  Stephanie unpacks the fascinating journey of Lodi Rules, from its beginnings as an integrated pest management initiative to becoming a global benchmark for sustainable farming practices. Stephanie spotlights the Bogle family's trailblazing role in embracing and spreading these sustainable practices, proving that the art of winemaking can harmonize with environmental stewardship.
 To learn more about Lodi Rules, simply click HERE 

To learn more about Bogle Family Wine Collection visit boglewinery.com.

Transcript

00:00 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
We need to emphasize the leadership that Bogle has in being a family business and supporting the farmer in their sustainability efforts, which empowers the family farm, and that there's rare examples of where that really works and this is one of those. 

00:29 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Welcome to the Bogle family story. I'm so happy to be sipping here with you today. We are talking with Stephanie Bolton, the director of the Lodi Rules for Sustainable Wine Growing Program. Thanks for joining, stephanie. Thank you for having me. As most of our people out there in the marketplace may have noticed, we have the California Rules for Sustainable seal on the back of our bottles, but you're the director of Lodi Rules, can you? 

00:58 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
make that connection for us Absolutely so. California Rules is another name for Lodi Rules, which is a sustainable wine growing certification program. We certify vineyards and grapes by the vintage, and in 2009, the Lodi Rules program expanded, thanks to the help of your brother Warren, into California, and we are now actually also in Washington state in Israel, so now it's an international sustainable wine growing certification program. 

01:28 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Congratulations. That's really remarkable. I had no idea that there were international wineries using the Lodi Rules or California Rules certification program. Wow, that's amazing. What does that mean, right? What does certification mean? What do wineries have to do or wine growers, excuse me, have to do to be sustainable? Great question. 

01:55 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
The short answer is there's a lot of I know there's a lot of different ways to do is to have their own definition of what certified sustainable means to them, so that you can quickly describe it at a point of sale or as you're pouring a glass, or even as an elevator pitch. So the short answer is that it ensures that farms are managed in a way that is socially responsible, environmentally responsible and also economically viable for the long run. But the longer answer is that our wine growers follow a set of over 150 different farming practices, and these farming practices cover the areas of business management, human resources management, soil, water, ecosystem and pest management. So if you can imagine having an auditor come into your house and make sure that you are doing what you say you're doing recycling, composting your waste, not being too wasteful, using cleaning products that are safer for the environment, not leaving the water running while you're brushing your teeth or the lights on when you leave the room right. 

03:08
Yeah, all of those different things. Our growers actually do that and our wine growers pay money to have someone else come and check and make sure that they are following this code of farming practices that we've developed. And the Lodi Rules Program. California Rules Program was started really as an integrated pest management program in 1992 by the Lodi Wine Grape Commission and it's since evolved to cover many different topics. 

03:39 - Jody Bogle (Host)
So our start with California Rules was around 2011. 

03:43
I remember Warren coming to my brother, ryan and I and saying, hey, I want to pilot this program in a couple of our fields, and he talked a little bit about it and I remember thinking, man, it seems like a lot of work. 

03:57
And he said, no, you know what he goes. It's really not doing things that much differently than the way dad and grandpa taught us to farm. He goes really it's just a lot more paperwork. And so he jumped on board wholeheartedly those first fields that he piloted. He found that that was a successful program and after those initial certifications so today, over the next couple of couple vintages, we certified all of our estate acreage. Today it's almost 2,400 acres certified sustainable. The other part is that, as you know and as we share with everyone out there is we have over 80 grower partners who we source fruit from and we encourage them after the first few years to be a part of California rules as well. In 2017, we made it mandatory for our outside growers, our grower partners, to be a part of Lodi Rules, california Rules or another certification program, and last vintage, nearly 40 tons of fruit, 96% of that was certified sustainable. I mean, that seems like a lot. I mean, in your experience, is that a? 

05:17 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
pretty high percentage. So, jodi, let me just tell you you all are doing amazing things for the farmers in California and we are so grateful that your family exists. Your parents and grandparents will be very, very proud of you. You are really you are really helping the family farm. 

05:34 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Thank you, thank you. I know that, beyond you know, our family is committed to sustainability because we want the next generation to get involved. It's going to continue to create healthy soils, healthy business practices, a stronger community, and so for us, those are all the reasons why. But, as someone who works with the California rules, why is it important for us? How is this going to impact our community or the environment beyond just the wine that's in the bottle? 

06:09 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Yeah, great question. So you might think that what you do on your farm or in your business or in your house only affects you, but we learn that we're all connected as we get older. When we're maybe in our younger days, we think the world revolves around us, but as we get older, we realize that we do have a great influence on other people, and our decisions and the way we interact with other people matters. That you're really enhancing the world around you in many different ways and gives you opportunities to look at what you're doing and think about the decisions you're making and how you can do better. 

06:53 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Okay, so kind of continual improvement year over year. I remember being really surprised when I learned that every single one of the fields that is certified is audited every single year. It's not just you stamp something and then this field's good for the next 10 years or the next 10 vintages Every single year there's an audit, exactly. 

07:17 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
So we take our certification very seriously. The Lodi Wine Grape Commission, the owners of the Lodi Rules Program it's a group of about 750 farming families and they tax themselves for the purposes of research, education and promotion and they are really adamant. The leadership of the Lodi Rules Program and the Lodi Wine Grape Commission, including your brother Warren, everyone is really adamant that we have a very rigorous set of certification practices, such that we would never want to be misconstrued as greenwashing. So when I approach our leadership committee and say hey, we have a set of 14 different risk indices that we can look at for one particular aspect of farming, do you want to? Just you know, should we look at five of them? Should we look at eight of them? Should we look at all 14? Every single time they're always going to the most rigorous level and I'm so proud of them for doing that. 

08:18
They really the growers that embrace the Lodi Rules and California Rules Program. They really are trying through education to learn what they can do, to be better stewards of the land, to take better care of the workers, to build up the community and then also to have profitable businesses so they can continue to do so, because that's so important in today's world, wineries are getting bought up, labels are getting bought up, and if you really want something that lasts a long time and is truly the definition of sustainable right, lasts a long time, then doing these farming practices that are in our program really set you up to do that. 

09:00 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Well, and it sounds like, from what you're sharing, that the program is changing too. They are adding more things based on what everyone continues to learn. So not only are the growers kind of challenged to continually improve, but the standards are continually improving as well. 

09:18 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Yes, we will sit in a conference room and Warren is on the board With Warren. He's on the committee for the Lodi Rules California Rules Program. We will sit there and we will discuss one word in one farming practice for hours, just to make sure that what we're telling, the advice we're giving people to do through the program, is sound, practical, based in science, not a trend, and economically viable not a trend and economically viable. 

09:51 - Jody Bogle (Host)
So you mentioned earlier that the growers are paying for people to come out and audit each field. How do they recoup that money? 

09:55 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Great question. So the growers themselves pay to be certified in the program and it's not cheap. It's a good chunk of money. So for your first year to be in the program it costs about $1,800 to sign up. 

10:11 - Jody Bogle (Host)
And if you have 1,000 acres that might not be much, but if you have 20 acres it's quite a bigger percentage. 

10:19 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
To spread it out per acre, absolutely so. We have growers as small as 7 acres in the program and as large as 8,000 acres in the program, and there's a lot of flexibility within our program so that we can keep it open to many different types of farmers. We wanted to be inclusive that way, so what growers will do is they'll pay to be certified and then they also pay a per acre fee, and then there's a lot of soil tests, water tests, employee trainings things that also cost money. 

10:54
Record keeping costs money by itself, but we did try to make the program as practical as possible and not too crazy, such that it would deter people from participating, and we have had great participation, which we should talk about too. 

11:09
So the growers what drove the program in the beginning, around 2005 when it started, was bonuses from wineries for certified sustainable grapes, and a lot of times this might mean something like $25 per ton of grapes as a bonus, just to show, as the wine grape buyer, that you're committed to sustainability and the buyer has a lot of power to support sustainable choices in the vineyard, since it does cost money in the beginning to become sustainable. Now you recoup some of that money over time because you're making good choices for your farm. Bogle, in particular, has helped contribute to over 14 million dollars since 2010, when we started tracking this of bonuses paid back in the pockets of growers, of farmers, and when I saw that statistic, that was one thing that attracted me to this job, because I thought here's a real grassroots, science-based program that growers developed with the help of scientists that is making real change for our American farming families. 

12:20 - Jody Bogle (Host)
I love how you put that. That's fantastic. But here's the question, stephanie what does this mean for the wine drinker? Does the consumer out there does it make a difference when they're selecting their wine to take home on a Thursday night off the grocery store shelf? 

12:35 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Okay, so I used to sell your wine in Atlanta. 

12:39 - Jody Bogle (Host)
I actually didn't know that. You didn't know that. No, yeah, so I—. 

12:42 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Thank you. I have a background in education and I was working in Atlanta having really fun jobs as a nanny, as a personal assistant, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to go to grad school for and then I fell in love with vineyards and wine. 

12:59 - Jody Bogle (Host)
I think everybody falls in love with vineyards and wine. 

13:02 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Well, if you grow up on the East Coast, you don't have the opportunity Like over here in California, we drive through miles of vineyards a day, but on the East Coast there aren't as many vineyards, so I didn't go into my first vineyard until I was maybe 27 years old, and once I did, I fell in love. 

13:20
So I got a job as quickly as I could a part-time sales job selling wine in Atlanta, to learn about wine. And so, yeah, I've sold a lot of your wine and this is how I would sell it. I also worked with buyers, or I worked with distributors to select wines for our wine shop. And the way I would describe it if I was selling a bottle of wine that was carrying a Lodi rules or California rules seal on the back, what I would say is that you can really feel good about this purchase of wine. There's a lot of different options on the shelves today at the same price point that have similar qualities of wine inside the bottle, but when you purchase a bottle that carries one of those certified green seals, you know for sure that the farmers and the winery are committed to farming in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible, and they are actively learning and trying to do the right thing as a community. 

14:24 - Jody Bogle (Host)
That's a really important message for everyone out there. Who's you know, got a bottle of Bogle with the California rules logo to hear, so thank you for sharing that. 

14:34 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
I also like to say that you're giving people the opportunity to participate in sustainable farming. So we make a lot of purchasing decisions constantly, right Almost every day, it seems and here's just an easy way, as you're buying something that's going to enhance your dinner and hopefully help connect you with your friends and family, relax you a little bit. Here is an opportunity to make a smart purchasing decision that really does literally make a difference for American families. 

15:07 - Jody Bogle (Host)
For farming families. Yeah, that's great, thank you. I want to pivot real quick and talk briefly about we also have a certification, separate from California rules, for our winery. California rules is for, as we said, for sustainable wine growing, but we also feel strongly about it and everything we do at the winery as well, and so I want to talk briefly about the program that has certified the winery. It's the California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance. It's a state program sponsored by the Wine Institute and for certification for that that it looks at all the programs and all some of the some of the community programs and the programs for our people as well are a part of that. 

15:52
But it looks at our water use at the winery, our energy use at the winery. We are so excited that, with a build out that's going to be finished here in the next couple weeks, we will have a total of 1.4 kilowatts of solar energy powering our winery. All of our water used at the winery is reclaimed, recycled and land applied for ag irrigation right outside the winery. It's just a host of many, many other things that we do and it's like kind of like that thing where you know, lots of little grains of sand make up a huge mountain right, they make up a huge it's, it's all the little pieces that come together, and so we're so proud to both be a part of the California rules with our wine growing and the CSWA with our winery. 

16:46 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Well, Jetty, we are so proud of you all. You and Ryan and Warren. You are doing wonderful things and we really can't thank you enough for your support of the farmers and your leadership in the world of sustainability. We awarded you the Green Medal Leader Award a few years ago. Thank you, yes, in 2018. 

17:07 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Yes, we were very honored. So, stephanie, from the vineyard to the winery and then to the bottle. As you know, our family is always working to continually improve. There's been so much talk recently about the carbon footprint of wine and wine packaging. We know that between the glass and between the transport of that glass of a bottle of wine, 30% of wine's carbon footprint is taken up in that glass and that transport of that glass. So several years ago, we started lightweighting our glass bottles and we did so in all of our programs by 10%, but we knew we could do more. So that was kind of the impetus behind starting to investigate another alternative packaging. Right, that's kind of what so many wineries are out there looking for right now. 

17:59
Four years ago, we started investigating this alternative packaging. Ago, we started investigating this alternative packaging and Warren Ryan and I really felt that. You know, we looked at bag and box, we looked at the Tetra Pak, we looked at all sorts of different things and we settled on aluminum. We felt that it ticked a lot of boxes, it's lightweight, it's recyclable, it's available here readily in the United States, and so we really felt that aluminum was the way to go. But none of us liked the idea of Bogle in a can. So we started talking to a couple of these aluminum production companies and saying, hey, why don't we try to make an actual wine bottle shape out of aluminum? Every single company we talked to said that it could not be done. 

18:48
A few months later we got a call from one of those companies, from an engineer, and he said you know what he goes we just got some new equipment and we might be able to make this work. And so that was the start of the creation of Elemental Wines. As everyone knows, out there today we have launched. Six months ago we launched Elemental Wines as the world's first 750-milliliter aluminum wine-shaped bottle. We could not be more excited about this project. The bottle is 80% lighter than glass. It is infinitely recyclable, shockingly lightweight and something so different out there in the marketplace. Our family is so proud to be the first company with this wine on the shelf and to be kind of a leader in this arena. 

19:42 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
My brain is spinning with all these ideas of where that could really be helpful if you're going on a hike, a picnic, so the outdoor enthusiasts also. Concert venues, sporting events, how? 

19:54 - Jody Bogle (Host)
fun. It's really limitless. You know, a lot of the wine that was out there before in alternative packaging has been marketed for occasion-based enjoyment. We're kind of saying Elemental is for all occasion because it is great for the beach or a pool. But this is a beautiful wine package that looks as gorgeous, as great on the top of a mountain as it does on a white tablecloth linen. It's also important to note that the wines have been crafted specifically for the Elemental program. They are amazing. They aren't just simple unoaked wines. The Rosé and the Pinot Grigio, of course, are 100% stainless steel, but 68% of the Chardonnay is barrel fermented in French and American oak and our Pinot Noir spends 12 months in French oak. So these are elegant, gorgeous wines. They've gotten some great scores 90 point scores from the wine enthusiast and so we couldn't be more excited about being the first to kind of get out there with this, with this wine brand that continues in a totally and completely different level, takes our sustainability to the next level. 

21:05 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
Yeah, it really does. And isn't aluminum infinitely recyclable and glass is not? Is that right? There's something about. 

21:13 - Jody Bogle (Host)
So glass it can be infinitely recyclable, but it can get contaminated over time. The other thing to note about glass is a lot of municipalities are no longer recycling glass bottles. You can't just throw them in the bin. You have to actually take them somewhere to be recycled. And you're busy, I'm busy, everybody's busy. People don't always take the time to do that. 

21:34
What's wonderful about Elemental is you can simply take that bottle, chuck it in the blue bin and it can be recycled over and over and over again. It also takes 5% of the energy to remake that aluminum bottle into something else than the very first time it's used, so the reduction in electricity for recycling is huge. Think also of the shipping ramifications you can get 43% more elemental on a truck and it still weighs 3% less than a truckload full of glass bottles. And I want to be clear glass is a fantastic vessel for aging wine. We're not going to be changing the Bogle traditional brand or juggernaut to, you know, away from glass. Glass has a place, but our family wanted to be able to create an eco-friendly and sustainable option for people to choose without having to sacrifice the quality and the romance of wine drinking that they love. 

22:38 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
That's wonderful, it's cool. 

22:40 - Jody Bogle (Host)
We're very excited about Elemental, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I like it Well. Thank you again, stephanie, so much for talking with us. We really appreciate you and all you have done as well in your eight years with the Lodi Rules as director, and so we just we thank you for your support and your stewardship of the program. It's wonderful being partners with you. 

23:03 - Stephanie Bolton (Guest)
You too, jodi, my pleasure, thank you. Oh, you too, jodi, my pleasure, thank you, thank you. 

23:13 - Jody Bogle (Host)
Thank you for listening to the Bogle Story. We are happy to have you be a part of it.