This is how you do sustainability on a grand scale
The vineyard out the front of the Scheid winery in Monterey County. Copyright Campbell Mattinson.
The Scheid winery shocks you. And then leaves you in awe. You have to see this place to believe it.
Scheid – which is family-owned, and has been for 50 years – is a wine operation that’s sizeable in anyone’s language. It sits on the flat valley floor in its Monterey County location and from there it both controls 4000 acres of vineyard across ten sites, and crushes a full 30,000 tonne of grapes annually. It calls itself “fully integrated”, which means that from the very thought of a grape-yielding flower to the final sale of a bottled wine, Scheid has the whole process covered. Scheid is both a bulk winemaking facility and a luxury winemaking facility, though the truth is that everything is done immaculately at Scheid. This winery is engineered to within an inch of its life. It’s huge and yet it’s still built on gravity flow. It’s ultra hygienic. There’s stainless steel everywhere (“it saves on painting”). Basically, they don’t muck around at Scheid.
And so here’s the fascinating bit. Even though Scheid runs a whopping 4000 acres of vines, and crushes 30,000 tonne of grapes each year, it runs most of its vineyards organically, and has been carbon negative for the past eight years.
That is, every year, despite its size, the Scheid winery removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits through its activities.
This is an awe-inspiring fact, not to mention an inspirational one.
The turbine at the Scheid winery sits in among the vines. Copyright Campbell Mattinson.
Scheid achieves this via many different means but the ace in its pack is a massive wind turbine, effectively placed right in among the vines themselves. Scheid considered solar panels but “they get wet and dusty, the panels get dirty, mould can grow, they can be problematic”. The location of the Scheid winery sees significant wind, courtesy of the daily funnel of air (and fog) blowing straight off the nearby Pacific Coast. Scheid decided to take advantage of its location. “We generate power all day long, and all night long, most of the time”. Indeed the Scheid turbine – which is 120 metres tall, and uses blades that can reach 200 kph at their tip – generates so much power that all the winery’s power needs are catered for, with excess power then feeding straight into the local towns.
Sustainability is often a romantic notion done at the micro level or as window dressing. A wind turbine isn’t going to work or appeal to everyone, clearly, but the Scheid winery – which also runs most of its vineyards organically – is dramatic proof that sustainability can be done grand.
