It has been 20 years since the first self-assessment workbook about the sustainable production of wine grapes was published in the United States. Since then, self-assessment workbooks have been written for and used by wine grape growers in California, Washington and New York, and by juice grape growers in New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Their use has had a significant influence on sustainable winegrowing programs, practice implementation and sustainability reporting. No other U.S. agriculture sector has adopted the use of self-assessment as much as the wine and grape industry. Because of the workbooks’ widespread use and influence, I thought it would be interesting to contact the various programs using self-assessment workbooks to find out if use has changed over time and, if so, how.

But first, for those readers not familiar with self-assessment workbooks, they consist of a list of farming practices that a grapegrower reads and uses to record whether or not they are using the various practices. They can be used for reasons such as in education and outreach programs, encouraging growers to increase wine grape quality, stimulating them to continually improve, enabling groups to anonymously aggregate assessment results for use in sustainability reporting, benchmarking practice implementation and measuring wine grape-growing improvement over time. A great attribute they all share is that any and all growers can use them since they incorporate a broad range of wine grape-growing practices.

Beginning in the Central Coast