Establishing soil moisture-holding capacity will help create an irrigation schedule.

This column has been building in my mind for the past several months. It started when I read two opinion pieces—one in The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat, the other in the Sonoma County Gazette—both highly critical of the wine industry’s sustainability efforts in Sonoma County, Calif. It continued to grow after the Napa Valley news media published several items expressing concern about the number of wine-related events and contending that, if such events continue to grow in number, they will adversely affect the community. It peaked when I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post suggesting that participants in the debates about mainstream agriculture compared to alternatives like organic, Biodynamic or sustainable were all wrong. As a result, I thought it was time to revisit the topic of sustainable winegrowing.