From pomace to power

JENNIFER LEWINGTON
November 21, 2008

Like others in the wine industry, Vincor Canada used to send most of its leftover grape skin, pulp and seed to landfills - costly for the environment and the company's bottom line. But in September, Canada's largest producer and marketer of wine and related products announced a deal with Vandermeer Greenhouses of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to create electricity using those wine left-overs, known as pomace.

Bruce Walker, executive vice-president of Vincor, says the project is the "most visible" example of the company's interest in sustainable wine-making - a trend emerging throughout Canada's wine industry. "The urgency is yesterday and that is how we are approaching this," he says.

This fall, Vincor shipped about 3,500 tonnes of pomace (most of the processing leftovers from three of its Niagara-area wineries) to Vandermeer's new $3-million anaerobic digester, which breaks down organic matter and captures methane gas for use as electricity in the greenhouse operations. Any surplus is sold to Ontario Hydro's grid to heat and light homes in the Niagara area.

Randy Van Berkel, general manager of Vandermeer, says close proximity to a big supplier of organic material helped the company invest in the digester, with financial assistance from the Ontario government, "at a drastically reduced cost."

Mr. Walker estimates Vincor saved $50,000 by not trucking the pomace to landfills. Vincor now is looking for a partner to invest in an anaerobic digester in British Columbia to process pomace from its Okanagan Valley wineries. Green initiatives also cut costs, he says, citing a retrofit of one Okanagan winery to recycle water at a savings of $75,000.

Mr. Walker, also chairman of the Wine Council of Ontario's sustainable wine-making committee, says the industry's move to more eco-friendly practices creates a "triple bottom-line" impact: a demonstration of social responsibility, cost savings and reduced carbon footprint. This year, 24 wineries (40 per cent of the Ontario industry) signed on to the Wine Council's voluntary guidelines on sustainability, up from 17 a year earlier. The future of green, he says, "is very bright."

Berry wines on the rocks

JENNIFER LEWINGTON
November 21, 2008

Newfoundland winery pioneer Hilary Rodrigues, who founded his operation 15 years ago with his wife Marie-France on a hunch about the fruit-wine potential of the province's wild berries, likes to tell the story of two German tourists who stopped in last year.

While driving on the Trans-Canada Highway, they saw a sign that pointed, improbably they thought, to a winery 80 kilometres west of St. John's, and decided to drop by for a laugh.

When they arrived at Rodrigues Winery, the first of two wineries on the Rock, the tourists found it was no joke. From an experimental offering of 300 cases of blueberry wine in 1993, Rodrigues Winery today produces 12,000 cases a year of Kosher fruit wine, pesticide- and sulphite-free, from Newfoundland's wild blueberries, cranberries and cloudberries.

"They were blown by the fact we can produce such high-quality wine," recalls Mr. Rodrigues, noting that one of the German visitors was a wine-maker back home.

Over its 15 years, Rodrigues has emerged as Canada's largest exclusively fruit winery, with sales across North America and in Japan and, in a nod to an important specialty market, is certified Kosher by Canadian and U.S. authorities. The winery's success is rooted in the variety and quality of the island's berries.

"They mature under a cool climate, so they are very sweet and flavourful," says Mr. Rodrigues, a dentist who was born in Tanzania, trained in India and England and who emigrated to Canada by chance with his French-born wife in 1974. From its start as a fruit winery, their company added a distillery eight years ago and plans to launch a vodka drink, a blend of traditional techniques and glacier water, in 2009.

So taken with the nutritional value of the province's berries, Mr. Rodrigues turned over the day-to-day operations of the winery to his son, Lionel, in 2005 to devote more time to a new company, Natural Newfoundland Nutraceuticals. Mr. Rodrigues intends to extract the juice from berries, processing them as nutritional fruit powders for the growing health-food and natural medicine markets.

Even with his diversification plans, he hasn't lost sight of what put him on the map in Newfoundland: "Everything stems from the winery."