The Good Earth

Paul Dolan is taking a stand. The 53-year-old president of Fetzer Vineyards is leaning over in the foggy early morning light to examine a small bunch of merlot grapes. He picks one and tastes it slowly, head cocked to one side. "These are really ripe. You can just taste the sugar in them. It's because of the weather here in Mendocino. The heat during the day develops the flavors and the textures, and the cool of the night means the acids don't respire and the grapes don't mold," he says. "Also, it's the way we farm. Everything is organic." Indeed, every single one of the 2,000 acres owned by Fetzer is certified organic. Dolan has sworn to convert all of his 200 outside grape growers to organic methods by the year 2010. And Fetzer is considered a "zero waste" business by the state of California. "It's just how business needs to be done," he says.

Taking a stand is something Dolan writes about with particular passion in his new book, a surprisingly readable manifesto on sustainable business. In True to Our Roots: Fermenting a Business Revolution (Bloomberg Press, 2003), Dolan urges all businesses to commit to the "triple bottom line," a measure of corporate success that takes into account not just profit and loss but also social and environmental impact, and he offers the story of Fetzer's own transformation as an example.

To those who say that going organic, using alternative power sources, providing living wages for workers, and eliminating waste (all of which Fetzer does) are nice, fuzzy goals that don't make financial sense, Dolan simply points to his own success in a tough industry. The wine business is one of the most competitive on earth: Fetzer dukes it out in a market crowded with nearly 3,000 wineries in the United States alone, while fighting older, more established European labels and trying to hold off upstart Australian and Chilean brands. Many American wineries are still recovering from the twin blights of phylloxera and Pierce's disease, which ruined thousands of prized acres in California's wine country over the past decade. And the entire industry suffers from downward pressure on prices caused by overplanting during the booming 1990s.

Dolan hardly fits the stereotype of a boutique organic farmer running his business at a loss to pursue an expensive dream of environmental and social nirvana. Not a chance: Fetzer says it's the sixth-largest premium winery in the United States; it sells 3.5 million cases of wine and posts annual revenues upward of $220 million. In 2002, Fetzer was the country's best-selling wine brand in the $7 to $10 category, with the number-one merlot and cabernet sauvignon as well as the number-two chardonnay and riesling. Fetzer wins awards, too: It took home more medals at the 2002 California State Fair than any other winery, has earned three Gold and two Best-in-Class medals for its premium varietals at the New World International Wine Competition, and won Wine & Spirits magazine's Winery of the Year award nine times. No, Dolan is no woolly-headed idealist. He's a fierce competitor who simply believes that business and social progress go hand in hand. As he writes in his book, "no margin, no mission."

An Organic Epiphany

It all started in 1986. Dolan was still the head wine maker, and Jim Fetzer--then CEO of the winery--decided to open an organic garden to provide food for the vineyard's tasting room and café. The theory: Great wine should be tasted with great food, and organic food was just coming into vogue. But when Dolan and Fetzer marveled over the quality of the first round of organic produce, the new gardener, Michael Maltas, challenged their use of "poisons" everywhere else on the property, asking, "How can you expect me to farm this way, when you guys are spraying chemicals in the vineyards?" Fetzer and Dolan decided he might be onto something. "Michael made us say, 'God, we've gotta try this in the vineyards,' " Dolan recalls. That year, he and Fetzer began to experiment with growing a small block of grapes organically.

When those first experimental grapes ripened, Dolan couldn't believe the difference in their taste. They made the nonorganic grapes seem bland. He continued the experiment with different blocks, and in 1989, he began growing large quantities of organic grapes. The results of the experiment convinced Dolan that years of applying chemical pesticides and fertilizers had stripped the soil of its richness and that the resulting dull grapes were affecting the quality of Fetzer's wine. In 1991, Fetzer launched a label called Bonterra (meaning "good earth"), made of 100% organically grown grapes. It was the first mass-marketed organic wine in the United States. The philosophy extends even to the packaging: To spare trees, Bonterra labels are made from a plant fiber known as kenaf and are printed with soy-based inks; the corks aren't sanitized with chlorine; and the cases are made from recycled cardboard.