Tom Gamble with Gamble Family Vineyards in Napa is a farmer first and has always had a “waste not, want not” mentality. So even though he knew dropping fruit was essential to making the concentrated Cabernet Sauvignon people expect from California, the practice really bothered him.
Then in 2012, the winemaking team came up with an idea. Using a process called flash détente, which extracts color and flavor from grapes by heating them in a device that looks like a large pressure cooker, it might be possible to take that partially ripe fruit and make wine from it. Their first attempt at using the process made a product good enough to sell on the bulk market. They did that for several more years, until Gamble realized how much people liked the wine from his green harvest, and found himself saying, “Let’s keep this margin for ourselves and start a wine program around it.”
Today, The Mill Keeper, which includes up to 20 percent wine made with the flash détente process, is nearing the size of the Gamble Family line. The more affordable bottling has allowed Gamble to capture a different segment of the market and provided some economic stability in tough times. “It basically saved our bacon during COVID-19 because it was an appealing wine at a good price point,” he says. The steady income allows Gamble more time to focus on increasing the quality of the Gamble Family wines.
Gamble isn’t the only winemaker who’s found there are economic, environmental, and sometimes social benefits to reimagining waste. Disposing of wastage can be a significant expense but instead this approach creates new profit centers—and potentially more jobs. There’s also an obvious environmental benefit to lowering the volume of disposed grapes or juice: Food waste is one of the biggest drivers of climate change, accounting for an estimated eight percent of all human emissions. The UN says that if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter in the world. When all of these things are taken together, it’s no wonder an increasing number of winemakers and private businesses are looking to transform grape waste from an afterthought into a central part of their business.
Keeping juice brings new revenue
At Villicana Winery and Vineyard in Paso Robles, California, Alex Villicana was less worried about dropped fruit and more concerned about the free-run press juice he discarded in droves. Grapes such as Mourvèdre and Grenache can produce notoriously pale wine when all the juice is left on the skins. As a result, it’s common for winemakers to leave only some of the pressings in fermentation tanks and throw away the rest.
“Since I farm the vineyard myself, it drove me crazy,” says Villicana. “I saw 30 to 40 percent of my work going down the drain.” The situation was doubly frustrating because “in an effort to make the best wine, we pull out what is arguably the best juice prior to fermentation.”
Villicana explored using the juice for brandy, but it was too low in acid. That also made it a poor option for premium rosé, another solution winemakers sometimes turn to. Then he stumbled across some research saying wine grapes could be transformed into vodka. Two years later, in 2011, he opened Re:Find Distillery with the goal of using 100 percent of the grapes he farms.
Alex Villicana, the proprietor and distiller at Re:Find Distillery and owner and winemaker at Villicana Winery and Vineyard.
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