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This area right here, that we call the "tank yard," while not being the prettiest parts of the
winery, it is definitely one of the most important because next to harvesting the vineyard, this
is pretty much where all the magic takes place. Back here. This is where we make our wines.
It always raises a lot of questions...like, 'if you guys are so sustainable, what are
your tanks doing outside?" But what makes this really unique is that this is one of
the reasons that we are the only certified wineries out here because of our sustainable
practices...is that every one of these tanks is individually climate controlled, every
aspect of the refridgeration connected with these tanks is all jacketed and sleeves. When
it is 104 Degrees out here, it is still going to be 44 in here, and this tank is not working
any harder than it would be if it was in a nice, air conditioned building, another building
that you'd have to have and there'd be maintenance involved in that. We actually do not have
a bottling facility here. We actually use a company that will pull up on the lot. That
truck right back there, a bit trailer. This truck will actually hook up to our tanks and
using this particular method for bottling keeps us from having to build a facility in
keeping with our efforts to be sustainable and in order to reduce our environmental footprint.
When the winery was built in 2003, there were a lot of things that right off of the bat
were sustainable. You'll notice over here this trellis, with all these wooden slats,
they're actually repurposed slats from the vine. Instead of throwing away all of that
wood, what they did is they actually built this beautiful trellis that you can see here...
Another thing that they do is any time they cut down any vines, they actually save that
as fire wood and use it in the restaurant...so when you get your woodfired pizza in the restaurant,
it's actually grape wood fired pizza that you are being served.
What we do now is that on the back of every one of our bottles that we have here at Ponte
there's a little note at the bottom that says 'return your bottle to the winery' and then
you will get a voucher which is good for one dollar off on your next subsequent purchase
of wine here at the winery. We also recycle our corks. Another thing that we have done
is the changing of the actual boxes that we use for our wine club shipments.
Our boxes used to be this beautiful white color, with the big print on them... but we
realized that that is actually not sustainable because you're bleaching those boxes first
and then you're applying color to them so we decided to change the way that we do it...
and now all of our boxes are the plain, craft color and then we print the color on the side
of it as well. Same thing with our bags. We don't have the high gloss bags anymore. We
changed that. And that's just printed on the actual paper itself. And any time we ship
any merchandise, or anything that uses extra packaging, we use these peanuts that are actually
biodegradable. You add a little water to them, and put them in your garden, and they're going
to be compostable. So, they're going to go right back into your garden which is highly
sustainable.