Judging from the standing room only crowd at the SIP Roundtable breakout seminar at CCVT’s 2009 Sustainable Ag Expo, there’s certainly a lot of buzz about the SIP program, and – we think – rightly so!
CCVT Executive Director Kris O’Connor spoke about the success of the fledgling program, now only in its second year, but already with 30-plus members and about 11,000 certified acres. She also noted that all the first year members renewed, many with expanded acreage. She stressed that although much of the certified acreage is from the counties of Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara, SIP is not and was never intended to be strictly a regional program.
O’Connor moderated the roundtable, which consisted of John Niven of Niven Family Wines (Baileyana/Tangent/Trenza/Cadre), Matt Merrill of Pomar Junction Vineyard & Winery, Daryl Salm of Paraiso Vineyards (and one of the committee members that wrote the SIP Program and Protocols), and Jean-Pierre Wolff of Wolff Vineyards & Winery.
There was a lot of great information presented at the SIP roundtable, some of which we’ll explore with some later posts, but it was intriguing to hear what some of the members had to say about the value of SIP as a marketing tool. Pomar Junction is using the SIP seal on everything from bottle labels to event posters, from advertising pieces to winery logo apparel. Matt Merrill noted that the SIP seal is particularly useful as a point of entry with which to get visitors to the tasting room talking about sustainability. Many visitors are pleasantly surprised to hear about such topics as vineyard worker benefits, for example. (Check out the recent article in the San Luis Obispo New Times discussing this.)
John Niven noted that getting the word out about SIP “is a grass roots marketing effort right now,” but his family’s labels are putting out a lot of roots. He estimated that about 30,000 cases of their labels’ wines went out with the SIP seal in 2008, and he estimates that number to increase to 40,000 this year. For his sales team, that seal has proven invaluable on at least one occasion – one of them walked into a shop and pointed out the sustainability seal, which prompted the proprietor to gather up 12 other labels with the word “sustainable” on them and ask “what makes yours different?” The wine rep was able to answer that in two words – “We’re certified.”