My guest for this episode is the matriarch of a Mendocino winery that has been organic since before there was organic certification. Martha Barra runs Barra of Mendocino which includes the Girasole brand, one of the few wineries with both vineyards and winery certified organic. Barra is a family business that her late husband Charlie started by purchasing Redwood Valley Vineyards in 1954. They were essentially farming organically from the beginning, even before there was organic certification. She describes a bit of what this entails in the winery, and their experiment using old vines to produce biochar when they replant… or don’t replant as the case may be now due to the state of the CA wine industry.. In this candid conversation, Martha describes the current challenges to being a winery in California, and she gives details of the significant costs of H2A visa labor for vineyards in California for wineries like Barra who abide by or exceed the requirements. this is such an important discussion at this time of evaluating the importance of immigrant labor in the US, and I think gives some valuable data for us to consider. And Barra is one of the few wineries of this size – approximately 250 acres of vineyards and 20,000 case production – who uses H2A labor, mainly because of the costs and regulations. From a migrant worker’s standpoint, it seems a very positive program, and while Barra is in a unique position to take advantage of it, and it obviously has some benefits for them, I respect how they’ve embraced it, and I respect Martha’s comment that what brings her joy is signing payroll checks and knowing that her employees are able to make a living for them and their family from this work. And I think this is important to contrast with the recent news coming from Champagne about the appalling exploitation of workers from Africa and Ukraine. Once again I’m reminded what goes into a bottle of wine, and what the cost represents, and how difficult it is for good actors like Barra to make it make financial sense, and could they even afford to be in the wine business if they hadn’t owned their land for several decades, and how silly we are to have wine tasting evaluations and competitions that don’t take into consideration the context of how a wine is produced so that we could have a gold medal, 95 point champagne made with essentially modern slave labor. And look, don’t take my advice on marketing and sales, but maybe educating wine drinkers about the context of wine and how important it is to have a quality context and not just quality flavors in the glass will help with the perception of well-produced wine’s value and price.

We also hear the strains Martha notices on the wine industry, and that she is experiencing personally at Barra, as California goes through what I would call the diminishment of vinifera culture. While Martha is optimistic that California wine will adapt, she definitely thinks there are some big changes ahead. Barra is one of California’s legacy wineries, and through our conversation I came to really like Martha and hope she’s right… I’d like to see Barra and other wineries like it be able to adapt and have a future where the business is good for the land and the people who live and work in it.

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