CLIMATE ACTION & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

CLIMATE ACTION & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

may 8, 2025 | Charles Krug Winery, Carriage House

CLIMATE ACTION & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE Agenda

8:00 am

Registration opens

8:30 am

9:40 am

Breakfast hour w/Sponsor Bingo

10:10 am

11:00 am

Break

11:15 am

Asking the Critical Questions Forum: “Can Wine Really Impact Climate Action?”

12:30 pm

Official Closeout & RISE Leadership Award

1:00 pm

Catered lunch & Wine

Asking the Critical Questions Forum I: Can Forest & Creek Restoration Create Localized Climate Cooling?

At RISE 2023, Hope Well Wine’s Mimi Casteel gave a standing ovation keynote on combating heat domes through landscape restoration and rehydration. Dominus Estate’s Tod Mostero was so inspired he launched a watershed collective that aims to turn this vision to reality in Napa County. The collective has brought together dozens of stakeholders and landowners and identified several hundred contiguous acres along a sub-watershed for a restoration pilot. The aim is to adapt and apply innovative nature-based models already being proven by USGS and the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, among others. 

 

Napa Green’s Anna Brittain will facilitate a conversation between Casteel, Mostero, and regional restoration leaders, sharing progress, discoveries, and the opportunities and challenges of designing and funding nature-based restoration. The wins could be huge: capturing and storing water, enhancing biodiversity, reducing fire risk and increasing resilience, and generating meaningful localized cooling. Our community has the opportunity to create a tangible model for climate-resilient agricultural landscapes.

 

Action Opportunities:

  • Get involved in turning the vision of the watershed collective to reality
  • Evaluate restoration potential on your land
  • Implement nature-based rehydration solutions
  • Identify sources of fire risk reduction and restoration funding

moderator

ANNA BRITTAIN

Executive Director of Napa Green

Anna Brittain is the Executive Director of Napa Green. Anna has worked locally, nationally and internationally on environmental management and policy with organizations ranging from the environmental economics think tank Resources for the Future in Washington, DC to the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Hanoi, Vietnam. She has spent a decade facilitating and growing sustainability in the wine industry, with an expertise in communications and certification standards. Anna has served as a lead sustainability consultant with Ontario Craft Wineries, Sustainable Winegrowing British Columbia, Crimson Wine Group, the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, and individual wineries including Benziger Family Winery and Seghesio Family Vineyards. She has helped lead the growth of the Napa Green program for over six years, and stepped into the position of Executive Director of the now independent non-profit in fall 2019. Anna has a Master’s of Environmental Science & Management from the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara and a BA in Political Science and Environmental Studies from Williams College.

speakers

Mimi Casteel

Vineyard manager and winemaker for Hope Well Wine

Vineyard manager and winemaker for Hope Well WineMimi Casteel is an incredibly passionate voice and example for this new era of regenerative carbon farming. Mimi is world-renowned for her vision of transformative viticulture, her approachable communication of that vision, and her on the ground examples of how to produce expressive wines from vibrant, healthy, carbon-rich soils in vineyards actively cultivating plant and animal diversity.

Tod Mostero

Director of Viticulture & Winemaking at Dominus Estate

Director of Viticulture and Winemaking, the French connection runs strong through Mostero, who studied in Bordeaux and trained at Château Haut-Brion, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Établissements Jean-Pierre Moueix. He worked with Baron Philippe de Rothschild in the Languedoc and at Almaviva in Chile before returning to his native California to join Dominus Estate in 2007.

 

“Christian Moueix has been my guide throughout my career and has been my greatest example of a perfect winemaker. He is clear, precise and is profoundly attached to the vineyard. He has guided me from the beginning.”

Two regional restoration leaders coming soon.

Marquee Keynote: Marquee Keynote Speaker(s) Coming Soon

Asking the Critical Questions Forum II: Can Wine Really Impact Climate Action?

As a high-value crop with deep cultural roots, wine is both uniquely vulnerable to climate change and has extraordinary power to influence global climate solutions. Napa Green’s Anna Brittain, an expert in whole systems climate solutions, will moderate a conversation with three visionary leaders bridging wine and climate action. Diana Snowden-Seysses shares a cross-continent perspective – making wine for Burgundy’s Domaine Dujac, Napa Valley’s Snowden Vineyards, and Ashes & Diamonds. She works closely with Porto Protocol and champions glass reuse and climate smart packaging. Dr. Olga Barbosa, founder of the Wine Climate Change and Biodiversity Program, shares research and results leveraging diversity to create more self-regulating vineyard ecosystems, better able to weather climate pressures. Together, they explore how wine’s perennial nature, cultural resonance, and powerful platform make it an ideal proving ground for climate actions that can be adopted by other ag and beverage sectors.

 

From the beginning, RISE has asked, If not here, where? If not now, when?

 

Action Opportunities:

  • Utilize wine’s platform to share climate leadership success stories
  • Build cross-regional climate collaborations
  • Leverage biodiversity for more resilient vineyards needing less intervention
  • Share successes in regenerative viticulture applicable to other perennial crops
  • Work with Napa Green to take a soil to bottle approach to regenerative agriculture, emissions reduction, operational resilience, and ROI

moderator

ANNA BRITTAIN

Executive Director of Napa Green

Anna Brittain is the Executive Director of Napa Green. Anna has worked locally, nationally and internationally on environmental management and policy with organizations ranging from the environmental economics think tank Resources for the Future in Washington, DC to the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Hanoi, Vietnam. She has spent a decade facilitating and growing sustainability in the wine industry, with an expertise in communications and certification standards. Anna has served as a lead sustainability consultant with Ontario Craft Wineries, Sustainable Winegrowing British Columbia, Crimson Wine Group, the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, and individual wineries including Benziger Family Winery and Seghesio Family Vineyards. She has helped lead the growth of the Napa Green program for over six years, and stepped into the position of Executive Director of the now independent non-profit in fall 2019. Anna has a Master’s of Environmental Science & Management from the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara and a BA in Political Science and Environmental Studies from Williams College.

speakers

Diana Snowden-Seysses

Winemaker

Diana Snowden Seysses was born in Napa, California, graduated from the University of California at Davis with a BS in Viticulture and Enology in 2001 and then moved to France. Today she divides her time between the Napa Valley where she makes wine for her family estate, Snowden Vineyards and for Ashes & Diamonds and France where she is oenologist at Domaine Dujac in Burgundy and consults for Domaine de Triennes in Provence. After twenty-four years in wine, she finds ever more meaning in the craft of making vins de terroir. “The most memorable wines are living and changing. They are the result of vineyard work without chemicals, native yeast fermentation with minimal handling, and élevage in a cellar that breaths. Beyond these simple, traditional techniques, those of us who are fortunate enough to run wineries must deepen our thoughts on terroir to allow that term encompasses both ecosystem and community. We must think about balance between prosperity in our beautiful grape-growing regions and protecting the natural charm that made them famous in the first place. Climate change and all our farming choices have genetic impact on the vine. The emotional state of our employees leaves it signature on our wines. All these complex issues are in part our responsibility. I seek to protect a healthy environment in the largest sense of the term and transmit this just savoir faire to the next generation.” Diana is a member of the Académie du Vin, a board member of the Porto Protocol thinking committee and a mentor for Batonnage Forum and the Roots Fund.  

Olga Barbosa, Ph.D.

Senior Scientist of Ecosystem Services, Agroecology, Vinecology at Pacific Agroecology LLC

Olga Barbosa is interested in the relationship between humans and the environment from an ecological perspective. Her research has been continuously centered around the effects of habitat fragmentation on both species (beetles and birds) and ecosystem functions (water and nitrogen cycling). She has conducted this work across Chile, specifically in Fray Jorge National Park, a fragmented cloud forest immersed in a semi desert area, and more recently in semi-pristine areas that transition into highly dynamic and human dominated ecosystems such as cities and agricultural ecosystems. She is active in engaging the wine industry on the conservation of Chilean Mediterranean Ecosystems. The conservation of this habitat is important not only for wineries that depend on the provision of ecosystem services that sustain production and wine quality, but also for successful climate change adaptation of local communities.

Final speaker coming soon.

Sustainable Services & Tools sponsors

Agrology is a leading climate tech start-up and Public Benefit Corporation with a mission to help farmers adapt to and beat climate change with real-time analysis and predictive insights. The Agrology platform consists of climate and carbon monitoring systems, both based on ground-truth data and machine learning. The Agrology Climate Monitoring System delivers predictive insights and warnings, up to three days in advance, for wildfire smoke taint, extreme weather, soil conditions, pest and disease emergence, and irrigation. Agrology’s Carbon Monitoring System tracks soil carbon sequestration in real time, quickly detecting carbon loss via carbon dioxide emission events. Agrology customers include Braga Fresh, The Duckhorn Portfolio, Boisset Collection, Dana Estates, Emeritus Vineyards, Jordan Vineyards and Winery, Joseph Phelps Vineyards, Langtry Farms, Lawrence Vineyards, Mission Hill Family Estate Winery, Renteria Vineyard Management, Signorello Estate, Silver Oak Vineyards, and numerous specialty farms. Agrology is the winner of two highly selective National Science Foundation SBIR Awards, a 2023 WINnovation Award, and is a recipient of a USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant. Agrology has offices in Alexandria, Virginia, and Sonoma, California, and can be found online at Agrology.ag.

Diam Bouchage has always been an innovative company; every year, it allocates a substantial budget to research and development.


In 2003, the company began investing in a revolutionary, patented process, called the DIAMANT® process that uses the properties of supercritical CO2 to extract the volatile compounds of cork and eradicate the molecules responsible for giving a taste to the wine, especially those causing “cork taint”.


Twelve years later, the company made yet another breakthrough in major technological progress with the launch of Origine by Diam®, a closure that reconciles science and nature, integrating a beeswax emulsion and binding agent composed of 100% plant-derived polyols.

Napa Green is a global leader in sustainable winegrowing, setting the highest bar for sustainability and climate action in the wine industry. Napa Green facilitates systematic soil to bottle certification for wineries and vineyards, and provides the resources, tools and connections to continuously level up leadership. In 2021, Napa Green was the first sustainable winegrowing program in the world to redevelop Vineyard certification standards to focus on climate action, regenerative carbon farming, and social equity. In 2022, Napa Green and community partners launched a first of its kind, six-event Climate & Wine Symposium (Napa THRIVES now RISE) with over 65 speakers and 600 total guests.