CLIMATE ACTION & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE
Registration opens
Tackling Critical Challenges Forum: Can Forest & Creek Restoration Create Localized Climate Cooling?
Breakfast hour w/Sponsor Bingo
Marquee Keynote: Marquee Keynote Speaker(s) Coming Soon
Break
Asking the Critical Questions Forum: “Can Wine Really Impact Climate Action?”
Official Closeout & RISE Leadership Award
Catered lunch & Wine
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:
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.
Vineyard manager and winemaker for Hope Well Wine, Mimi 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.
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.”
Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California’s ecology, biodiversity, and geography. Most famously, his 2017 book The California Field Atlas recontextualized popular ideas about California’s more-than-human world. His following books, THE STATE OF WATER and THE CALIFORNIA LANDS TRILOGY, present a comprehensive survey of California’s evolutionary past and its unfolding future. 2024’s THE STATE OF FIRE; WHY CALIFORNIA BURNS is among his most popular and timely books to date. When he isn’t backpacking, Obi Kaufmann makes his home in Oakland, where he is working on more Field Atlases to come.
Brock Dolman (he/him) co-directs the WATER Institute, Permaculture Design Program, and Wildlands Program. He has taught permaculture and consulted on regenerative project design and implementation internationally in Costa Rica, Ecuador, the US Virgin Islands, Spain, Brazil, China, Canada, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, and widely in the United States. He has been the keynote presenter at numerous conferences and was featured in the award-winning films The 11th Hour by Leonardo DiCaprio, The Call of Life by Species Alliance, and Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution by Vanessa Shultz. In October of 2012, he gave a City 2.0 TEDx talk. Brock completed his BA in the Biology and Environmental Studies departments at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1992, graduating with honors. For over a decade, he has served as an appointed commissioner on the Sonoma County Fish & Wildlife Commission.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
Founded in eastern Napa county, Napachar converts woody waste from vineyard management and local forest fuel-reduction efforts into Biochar, one of the richest soil amendments and most stable forms of carbon capture available today. By making our biochar with portable kilns on site in the vineyard and forest, we reduce transportation costs and emissions, and offer a drop-in replacement for burn-piling and wood-chipping. Additionally, our kilns are substantially lower polluting than these alternatives, producing almost no smoke and releasing a tenth of the CO2. Our resulting product is ready for incorporation into vineyard soil, where it serves as an organic tool for holding onto water and nutrients in the soil and encourages increased growth and crop production, with no detriment to the quality of the fruits.
At Scout, our mission is to assist growers, wineries and vineyard management companies achieve their financial objectives, grow better quality fruit, and increase their yields using data harvested during the growing season. We believe in the blending of traditional farming intuition with state of the art data collection and AI assisted insights will enable sustainable, profitable, and high quality farming for generations. We are dedicated to helping our customers make the best decisions to maximize their efforts across all their planted sites while improving their bottom line.
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.
➡️ Scroll for Speakers!
💦 Water is gold in California, where we continue to face increasingly frequent and intense droughts tied to our changing climate.
Join the acclaimed journalist and storyteller Mark Arax as he unravels the complex tapestry of California’s relationship with water, lean how to transform your water management through proven metering and monitoring strategies, hear grower experiences of transitioning to dry farming, and listen to industry experts speak about the critical question “Is Water the Solution to Heat Stress?”
Ticket link in our bio for Water Efficiency & Savings on April 29, 2025 at the Charles Krug Carriage House.
Water Efficiency and Savings Day is April 29th at @charleskrugwinery. Find information and tickets at the link in our profile ⬆️
Join us for RISE beginning on April 29th 2025! 🌱
#rise #symposium #napavalley #sustainability #winebusiness #wineindustry #napa #winery
Join us at RISE on May 7th to hear from our Speakers @cathycorison & @gracecorisonmartin! Our topic will be “Insights from 50 years of winemaking & the next generation of leadership.”
Pick up your early bird priced tickets at the link in our bio!
Join us for RISE Climate & Wine Symposium starting April 29th, 2025!
Early bird pricing is available only through March 15th so don’t delay on picking up your tickets. Remember - Napa Green Certified Members receive a special discount and information can be found in your Napa Green Newsletter.
RISE is the first of its kind Climate & Wine Symposium. Held in Napa Valley at @charleskrugwinery, put on by the team at @napagreen.
This six day event centers around the six pillars of sustainable wine growing with each day having a unique focal point and expert speakers.
Now is the time to procure your early bird pricing tickets at the link in our bio or our website: www.risegreen.org.
Please join us at RISE beginning April 29th 2025. Now more than ever, we look forward to seeing you there.
Early bird pricing is still in effect and tickets may be purchased at the link in our profile. #rise
📣 Calling All Sponsors!! RISE Climate & Wine Symposium begins again this Earth Month and it has NEVER been more important to get involved then right now.
Reach out ASAP to Anna or Megan via rise@napagreen.org if you are an interested sponsor! 🌿
Economic benefits & ROI of workshops: In a time of changing consumer trends, we want you think of us as extended members of your team. We are here to help share information of ways to not only increase your sustainability but also share with you how these things bring with them ROI, decrease in cost, consumer approval & many other economic benefits.
Join us at our All Things Bottle Sustainability Workshop on April 26th to hear from our panel of experts. Registration is $20 and the link can be found in our profile. Cheers!
‘What if things get better?’
We highly recommend you take a moment to read this beautiful piece featuring RISE Speaker @mimicasteel.
“As the predictions of climate scientists become reality, imagining a better future can feel impossible. But hope might be right beneath our feet… Mimi Casteel shows us what’s possible with regenerative agriculture.”
“Mimi’s work fills me with hope that healthy soil can create local cooling effects that bring the temperature down dramatically, remove carbon from the atmosphere, feed more people with nutrient-rich food grown on fewer acres—and give us an enriched base from which to imagine.”
Read the full story by Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell in @esquire, at the link in our bio.
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