Grapes of Joy – 2011 Wine & Grape Symposium
– by Darkstar Dan
Media One has partnered with old friend David Lee Joy of All Star Media to record every minute of the 2011 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, CA. This is the largest wine and grape conference in the nation and twelve-thousand industry professionals attended this year’s conference. We record this symposium because, as taken off their website, “the conference represents the collective experience, knowledge and background of the entire industry. We collaborate with a diverse committee of industry and academic professionals to bring you a program with timely topics and compelling speakers.”
For me personally, I was proud to see my Alma Mater, University of California – Davis, well represented and at the forefront of developing technology beneficial to the growth, harvesting, and processing of grapes and related crops within this multi-billion dollar, world-wide industry. UC Davis was touting their brand new sustainable winery, brewery and foods complex which opened on January 28, 2011. The new, 34,000-square-foot teaching and research complex, located within UC Davis’ Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, is the world’s most environmentally sophisticated facility for making wine, brewing beer and processing foods.
The sustainable winery building will enable the teaching and research winery to demonstrate how a winery can operate on rainwater when it captures, filters and reuses that water many times. The planned building also will house equipment needed to sequester the carbon dioxide captured from the winery’s fermentation system, thus preventing damage to the atmosphere. This is expected to make it the first winery to have a net-zero carbon footprint, meaning that it captures and sequesters at least as much carbon dioxide as it produces.
I was attending U.C. Davis when they started the construction of this facility and would wonder what it would all look like when finished. Now I’ll take a ride over and check it our for myself. And yes, for anyone wondering, I attended college a little later in life. It was weird being almost the same age as some of my professors!
All in all, the Wine & Grape Symposium was a successful and fun event. There is always new information to be learned at these conferences, lots of interesting people to meet, and some delicious wine to be tasted (a great perk of the job!)
Well, that’s our update of what we’re up to lately. Hope everyone is staying busy and healthy out there. And remember, no matter what is happening in your work or personal life at this moment, my dad used to say to me, “It’s not where you are today that matters, it’s where you see yourself going”.
I say let’s reach for the stars…