Red, White, and Green: wine with a conscience
My Clean Break column today takes a look at one of Ontario’s newest wineries and the first to get LEED Canada certification for green building design. Stratus Vineyards has gone out of its way to conserve water, use recycled materials, save energy and rely on renewable energy sources. Perhaps the centrepiece of this effort is a vertical closed-loop low-temperature geothermal system that has cut the winery’s energy costs in half. It’s also one of the few gravity-based wineries, meaning a series of stainless steel slides and tubing and the force of gravity are used to process the grapes into wine. No energy-sucking conveyor belts or pumps. It’s another example of how smart thinking from concept to design to construction can have a quick payback and offers the potential benefits of green marketing.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca