Green Commitment

At Monte De Oro, more than our grapes are “green”!

A top pri­or­ity for Monte De Oro is to min­i­mize mechan­i­cal pump pro­cess­ing in its wine­mak­ing prac­tices. This helps pre­vent the grapes from being bruised and wine fla­vor being dis­torted. In a grav­ity flow win­ery, grapes fall nat­u­rally into the fer­ment­ing tanks and wine moves gen­tly from wine fer­menters to the aging barrels.

The mul­ti­ple lev­els of pro­cess­ing stages exploit the force of grav­ity to ten­derly move grapes and wine through the pro­cess­ing steps, result­ing in the pro­duc­tion of high qual­ity wines.

While sev­eral lead­ing Napa winer­ies uti­lize such a sys­tem, Monte De Oro is look­ing to intro­duce it to Temec­ula Val­ley winemaking.

Monte De Oro is com­mit­ted to sus­tain­abil­ity. Instead of rely­ing on the high energy con­sump­tion required for an above-ground wine bar­rel facil­ity, Monte De Oro exca­vated a 9,000 sq. ft. base­ment below ground, to uti­lize the nat­ural envi­ron­ment and aes­thet­ics of the build­ing struc­ture in order to main­tain a proper, con­sis­tent tem­per­a­ture and con­stant humid­ity. This dra­mat­i­cally reduces the need for elec­tric­ity needed in an above-ground facility.

To cap­i­tal­ize on the sunny locale, Monte De Oro has also made plans to incor­po­rate into its site design (park­ing lot and even­tual crush pad) instal­la­tion of solar pan­els to allow for solar-generated elec­tric­ity in the near future.