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28 WINES&VINES June 2017 I t has been 20 years since the first self- assessment workbook about the sustain- able production of wine grapes was published in the United States. Since then, self-assessment workbooks have been written for and used by wine grape grow- ers in California, Washington and New York, and by juice grape growers in New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Their use has had a significant influence on sustainable wine- growing programs, practice implementation and sustainability reporting. No other U.S. agriculture sector has adopted the use of self- assessment as much as the wine and grape industry. Because of the workbooks' wide- spread use and influence, I thought it would be interesting to contact the various programs using self-assessment workbooks to find out if use has changed over time and, if so, how. But first, for those readers not familiar with self-assessment workbooks, they consist of a list of farming practices that a grapegrower reads and uses to record whether or not they are using the various practices. They can be used for reasons such as in education and out- reach programs, encouraging growers to in- crease wine grape quality, stimulating them to continually improve, enabling groups to anonymously aggre- gate assessment re- s u l t s f o r u s e i n sustainability report- ing, benchmarking practice implementa- tion and measuring w i n e g r a p e - growing im- provement over time. A great attribute they all share is that any and all growers can use them since they incorporate a broad range of wine grape- growing practices. Beginning in the Central Coast The first self-assessment for U.S. wine grape growing was the Positive Point System (PPS). It was published in 1996 by a group of growers farming in California's Central Coast region. They were helped by people from the Univer- sity of California, Davis, as well as Robert Mon- davi Winery. The group's idea was to use PPS as a tool to help growers identify strengths and weaknesses in their wine grape-growing prac- tices in a systematic fashion. This was done by assigning points to practices. There were 1,000 possible points in the assessment. At the time, the Central Coast winegrowing industry was fairly young, and there was a desire by the group to improve farming practices and fruit quality. There was also the sense of impending community and regulatory concerns, so the growers wanted to meet these challenges pro- actively. The PPS self-assessment framework provided them with a way to talk about re- source and winegrowing issues in an honest and active way. Notably, at the time PPS was first pub- lished, there was no established organization to guide its use. However, a short time later the growers formed the Central Coast Vine- yard Team and used PPS as a foundation of their education and outreach program. PPS stimulated the development of a Positive Points for Citrus and the Ranching Sustain- ability Self-assessment Project. The next self-assessment workbook to be developed was the Lodi Winegrower's Work- book, published at the end of 1999 by the Lodi Winegrape Commission (LWC). I began work- ing for LWC in 1995, and around 1998 our sustainable winegrowing program was looking for a way to encourage widespread adoption of sustainable winegrowing practices by Lodi growers. As with the Central Coast wine grape growers, Lodi growers also wanted to im- prove farming practices and fruit quality as well as be proactive about community and environmental concerns. I heard about the PPS and studied it carefully. I had also come across Farm*A*Syst, in Madison, Wis., which had written self-assessments for dairy, several crops in Ontario, Canada, and for cotton in Australia. The model they de- veloped was based on the plan, do, check process of environmental management sys- tems and had come up with an interesting way of dividing specific practice topics into four categories, scoring them from 1 to 4, with 1 containing the least sustainable prac- tice and 4 being the most sustainable. It enabled growers to see where their practices fell on a sustainability continuum and where they should be going in relation to every practice topic. In the end we chose to use the Farm*A*Syst model and contracted with them to help us get started. Working with a committee of Lodi growers, the University of California Cooperative Exten- sion and East Bay Municipal Utility District, the Lodi Winegrower's Workbook took shape. Within the first year and a half of its publica- tion, 265 growers that managed more than 60% of the wine grape acreage in the Lodi region had assessed one or more of their vine- yards using the workbook. LWC published a revised and expanded second edition of their workbook in 2008. Vineyard View n CLIFF OHMART Self-Assessment Workbooks: Where Are They Now?