Our Winery is Now SIP Certified!

We were excited and honored to learn that we earned the distinction of becoming the first SIP Certified Sustainable Winery

What does this mean? The Vineyard Team is a non-profit organization dedicated to education and promotion of sustainability within the wine industry and has more than 40,000 acres of vineyards currently SIP Certified, which is an acronym for Sustainability In Practice. You may have heard us use the acronym when talking about our vineyards, as all three have been officially certified since 2015. 

In addition to their Vineyard Certification, The Vineyard Team recently launched a pilot program for wineries that involves separate winery-specific criteria for their new Certified Sustainable Winery Certification. This comprehensive set of standards includes ten chapters covering a wide range of topics, each with their own requirements - over 70 in total. 

After months of gathering data, fine-tuning our practices and documenting everything from daily water usage to how we clean our tanks and barrels to our noise output during bottling, we submitted our application and passed! Our third-party audit was conducted by unbiased industry veterans and ensured that we met or exceeded all of the rigorous SIP guidelines for certification. 

The inner workings of our main winery, with a gravity-flow system

Our craft winery, exclusively used to make small-lot fermented Pinot Noir

Why is it important? This certification takes our sustainability to the next level.  In the vineyard, we constantly strive to improve our farming practices and we are proud to be SIP Certified in our three vineyards. But what happens when the grapes are delivered to the winery? Isn’t being sustainable in our winemaking and business practices equally important? If you have visited our LEED Certified Winery or seen our Solar Panels and water reclamation system, you have witnessed our dedication to green building

While infrastructure is important, it is only a part of the certification. In fact, most of the winery certification focuses on daily practices and the systems we have in place to protect our employees and make for a good work environment. All of these things are important to the Niner family and SIP Certification is a way to demonstrate that to our customers.

As the Vineyard Team states, SIP Certified “is about great wines, healthy vineyards and the well being of workers.” Thank you for supporting our quest for a better environment!

Want to learn more? Go behind the scenes of our winery with a tour! Click here to make your reservation.

Molly Bohlman
NINER Winemaker  

Solar power provides us with 100% of our energy needs at the tasting room, restaurant, winery, craft winery, wells & water reclamation systems