Leonard Brown Discusses Diversification

Editor’s Note: Leonard Brown of Earl Brown & Sons, a vertically integrated apple and winegrape grower in Milton-Freewater, OR, graced the cover of the June 2010 issue of American and Western Fruit Grower. Brown and the many family members involved in the business are full of ideas, and are remarkably unafraid of trying them out. They’ve got so many ideas, in fact, that we couldn’t squeeze them all into the cover story. So here, as the late radio newsman Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story. Leonard Brown, who serves as family spokesman, talks about what advice he’d have for an apple grower considering going into making hard cider, or getting into winegrapes, as well as other topics.

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Going Into Grapes

Back in 2001, Brown planted grapes for the well-known Washington vintner, Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery, on a ranch Brown co-owned with Bill Zirkle of Rainier Fruit. Ste. Michelle’s experts knew the land was perfect for certain winegrapes. Then a couple years later, Brown decided to start their own wine venture, and came out with their own Watermill bottling in ’05. They started by purchasing grapes, and then began planting their own in ’03. They now grow about 80% of the grapes they use, but it will be all their own soon. Part of the reason they had to buy grapes was that the Walla Walla Valley, where they farm, gets very warm, which is not conducive to growing grapes for white wines.

By the same token, that heat is excellent for producing certain red wine grape varieties, as is the long growing season. In fact, other wineries started asking Brown for grapes. “We thought ‘What are we doing here, let’s do it ourselves,’” said Brown. “And that wine deal really took off.”

They now farm 100 acres of winegrapes. The varieties include Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, Petite Verdot, and last year they planted several Italian varietals, including Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and Barbera.

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They took out some good apple ground for grapes, because while good for apples, it was perfect for grapes. It had good air drainage and a good microclimate. That’s absolutely vital because it gets quite cold in the valley and they need to avoid winter kill. They planted grapes in the warmer districts with more heat units. Bordeaux varieties require a lot of heat units. Also, almost all their grapes are planted on sloped ground so that cold air flows away in winter.

On the bottling end, unlike many extremely expensive vintners, they have weathered the recent recession well. They maintain a price point between $20 and $30 a bottle, which is good because they didn’t have to lower prices when the recession hit. “When the economy was booming we were tempted to go super-premium, but there was a lot wine out there,” said Brown. “We might have thought about it, but the key to the whole thing is we that we decided to stay with our price point, our niche, and we maintained that.”

Brown has one last piece of advice for apple growers who are thinking of growing grapes: Make sure you have a home for your grapes. If you are not going to be making wine out of them yourself, do not plant them at all unless you have a contract. That cannot be overemphasized, he says.

Making Hard Cider

In the June cover story, Brown explained how they got started in the hard cider business. Here he explains how the greatest challenge in the hard cider business is on the marketing end.

In a nutshell, the key to success in the hard cider business, as it is in many others, is knowing exactly how to deliver the product, i.e. what kind of package the consumer wants. The Browns were treating their hard cider almost like wine, as it tastes quite similar. Their cider is a far cry from traditional apple cider, and tastes much more like a dry, lightly fruity wine, like Sauvignon Blanc. They took that approach because in recent years dry hard ciders are faring better than the sweeter versions. But they’re finding the consumers want 22-oz. bottles, not the 750-ml. wine bottles the Browns currently use.

“That’s what we’re seeing in the marketplace; you have to treat it more like a new product, not wine,” says Brown. “We’re now shifting to kegs to put it in taverns and bars. We’re trying to redefine it as a category in itself.”

They don’t know if the trend toward dry cider is just a fad or not, but they have decided they really need to rethink packaging. They’ve decided to think outside the box, or, more accurately, outside the bottle. Instead of moving from a wine bottle to a large beer bottle they are starting to market the hard cider in “growlers,” or little brown jugs.

Salmon-Safe

Perhaps because Leonard Brown’s father, Earl Brown, the man who started the company, was an entomologist, the family’s more sensitive to the environment than most. The kids learned about beneficial insects at an early age. Several years ago, Brown participated in a sustainability program called LIVE – Low Impact Viticulture and Enology, which started in Oregon’s Willamette Valley for vineyards. Because LIVE dealt only with vineyards, the Browns then found a program that covered whole farms called Salmon-Safe.

When they first looked into it, they found that Salmon-Safe had a hard time dealing with apples, in part because there weren’t many in the Willamette Valley where the program started. The organizers wanted to over-simplify a list of pesticides that couldn’t be used at any time, but Brown urged them to take a more reasoned approach. “For us sustainability is not just ‘Don’t use this chemical.’ It’s a holistic approach,” said Brown. “We had to use certain chemicals.”

So Brown sat down with his nephew Jared Brown and Clive Kaiser, an Oregon State University Extension horticulture agent, and made up a more flexible list growers could live with. Then they worked with Salmon- Safe and developed chemical program that Salmon-Safe adopted. Certain pesticides, those that had toxicity to fish, were obviously out. But many others were eventually included. Today Brown farms how he wants to farm, but also has the additional marketing edge of being able to label his crops “Salmon-Safe.” He thinks such programs will become increasingly important to differentiate and distinguish product in the marketplace.

Five years ago the family decided to stop using organophosphates. They didn’t think they needed such a big stick, and in any case, didn’t think they would be around for too many more years. A year after they stopped using any OPs, a praying mantis was found in a vineyard. “That was an ‘A-ha’ moment,” says Brown. “We hadn’t seen them in the vineyards before.”

They took that as a sign, and decided to use that too as a marketing tool. Hey, whatever works, says Brown. They now feature a praying mantis prominently on one of their wine labels.

GLOBALGAP

This is another program that Brown thinks is important to have for marketing fruit. The GLOBALGAP (the “GAP” stands for Good Agricultural Practice) standard is primarily designed to reassure consumers about how food is produced, minimizing detrimental environmental impacts of farming operations, reducing the use of chemical inputs and ensuring a responsible approach to worker health and safety.

Besides just feeling like it’s the right thing to do, Brown is pretty sure this program will pay off in the future because it already has. Last year he was able to sell his Red Delicious apples in Great Britain because he had the GLOBALGAP label, the first year he was able to do so. He was also happy to get into that market because he got $4 more per box for the apples than he was getting in the U.S.

It’s not easy to comply with the program, and in fact Brown says they have one employee who does nothing but police the orchards and complete the necessary paperwork. But the Red Delicious deal in England easily paid that employee’s salary. Even more important, he thinks the European program is going to be adopted by U.S. chains. “The chatter’s out there that a lot more stores in the U.S. will require it,” says Brown. “That’s the talk out there, that in order for you to sell them, you’re going to need it. I think it’s just a matter of time.”

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