VISIONARY: Lecture Series continues with Professor Roger Boulton

The Visionary Lecture series, a joint effort between the USGBC-NCC Capital Branch and the AIA Central Valley Chapter, continues this June with a presentation by Professor Roger Boulton, the Stephen Sinclair Scott Professor of Enology and Chemical Engineering at the Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California at Davis.

Professor Boulton started dreaming of a self-sustaining winery more than ten years before the Mondavi Institute built its LEED Platinum Winery and Brewery. His passion for rainwater harvesting, an ideal source for pure reverse osmosis water for scientific experiments, and his need to prevent deposits on valuable equipment, fueled his study for systems for the new facility. As a result, the new winery, brewery, and food-processing complex now serves as a test bed for production processes and techniques that conserve water, energy, and other vital resources.

There is an auxiliary building that houses equipment adjacent to the winery that will make it possible to capture, store, and recycle rainwater. The proposed system reuses 90 percent of the captured cleaning water volume each cycle—requiring only a fifth of the normal water volume for cleaning. Eventually, the facility plans to be “water positive” and completely independent of the main campus water line.

“We wanted to demonstrate a self-sufficiency model that is applicable to any business with limited water,” Boulton explains.

Additionally, the winery was designed to capture carbon dioxide, a natural byproduct of fermentation, from a port in each of the new fermenters. An innovative process will be used to remove, capture, and store the carbon, so that it will not contribute to global warming.

“The goal for the facility is to not just be carbon neutral, but carbon zero, in terms of its carbon emissions,” Boulton said.

Discover the vision behind the world’s first LEED Platinum Winery and Brewery, located at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at UC Davis, by attending this Visionary event on Thursday, June 14.

Learn more and register >>