(Wines&Vines) - After more than a month overseas and dozens of meetings with government officials and her counterparts in the European wine industry, the president of the Sonoma County Winegrowers reports she has a much better grasp on the wider wine world and Sonoma’s place in it.

Earlier this year, Karissa Kruse—the growers’ group president since March 2013—was nominated and accepted for a fellowship with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The fellowship entailed spending more than five weeks in Europe visiting Brussels, Copenhagen, Rome, Belgrade and Paris.

Established by the German government in 1972 as a tribute to the Marshall Plan rebuilding post-war Germany, the fund is an exchange program to foster trans-Atlantic partnerships in the spirit of the original plan. In addition to her fellowship with the Marshall Memorial fund, Kruse met independent wine grape growers in Champagne, France, and participated in the international conference on sustainability that was part of the SIMEI exhibition and tradeshow in Milan, Italy.

 Kruse is in great demand as a speaker about sustainability since spearheading the Sonoma Winegrowers’ push to get all of the county’s vineyards certified as sustainable by 2019. This week she is in Bilbao, Spain, delivering a presentation about the county’s efforts at the Wine Vision conference.

Speaking to Wines & Vines before she left for Spain, Kruse said she the Marshall Fund was essentially an executive MBA course on European affairs that provided her with invaluable context about critical issues such as immigration. Kruse said she was impressed by a liberal guest worker program, which allows workers from mostly Eastern European nations to flow freely to where labor is needed. “It was really kind of thought provoking to me,” she said.

Meeting with trade officials with the U.S. embassy in Paris, Kruse said she received an update on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP. The partnership is a wide-ranging trade deal primarily between the United States and the European Union.

Kruse said the TTIP will deal with what terms can be used by U.S. wineries seeking to export wine to Europe as well as set agreed-upon standards about what constitutes as organic farming, for example. She said embassy officials told her the Europeans—especially the French—are particularly sensitive and defensive about international trade when it comes to food and wine. “The idea of opening that market up is somewhat of a challenge to them,” she said.

In Copenhagen, Kruse said she was struck by the city’s commitment to sustainability, and she said parts of its strategy could be brought back to Sonoma County.