(CP) - Sonoma County Winegrowers bought an expensive, full-page, color ad, using tax dollars, in the July 12 daily Santa Rosa Press Democrat and in various weeklies, such as the North Bay Bohemian and Sonoma West. The ad ignited a firestorm of protest with angry letters to editors and online comments from the community storming local publications that ran the ad.

As someone who practices, writes about, and teaches college students at Sonoma State and Dominican Universities about what “sustainable” really means, the ad offends me. It is blatant propaganda of false advertising to hoodwink readers.

Winegrowers received a $377,282 federal grant in 2014 for their “branding campaign.” That followed a state grant that brought their total to $756,000, according to the North Bay Business Journal. The fact that tax payer dollars funded the wine industry’s Public Relations campaign hit a sensitive nerve county-wide, a nerve already frayed by the overdevelopment of wineries as event centers hosting weddings and entertainment unrelated to wine. This changes the face of this once bucolic region. (A copy of the ad can be requested from the Winegrowers at [email protected] , where readers can also send responses.)

The glossy ad offers no proof or third party verification of their alleged sustainability. The Winegrowers self-regulate, thus co-opting and green-washing the word, like a fox guarding the chicken coop. To be “sustainable” requires having a triple bottom line: profit, environmental protection, and social justice.

The Wine Empire is certainly profitable, for a few. It’s all about money. It cuts off hilltops, converts redwood forests, oak woodlands, and apple orchards into regimented, industrial mono-crop rows, which is not nature’s way. It leaves a path of destruction. It fences out wildlife, poisons bees and other critters, leaves the soil naked, and hoards water—not very environmental.

Big Wine does not treat or pay its workers living wages. The ad shows clean, white hands. Yet most of the real growing is done by Latinos with brown skin and other workers of color, with soil often further darkening their working hands.

These so-called “winegrowers” are often merely managers, with some notable exceptions among the few real small family vineyards left that are truly sustainable. Their practices include things such as dry farming, cover crops, and vineyards within a diverse ag and natural environment.

“THE MYTH OF THE FAMILY WINERY”

The wine may be “world-class,” as claimed. Wall Street and foreign investors own most of it, so most money leaves the county. Multi-national alcohol corporations—like Altira, Brown-Forman, Constellation, and The Wine Group—own much of the wine production.

Wine industry lobbyists and PR people present the industry as mainly small mom and pop operations is a lie. “The Myth of the Family Winery: Global Corporations Behind California Wine” by the Marin Institute documents this ownership. “Preserving local agriculture,” the ad claims. This study reveals how they preserve agri-business.

“Nearly all the leading wine producers in California are massive corporations integrated with ‘Big Alcohol,’ multinational conglomerates promoting and controlling politics in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.,” the study opens.

“We’re growing a better place for us all to live, work, and play,” the ad deceptively claims. Meanwhile, they spray poisonous chemicals, without even informing neighbors. They crowd narrow, rural roads with tipsy drivers. They dig 1000-foot wells and take as much water from streams as they want, even during the drought, sometimes drying up neighbor’s wells. Big Ag does not have to conserve, like the rest of us.

A visual parody of the ad by artist Perro Aulando was posted on Waccobb.net. It includes the following words: “Our marketing hype is so slick, you’ll think you’re saving the planet while our chainsaws, agrichemicals, and pumps destroy whatever we haven’t already.”

Aulando suggests a campaign “to heap scorn and ridicule on the most egregious examples of green-washing and tourism uber-hype.” It could use “adbuster-style tactics and humor to undermine.”