Wine label rises from bird's ashes

The hawk that sparked a Windsor vineyard fire when it landed on a power line and burned to death has left an unusual legacy.

Burning Hawk Wines (burninghawk.com), produced by Windsor Vineyards, hit the marketplace Tuesday with two $30-a-bottle wines and an ambition to prevent similar avian deaths. The wine brand was conceived and brought to market in a frantic few months since the May fire, and 10 percent of its sales are pledged to help protect birds.

"It's a complex issue costly on many levels, to wildlife, energy and ratepayers," said Nick Papadopoulos, a Santa Rosa conflict resolution and business consultant who proposed the idea.

On the late May day when he read news reports about the hawk's fiery death, Papadopoulos had no wine industry experience. He worked with public and private sector clients on team-building and conflict resolution.

But within days, he said, he'd sketched a label, tried out the idea on friends and associates and been given a phone number for Pat Roney, CEO of Windsor Vineyards.

Papadopoulos soon had a new title, director of Resolution Wines, a new division of Windsor Vineyards.

"It was a unique cause" but a familiar concept, said Roney, noting that the 50-year-old winery already produces a wine, Fire Station Red, to raise funds for fire stations nationwide.

Burning Hawk's Web page cites figures from bird research groups, the government and utilities that 174 million birds a year are killed by electrocution or collision with power equipment and that wildlife-related power outages cost the state an estimated $34 million a year.

"It's a definite problem," said Garry George, Audubon California's chapter network director.

Decades of cooperative efforts between fish and wildlife agencies and utility companies have made strides toward making power equipment safer for birds, George said. "But then there's the problem that more transmission lines are going in, more development, more people, more power."

The cause fit the interests of his winery, which pursues ecologically sustainable grape and wine production practices, said Roney. "We're looking for long-term and sustainability causes to support."

Resolution Wines, he said, will be an umbrella for Fire Station and Burning Hawk, and for other "cause-related marketing" ventures that develop.

The organizations that will get the proceeds haven't been chosen. Papadopoulos is speaking with groups around the country "to ascertain whether they can deliver" in working to prevent birds from being killed through electrocution or collisions with power equipment.

Windsor Vineyards produced 2,000 cases of each wine -- a red blend of Napa Valley grapes and an Alexander Valley chardonnay -- for Burning Hawk.

Wine-related events that benefit a specific cause are not uncommon in Wine Country, but tying consumer purchases to a particular cause is a growing part of corporate philanthropy, said Jennifer Furla, a board member of the Illinois-based Giving USA Foundation, which studies philanthropy trends and advises nonprofit groups.

"This type of thing has certainly been raised to more of the American consciousness," said Furla, also executive vice president with Jeffrey Byrne & Associates, a fund-raising consultancy in Kansas City.

"Corporations have found it makes good sense to link their products and services with good social causes that relate to their mission and to what their products can promote," she said.

Locally, at least one other winery has cut a similar philanthropic path: Cleavage Creek Cellars, a Pope Valley winery that gives 10 percent of its sales to breast cancer.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.