LaVelle Winery and Pony Boy Gilbert - Here's How Real Environmentalism Works

This is what the old steel winery structure looks like after being reclad by Pony Boy Gilbert

The wine industry has a great trade publication called Vineyard And Winery Management.  Below is a story I wrote for the magazine a year or so ago.  The story is a great example of how environmentalism, stripped of all the politics and emotion, is really supposed to work.  If you're ever in Eugene, Oregon, visit LaVelle Vineyards.  They put the fine in fine wine and if you ever need something really special designed and built in a cost efficient and environmentally sensitive manner call Pony Boy.  He's amazing.

To the right, the new wood, sawn from logs that would usually be ground up into chips covers the old steel clad buildingvisible to the left.  Serious environmental benefits were achieved even as costs were reduced

When Doug LaVelle decided his winery and tasting room in Oregon’s Southern Willamette Valley needed an upgrade he worked with his builder and the owner of a local custom sawmill business to design a most unique approach to the project. The result, Doug comments, was entirely satisfactory in nearly every respect.   An old, steel clad “warehouse” looking structure housing the winery was transformed in appearance over the course of a few months into an elegant “Oregon Lodge” style attraction without significant disruption to winery operations and for a fraction the cost of more traditional approaches.  Equally important, Doug comments, he was able to act directly on the environmental ethic he espouses, achieving documentable environmental enhancements at almost every stage of the project. 

LaVelle Vineyards became the oldest bonded winery in the Southern Willamette Valley surrounding Eugene, Oregon when founder Doug Lavelle acquired, in 1994, the existing bonded winery license, 16 acres of vineyard, and a winery from the previous owners.   

Using knowledge gained over 30 years in the corporate world, Doug began to build the kind of wine business he'd always envisioned as a post-corporate career pursuit.  By 2008 LaVelle Vineyards’ physical property included not only the vineyard, the winery and the tasting room tucked into the quiet and secluded hills north of Eugene but also a terraced garden attraction with seasonal landscape displays and a wine bar and bistro known as the  “Club Room” at the historic 5^th Street Public Market in downtown Eugene.

Doug says he was especially pleased in 2008 when his son Matthew, who’d been acting as operations manager for the firm while learning wine making from a master craftsman stepped up and formally became the LaVelle Vineyards winemaker.

What LaVelle did not have in 2008 was a destination winery and tasting room appropriate to the image Doug had created for the business. The winery structure, in its fourth decade of service, hadn’t aged beautifully.  By 2008, the industrial pole building’s siding had become sun bleached and parts of it were beginning to corrode.  The LaVelle’s decided it was time to upgrade their facilities to match the quality and image of their product. 

An early step was to contact one of Doug's contractor friends, Robert Stolle of Eugene's Ordell Construction for a brainstorming sessions. After some research, the men decided to investigate options other than tearing down the existing structure and constructing an entirely new building. 

Tearing the building down and starting over presented problems.  The winery would face extended downtime and would need to operate out of an alternate location for the duration.   "From an environmental standpoint," Doug recounts, "removing the existing structure and putting up a new one would have created a good deal of waste.  Recycling the old building was clearly a more attractive option.” 

“Possible alternatives investigated,” Doug continues, “including removing the old steel from the building and replacing it with new metal siding that emulated a stucco look, or actually resurfacing the building with stucco.

 A fourth option presented itself with the introduction of Pony Boy Gilbert into the discussion. 

Pony Boy is proudly Native American and, Doug says with a smile, possesses a boundless enthusiasm, a dedication to practical environmentalism and a portable, thin-kerf sawmill. 

The solution Pony Boy put forward was to utilize his sawmill to mill some grand old incense cedar logs that would otherwise be chipped into pulp for a paper mill into boards usable in recladding the existing LaVelle winery.

Making lumber from logs otherwise destined to be underutilized as pulp chips

“The idea was immediately appealing,” Doug commented.  “I had been focused on creating a Tuscan look for the winery, an architectural theme that is commonly used in our business because it evokes an Old World ambiance.  But we don't live in Italy, we live in the Pacific Northwest, and I really preferred a solution that used local materials and fit comfortably into the Northwest landscape.  Pony's proposal got us thinking about an "Oregon Lodge" look constructed from cedar and stone."

Robert Stolle was familiar with Pony Boy’s expertise and thought the idea might have merit so, at Doug’s behest he took the concept and began to play with the possibilities, figuring out how accomplish the task of affixing lumber to the old building, and costing out the alternatives.

“We were surprised by the costs for the various options,” Doug said.  “Although I didn't keep all those numbers, using lumber milled by Long Tom Custom Sawmill (Pony Boy Gilbert’s company) was approximately 40% less than resurfacing with steel would have cost, and steel was roughly 30% less than the stucco option."

According to Robert Stolle, a 40% estimate for the lesser cost of lumber milled by Long Tom Sawmill vs. lumber purchased at a lumber yard is probably quite conservative, if difficult to quantify, because Pony Boy could mill lumber to exact specifications.  “Traditional supply channels typically provide only standard dimensions,” he comments.  “With Pony milling the wood on site we were able to get exactly the sizes we wanted including the thicker, rough cut boards the owner preferred.  We were able to obtain precisely milled specialty sizes without the extra cost of specialty milling, so both cost and waste were minimized.”

The decision was made to move ahead with the innovative solutions Robert Stolle, Doug LaVelle and Pony Boy had worked out between them and work began on upgrading the existing structure.  Ordell poured a new footing around the structure to support the weight of the wood.  The original metal building was left intact albeit attached to and surrounded by a new façade separated from the old building by an 8” space.  Logs were delivered and sawmilling began. 

The sawmill used by Long Tom Custom Sawmilling to mill logs to lumber is a portable, thin kerf sawmill (kerf is the thickness of the cut taken when a saw blade passes through a log).  First broadly marketed some twenty-five years ago by Wood-Mizer Products of Indianapolis, Indiana, the mills allow one and two person entrepreneurial firms to recover very high end lumber from trees that might otherwise be land-filled, under-utilized or simply left in the woods to rot and release the greenhouse gasses stored in them to the atmosphere.  

Today, estimates are some 20,000 plus businesses like Long Tom Custom Sawmilling provide service to builders, architects and individuals with access to those services in virtually every area of North America.

The LaVelle effort, according to Pony Boy Gilbert, is a case study in demonstrating that carefully considered environmental approaches to construction can also be profitable. 

“Doug LaVelle deserves huge credit for his commitment to environmental sensitivity,” Gilbert put forward.  “He put his money where his passion is by taking a chance on an unfamiliar approach based on my assurances this could not only result in the construction of a beautiful facility but also provide important environmental enhancements.”

According to Gilbert, “Those enhancements are real and documentable.”

“First,” Pony Boy said, “Wherever an old building can be effectively reused it should be.  It’s a terrible waste of resources, both natural and financial, to rip something apart just to replace it with something new when viable options are available.”

“Next,” Pony continued, the wood used was harvested within fifteen miles of where it was used so the emissions and other environmental impacts of transport were minimized.”

“We wanted to use Incense Cedar to demonstrate how environmental sensitivity can be practiced on a project like this,” Gilbert explained.  “ It’s a beautiful wood often piled up and sold for making chips as a byproduct of harvest.  The LaVelle building is, I believe, an outstanding example of how local and typically underutilized species can be put to their highest and best use.  Now, landowners throughout Central Oregon can visit the winery and see how resources on their own lands can be responsibly and sustainably utilized to optimize value and reduce waste.” 

Pony Boy points to the sawmill he used to mill lumber for the LaVelle Winery as providing  additional environmental enhancements.  The very thin cut taken by his Wood-Mizer means about 30% more lumber is recovered from a log than is typical in a conventional sawmill.  “That means the carbon contained in that additional thirty percent continued to be trapped in the wood for decades and it means thirty percent more trees are left standing and still scrubbing climate change gases from the atmosphere as a result of this mill,” he contended.  “A thinner blade also requires less energy to produce the lumber.  This is waste reduction, recycling and reuse at its best.”

“This has been a wonderful project for us,” Doug Lavelle said.  “We know that cedar will require more maintenance than steel but the opportunity to live our environmental ethic, achieve our goals regarding the aesthetics of the winery, and still be financial conservative is rewarding beyond what we thought possible when we conceived this project. How many times in business does a single solution represent the lowest cost, the highest quality, and the most environmentally responsible alternative?  Not many."