Adam Casto’s Reflexive Questioning Is Exactly What the Wine Industry Needs

How can we make wine environmentally, socially and financially sustainable? By asking tough questions, one thing has become clear to Casto: wine is the canary in society’s coal mine.

Sometimes, you arrive at answers not by seeking them directly, but asking questions yourself—often of the people who asked you a question. Just ask Socrates. Or Adam Casto.

“The podcast wasn’t supposed to be an actual podcast,” Casto says of the very real podcast, “What’s the Problem,” which he launched on sustainability through his work as winemaker at Ehlers Estate Winery. “The premise of it came because I kept answering questions from the media about sustainability. I was giving long, ridiculous answers that encompassed environmental concerns, but also social issues, energy, politics. All in pursuit of better understanding the issues myself.”

He says kept asking himself, and his interlocutors: “What is sustainability?”

The answers he, and others were arriving at were so complex, Casto says he realized that perhaps he—and the wine industry writ large—was talking around the problem.

“Because really,” Casto asks. “What was the problem in the first place?”

Defining a Slippery Concept

The notion of sustainability, as Casto quickly found when answering earnest questions from reporters, is slippery. There are environmental concerns: most people can get behind using fewer potentially cancer-causing, groundwater polluting chemicals to grow things we want to put in our mouths.

But should—and does—sustainability also encompass the way employees are hired, treated and paid? And what about the cost of all of this, and how that affects the bottom line of the people who are opting to farm regeneratively, organically and pay their staff well?

“The initial goal I had was of having serious conversations with icons in the industry and leaders in the sustainability space,” Casto says. “I invited some of my mentors, and people I saw as leaders. Winemakers, writers, entrepreneurs. I wanted to understand the problem, and part of that was having a conversation with people I respected, and trying to arrive at some answers together.”

Casto works closely with Ehlers’ director of sales and marketing, Sandra DeMaria, and he says they both realized there was an opportunity for him, and the industry, to ask real questions that could have an impact on the sustainability of wine—from vine to bottom line.

He recorded the first conversations in late 2024, and recently wrapped up what became 60 deeply engaging, compelling and often frustrating conversations.

“We asked each other, in different ways, what the problem was,” Casto says. “And more than once, it became clear that I was part of the problem in people’s minds. Not me personally, but my asking the question.”