As part of my normal routine when I get to the office every morning is to skim the feeds that I have set up. This morning I saw two articles about Oregon’s green businesses. Michael has posted on his blog, Market Accelerators, an article about marketing green products in Portland and the USA Today has an article about the use of cork as –you guessed it– corks as a sustainable product in the Oregon wine industry.

According to the USA Today article,many wine makers have been moving to screw top stoppers for their wines in the past decade or so. The problem with cork being that it can occasionally taint the wine. Not being much of a wine drinker myself, I was unaware that wine was being sold with a screw top. I imagine as screw tops become more popular, real corks will be used by wineries to show their “Green” cred. Of course what is interesting to me is not so much wines in general but how “sustainability” has quickly become a marketing and branding tool. It seems in this town, unless you want to compete to be the lowest cost provider, you are going to have to go green.