Dear pot community

How appellations work

EDITOR: Your July 7 article about the cannabis appellation program is accompanied by two large photos of a proud local grower’s plants in bags of potting soil (“North Coast pot farms embracing appellation”). The article discusses the grower’s plan to build a greenhouse to provide customers with three “expressions” of growing — indoor, outdoor and mixed light. Maybe our growers don’t understand the basics of appellation or are getting a head start on their marketing hype. The California appellation program requires “planting in the ground, without the use of structures, in natural light.”

The obvious reason is for the product to pick up the unique “terroir” of the region. California’s leading sentence on its website states: An appellation of origin is a protected designation that “identifies the geographical origin of a product.”

Growing with artificial light and in structures such as hoop houses cannot develop a product identifiable to the geographic region of Sonoma County. Growing in a bag containing a mixture of chemicals, additives and nutrients that have no on-site provenance cannot identify the geographical origin of the product, unless we start counting the nursery section at the hardware store.

BILL KRAWETZ

Sebastopol