When visiting tasting rooms in the Napa Valley, it?s often easy to overlook all the factors that have made the wine stand over the years. To Tom Gamble, owner of Gamble Family Vineyards, the many preservation efforts in the region have been essential in keeping Napa Valley wines ? and the region itself ? flourishing. Throughout his life, Gamble has been intimately involved with sustainability in agriculture. His family has been farming the Napa Valley since 1916, and working alongside his father George gave Gamble the opportunity to learn about the importance of the land?s habitat and the overall ecosystem. ?Farming is not just what takes place on the land,? says Gamble. ?Farming depends on a healthy ecosystem to be sustainable. We find that the more holistically we think, the more sustainable we become.? His mother, Mary Ann McGuire, was active in collecting signatures to establish the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve in 1968. The nation?s first agricultural preserve, it protects vineyards and wineries from commercial development and ensures that the land is used strictly for agricultural purposes. ?Without the agricultural preserve, I don?t know that the wine industry could have survived long enough to show that it could be a great, sustainable industry,? says Gamble. ?It bought time for all the mavericks and people with foresight ? like Robert Mondavi and Jack Davies ? to prove what they could do, and a little less than a decade after, the Judgment of Paris drew everybody?s attention to the Napa Valley.? The agricultural preserve is now 50 years old, but for the region to keep what it has in terms of agriculture requires educating people about farming in a society where citizens are less connected to the land. The Napa River once meandered across a wide swath of the valley floor…