Wine and viticulture are areas of agriculture, that is to say farming, but usually we don’t think about that aspect of the industry too much. We mostly relate to experiencing wine in nice atmospheres, in tasting rooms, or over a great meal with great service and great company. But behind the scenes, things on the farm have been changing in a big way over the past couple of decades, and mostly to our benefit. Still we’re subject to gray areas, interpretive nuance, and sometimes, downright deception by labeling things as being ‘green’, sustainable, organic, and biodynamic. What do all of these things really mean in viticulture? And even more importantly, does any of it actually contribute to quality in the bottle or quality to the planet?

First off, the word ‘green’ has no legal meaning in wine or anywhere else, the possible exception being a word in today’s marketer’s bible. Green in fact is so overused and abused by marketers so trying to impress us with a company’s ‘corporate good citizen’ status whether it’s true or not, that the entire concept loses its meaning. I’m really becoming weary of, and beginning to be disgusted by the flagrant and shameless use of the word for the sake of selling more product.

Sustainable viticulture also has no legal meaning but is an actual practice that growers adopted several decades ago. This important shift in thinking moved away from chemical-based farming practices where vineyards were just hosed down constantly to keep pests and disease away. This old school methodology had the predictable effect of dumping untold gallons of dangerous chemicals into our soil that eventually found its way into our water tables, while also altering life in the vineyard and thus upsetting the natural order of things. The movement toward sustainable viticulture introduced a concept known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which goes something like this: it costs growers money to loose grape yields to pests or disease but using chemicals to rid the vineyard of these creatures (which also costs money) all but guarantees that the enemy will eventually become resistant and produce a super-creature untouched by the chemicals at hand. It’s along the same lines as us mortals overusing antibiotics, which is why we have so many different strains of bacterial and viral microorganisms. The score? 1 – troublemakers. 0 – farmers.

One of the cornerstones of IPM is to introduce natural predators to the pests. Often this means allowing an environment for these natural enemies to exist, like planting cover crops between rows of vines or allowing weeds to grow naturally so these guys have a place to live. This is a balancing act that requires great diligence and as we have learned but often forgotten, messing with Mother Nature can have serious side effects. Sometimes introducing other creatures to manage the pests becomes unmanageable itself and the chemicals then come out of the closet. Most growers practicing sustainable viticulture will set an economic stop-loss limit before they pull out the big guns; perhaps a farmer will agree to lose 10% of his crops before arming the sprayers.

All said, sustainable viticulture is a great idea, saves gazillions of gallons of chemicals from being poured directly into our earth and much of the time, really is sustainable. It also fails at times and there are a number of problems with vine diseases today that remind me again why I don’t ever want to own a vineyard. The struggle between man and pest continues to threaten many regions in the wine world but there is intensive and continuing research being done in this field, both in the US and France, with excellent contributions from Australia as well.

Organic – now there’s a buzzword and if you see it on any packaging of a consumable product, you can bet you will pay at least twice the price to have the package adorned with those seven letters. In winemaking ‘organic’ has two possibilities; one is that the grapes used in the wine have been grown organically, which is to say there has been no use of synthetic or chemically altered pesticides or fertilizers. The second use is organically processed wine, which means no sulfur dioxide was added during the winemaking process. The term itself is a moving target as there are a lot of different players, amongst them the USDA and the Tax and Trade Bureau, legally defining what does and does not constitute the word “organic” along with individual state agencies jumping into the game as well. Add to this, other non-official agencies that are evaluating the use of corks and the chemicals used to bleach them, storage tanks and materials, chemicals used to sterilize storage devices, fining and filtering wine and so on and everything begins to get blurry.

The upshot of all of this to me is that drinking wine from organically processed wine imposes high risks that the wine will either be unhealthy to consume, or it will suck. Those really are the only two possibilities given what we know about wine chemistry and the world around it. Making wine without adding sulfur dioxide, which is an antioxidant is fine if you consume it when it’s made (barrel tasting anyone?) or otherwise it will spoil through oxidation very quickly, which also leaves the door open to other microbes finding their way into your body via organic wine. This is not anti-organic sentiment but physical reality. Organically grown grapes are one thing, yet because of a lack of clarity can still be suspect, but organically processed wine is not even smart.

As insane as organically processed wine is, it actually sounds like a smart idea compared to biodynamic farming. The jury is still out as to whether the man behind biodynamics was a complete sham and savant idiot, or a genius. Rudolf Steiner was many things but is largely credited with the concept of biodynamic farming now being adopted by wine estates at a fairly brisk pace. Born in Austria in the late 1800s, he really was a prolific writer, sculptor, philosopher and spiritualist who wrote a series of papers on agriculture a few years before he left the planet. So logical was his philosophy that many adopted his concept of the farm being an organic whole that should be treated holistically, which created an almost ‘cult-like’ following. It’s not like there wasn’t some truth to his thinking. 

Winegrowers have also attached themselves to biodynamic viticulture but it takes effort and considerable time to see the results of producing better wine. Part of the issue with biodynamic viticulture is the strange and very unscientific steps required. Imagine having to ferment cow manure in a cow horn and bury it over the winter or ground quartz and mix it with rainwater, put the substance in a cow horn, bury it in the spring and dig it up in autumn. Or what if you have to put the flower heads from a Yarrow plant into a deer bladder (we’re assuming the deer is already dead, right?) and apply the results to compost? And all of these and more must be done in strict accordance to the cycles of the moon. Is this crazy or what? It really is ridiculous to most of us.

Not including the foregoing, there are two formidable problems with biodynamic farming: one is the lack of solid research to know if any of this is really worthwhile or just folklore. Despite all of this strangeness there are some very high-end wine estates that are researching or actually using these methods and claim that it makes a difference in their finished product and even elaborates on the vineyard’s terroir. There’s just no reliable data available and it makes sense that even without fermenting oak bark in the skull of a domestic animal, putting this depth of care into a vineyard is logically going to produce positive results.

Secondly, the certifying bodies that hand out the designation of ‘Certified Biodynamic’ present their own difficulties, which may be the bigger problem. The fact is that are a lot of so-called ‘agencies’ popping up with questionable authority to confer some sort of certification as to a company’s farming practices. Some of them insist that only some of the rules of biodynamics be followed, but not all the rules. Similar to religion, people take what applies most to them, or makes the most sense, and leave the rest behind so not all things are necessarily going to be equal when it comes to biodynamic viticulture. This type of inconsistency threatens to fragment the credibility of any organization based on a belief system or common principles. 

Despite some of the very odd directives of biodynamic principles, if I knew another farmer I respected that told me “it just works”, would I be inclined to spend ten years fooling around with the formula only to find that it failed? No way. If jumped in I’d follow the prescribed methods to a tee regardless of how wacky it sounded; I think this is why many growers are doing these seemingly nutty things.

All in all, this post just touched the very tip of the iceberg regarding this evolving and very complex subject – there’s just far too much information to include here. But I am fascinated to see how all of this develops and what ends up as a mere marketing ploy, and what ends up being a valuable contribution to the quality of wine. Stay tuned for Green 201.