Wine Conversations: It's Not Easy Being Green (IV)
Why it's an insult to call 'organic' and 'biodynamic' marketing terms
This week, I’m participating in a collaborative set of articles named Wine Conversations. Thanks to for the initiative! This month’s topic is sustainability and the profusion of related terms such as organic, biodynamic and regenerative agriculture.
If you want to catch up on the first three installments in this ‘conversation’, here they are:
Organic is not a Marketing Term
A few years back, my girlfriend and I had an allotment in Amsterdam. We farmed it organically, attempting to grow broad beans, salad vegetables, carrots and tomatoes. Even though I grew up on a smallholding, I had never previously tried my own hand at vegetable gardening.
You learn quickly that nature is brutal. If it isn’t unseasonable weather preventing your seeds from germinating or your tomatoes from ripening, it’s the constant onslaught from pigeons, slugs, snails and smaller less visible predators. After a year’s work, we barely harvested enough for a couple of meals.
If you eschew the conventional armoury of synthetic sprays and pellets, you have to think differently. We tried installing nets to keep the birds away from our beans and lettuces. But they were smart enough to wait for the wind to open up our defence systems. It would have been better to figure out what else the birds like to eat, and then to make sure that was planted somewhere strategically nearby.
Try to fight nature and nature will always win. The only logical path is to work with, not against it. But that requires infinitely more patience and learning than the chemical warfare alternative.
It’s for this reason that I cringe in pain whenever someone utters the phrase “organic/biodynamic farming is something ‘they’ just do for the marketing”.
I defy anyone who has spent time in the company of an organic or biodynamic grower, or who ever worked so much as a single gardening season or grape harvest to be able to choke out those words.
Changing the Mindset
Tending vines and growing grapes isn’t fundamentally different to any other kind of farming - except that it’s usually a monoculture, or close to it, and that the plants have a useful lifetime measured in decades.
Vitis vinifera vines are susceptible to a number of pests and pestilences, chiefly grey and powdery mildew – oidium and peranospera to give them their fancy Latin names. These two ailments can knock out the major part of a grape harvest. Add in extreme weather events such as frost, hail and drought, and an unlucky grower could forego their entire crop.
What can growers do to fight these problems? Conventional methodology recommends the use of systemic sprays to fight the mildew, irrigation to combat drought and nets to offer some protection against hail or birds – who also find grapes rather tasty. But all of these interventions have limitations and downsides.
Growers who work within the boundaries of organic or biodynamic certification have far fewer options when it comes to fungicides or pesticides, currently just the two elemental substances copper and sulphur. Combined to make Bordeaux mixture, they offer temporary protection against mildew, but rainfall washes it away and requires that the grower does a further pass to respray.
In a rainy year, a grower who farms according to organic or biodynamic principles will have to accept some degree of grape loss. Whether it is 10, 20 or 50% depends on a complex web of factors. Pruning and canopy management to maximise airflow can help blow mildew spores safely on their way. Healthy plants are better able to fight and recover from mildew attacks. Resistance also differs widely from variety to variety.
But still, harvests vary. In some years, nature smiles. In others, it roars and bares its teeth. A skilled grower can optimise their vineyard for success by working on soil and plant health – this is where biodynamic preparations and herbal sprays come into their own. But nature is the final arbiter come harvest time. A grower who can’t get their head around this will never manage to farm organically or biodynically, because these systems require a high degree of acceptance combined with a dose of fatalism.
I frequently discuss farming with growers who are at various points in their evolution. Some are on the path to organics, trying to reduce their synthetic inputs, considering whether they should take the next step. I ask what it would take for them to embrace full-scale organic conversion. An answer I often hear is “well, I would love to. But in a rainy year, I need to spray fungicides, otherwise I would lose too much of the crop.”
That response clearly demonstrates that they are not ready for conversion. Farming according to organic or biodynamic principles is a lifestyle. It requires a change of thinking, from a combative to a collaborative approach.
True sustainability
If we talk about sustainability, a grower has to factor in the possibility that some years will deliver poor harvests. If a 20% loss of yields in one year would bring you close to bankruptcy, you are not running a sustainable business.
Losing any amount of a harvest is tough. I’ve spent enough time with growers in the throe of a challenging year to read the signs. The resigned expressions, the shrug of the shoulders, the peppering of sentences with philosophical plaudits: “it is what it is”, “We can’t change the weather”, “It’s part of the process”. No-one enjoys seeing their whole year’s work wasted.
I remember visiting Gut Oggau in 2017, following their disastrous 2016 harvest. A double whammy of spring frost and summer hail took out about 80% of the crop. But Eduard and Steffi endured. They blended what was left together, and made a unique label (the ‘family reunion’ wines) that has never been repeated. These wines eventually became desirable and collectable in their own right. Meanwhile, the couple waited for the following year. Their dedication to biodynamic farming never weakened.
Visiting La Biancara in the Veneto in June 2018, I took a walk through the vineyards with Angiolino Maule. He was on edge because he could see the first signs of peranospera on the vines. “What can you do about it?” I asked. “Nothing” he said, “we just have to wait and see if we get some wind.” The next day, he was more relaxed. A cool breeze had swept in the previous afternoon and blown away the spores.
This is the reality of organics and biodynamics. There is only so much you can do. The rest is up to nature and the weather. In this sense, farming is similar to how we care for our own bodies. If you eat a healthy and varied diet, exercise frequently and get plenty of fresh air, your body stands a better chance of fighting off illness. You optimised yourself for a long and fulfilling life. In contrast, if you survive on a diet of junk food and over the counter medications to bring you back into equilibrium, it’s going to be harder to stay healthy. When illness does strike, recovery may be slower or less effective.
What does the certificate tell me?
The certification process for organic and biodynamic growers barely hints at the vineyard work. It doesn’t tell you how many years the grower took to work through conversion, what they lost along the way or how they came to terms with the the reality of working without synthetics. Certification is just a basic form of proof, a quality mark that reassures customers that you are the real deal. Just as a appellation guarantees the provenance of the grapes, so an organic certificate guarantees that no synthetic products were used.
What lies behind that certificate is the strength of will to think about farming in a different way. To farm without chemical warfare is to respect nature and to walk arm-in-arm with it through the fields. If you can’t do this, you’ll be handing back that organic seal in minutes. When the first tricky vintage comes along, the pressure will be too great. The idea that you could be in control, that you can fight, will be too tempting.
To suggest that life-changing decisions like this could be made on a marketing whim is like saying you could build Rome in a day, or write a bestselling novel in a week. It is the most insulting statement imaginable, because it demonstrates total ignorance of how farming works.
A certificate might just seem like a piece of paper, but it is the result of a major decision-making process and work that spans many years. It is, effectively, the proxy for an entire belief-system.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and get ready for the next installment in Wine Conversations which will be from
.
Having read the previous articles, there has been no mention of packaging yet. I know you have mentioned this in previous posts, but it seems like this topic goes part and parcel with the matter at hand. For wines that are designed to be consumed years, if not decades, after being "containerized", what are the viable alternatives to cork topped glass bottles? Are there any ongoing studies using these other methods to determine their viability?