Wine Conversations: It’s Not Easy Being Green (V)
Organic, biodynamic and sustainable certifications are great but they are not the only way to identify low-intervention wines
This week I am part of “wine conversations” where a thought-provoking question is lobbed into a group of wine writers for them to discuss.
The topic we were given was organic, biodynamic, regenerative and sustainable wine certifications.
I’m fifth in line which is great because my fellow writers have given me plenty of food for thought:
My one wine true love has always been low-intervention wines. It’s what my wine store and bar Vino Vero specialised in. Not just because we were eco-warriors (at least, not entirely) but because after trying an estimated 25,000+ wines over my career, I believe that low-intervention wines — on the whole — taste better.
(FYI if you want definitions of organic, biodynamic, sustainable and regenerative viticulture,
did a great job of explaining them in the first conversation of this series).Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible conventionally made wines out there. Many fall under the “I would die happy drinking this” banner.
But I do love a wine that reflects where it comes from and who made it. I’m a sucker for a winemaker who says things like “no chemicals in the vineyard” “spontaneous fermentation” or “we use minimum levels of sulphites.”
As
alluded to in this wine conversation, we Millennials are well-known for wanting better quality products and I am no exception so knowing a wine’s providence became a pillar of my wine bar and store. Around 70-80% of the wines in my place were farmed organically.But importantly, not all of them held a certification. My focus was never on the label but what the winemaker was doing on the ground. And I know there are many more organically, biodynamically and sustainably farmed wines than those who hold a certification.
Alas, this doesn’t make it easy for you as a wine consumer intent on drinking more sustainably. It’s so much easier to search for the green organic label, or find Demeter or Biodyvin (the two major biodynamic certification bodies) on the back of bottles than to guess which wines in a store are uncertified but still work to low intervention principles.
So certification certainly has its place. And as
argued in his conversation, they are not to be sniffed at or dismissed as marketing speak. There is a huge amount of work that goes into both becoming certified and maintaining it through the best of times — and more importantly, the worst of times.As a consumer, I’ve been known to rely on certifications myself. I once spent a month in Albania where I bought all my wine from an organic supermarket. It was a comfort to know that, if nothing else, the winery had gone through a process that ensured their organic credentials.
But as useful as certifications can be, they only tell part of the story.
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I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again. If you want to buy better wine, you have to shop at the right place.
touches on this in the third conversation of this series:Get familiar with importers and distributors that you really love. More often than not, import companies that bear names like Martine’s Wines, Rosenthal Selections, or Skurnik will have their name, if not their logo, on the back label of a wine bottle.
Being a former wine merchant, I would say that whilst distributors are important, wine stores are even more so because when it comes to buying wine, they are your main point of contact.
The right place will have researched all the wines on their shelf. They’ll know them inside out. They may know some of the winemakers personally. The reason I didn’t focus on wine certification labels in my store and bar was because I had researched my wines. I knew which ones worked organically, biodynamically or naturally, regardless of certification. We had “shelf talkers” — those little cards that tell you something about the wine — on every wine in the store which included whether the wine was organic, biodynamic, natural, sustainable etc. Certified or not.
When there is no certification, there is admittedly a lot of trust involved. You as a consumer have to trust that your wine merchant has done their due diligence and is telling you the truth about their wines.
That trust goes up the ladder. Wine merchants or sommeliers have to trust the winemaker is telling us the truth about their practices. If the winemaker sources grapes from somewhere other than their own vineyards (a common practice in certain parts of the world including here in Portugal), they have to trust how the grape grower treated the vines.
Surely, you’d think, a certification could eliminate some of this uncertainty, but it’s not that simple. There are myriad reasons why a winemaker might not go through certification. It can be expensive, especially for smaller projects who might rather spend money on a new barrel than on certification.
It also takes — as Simon alluded to — massive time and effort. I once watched a winery go through a certification process and it was rough on them. Not all wineries have the ability or desire to go through it.
And sometimes there are issues outside of a winemaker’s control that prevent them from being certified, like pesticide drift from a neighbouring vineyard. Or perhaps they make their biodynamic wine project in the corner of a large non-organic winery.
And of course, there is suspicion of the bodies themselves. I’ve spoken to winemakers over the years who don’t believe in the credibility of certification bodies. They think they focus on the wrong things or don’t go far enough. Others want the freedom to interpret organics or biodynamics as they see fit, not how a certification body sees it.
But I do think there is a place in this world for certification, espcially organic. They show a level of commitment both to the environment and to maintaining a standard throughout the winemaking process.
As a consumer, certifications can be a great place to start, especially if you are faced with a wall of wine in a store you don’t know. But if you rely on them too heavily, you are missing out on vast swathes of wineries that work organically, biodynamically or sustainably, just without a label to prove it.
You might even miss out on some of the best wines of your life.
If buying low-intervention wines is important to you, the best thing you can do is find the right place to buy your wine from. They will tell you how their wines are made. They will have dug deep to find out as much as they can about their winemakers.
The right place will do the work for you. After all, it’s our job.
I’d love to know what you think. Do you rely on certifications when buying low-intervention wines? And be sure to look out for the next installment of this wine conversation with .
A great argument for the immense value that independent bricks and mortar businesses still offer. Curation and assistance from a trusted source are still by far the best way to get to the good stuff.
I think outside mostly why I rarely drink American wines are because most European vineyards that have been in families for generations consider themselves curators of their land not owners. They always have been organic/sustainable, whatever label you put on it. Where America allows some really repulsive additives with no transparency. I agree. Know where to buy- Total Wine type mega box shops and a supermarket you will mostly find things I avoid.