Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Sales of "Green" Wine are Up, and Monsanto Smiles ...

Sales of so-called “green” wines increased 12.1 percent over the past year, nearly four times the growth rate of wine sales in general, according to a new Nielsen Company report released last week at the “Green Wine Summit” in Santa Rosa, Calif.

 

The survey, reported by WineBusiness.com, also found that consumers are confused about what makes a wine “sustainable,” “organic,” or “biodynamic.” This confusion will only grow as these terms are used indiscriminately as marketing tools without set standards or definitions.

 

The industry has made several praiseworthy efforts to set standards for these terms. The Wine Institute, the California industry association, has published a textbook of sustainability practices to guide its members. Oregon has LIVE – Low Input Viticulture and Enology – which certifies wineries that use sustainable practices. But there is no easy or uniform definition of “sustainable viticulture.” And with Monsanto advertising itself as the epitome of sustainable agriculture, consumers are bound to become leery of winery claims about their own farming practices or reduced carbon-footprint.

 

As for “organic” wines, the U.S. government made that nomenclature impossibly confusing with its organic agriculture regulations a few years ago, and the best the industry can do now is label its product “made with organically grown grapes.” That seems a half-way measure at best, and there is not a single certifying organization to give that claim any stature or authenticity.

 

There is a single organization for certifying biodynamic wines – Demeter USA. Demeter is not a wine industry creation, which gives it an extra measure of credibility. There is still some gray area, though, as wineries can claim to follow biodynamic practices without applying for certification, and there is no third-party verification of those claims.

 

Another survey reported at the summit, from Full Glass Research, found that 59 percent of those who purchased organic or sustainable wines said they did so because the viticultural practices were better for the planet, while 38 percent of those who do not purchase them said they rarely see them on store shelves, and 33 percent of those who did not seek these wines out simply did not care.

 

I like the "green wine" movement, but I worry that it has become a marketing gimmick as much as a form of viticulture. A wine made by practices that respect the Earth SHOULD taste better, but when every wine becomes "green," how will we be able to tell?

Carbon-Neutral Wine

Wineries today tout their green credentials almost as much as their scores from influential wine magazines. Solar power, sustainable or organic or biodynamic (s/o/b) viticulture, and "carbon-neutral" winemaking are all marketing buzzwords for wineries. In today's column in The Washington Post, I focus on "carbon neutral" - what does it mean, and why should we consumers care? And in this video, I interview Dave Pearce, chief winemaker for New Zealand's Grove Mill winery, which was the world's first to attain "carbon-neutral" certification. The video was shot on my new Flip camera in a restaurant, and the light was focused on the center of the table, which means the wine glasses look great while Dave and I resemble shadowy creatures in a county fair house of mirrors, but oh well. I'll get the hang of it someday.

psst - Grove Mill's wines are good, too! Especially the Sauvignon Blanc and the Riesling. The Pinot Noir ain't shabby, either.

Cheers!

California DOES make good bargain wine!

It is easy to knock California for not making affordable wine worth drinking. And that’s mostly the wine industry’s fault, because they would like us to focus on the high-end cult cabernets and chardonnays that sell for triple figures to exclusive mailing lists. I’ve always thought there must be some good, cheap California wines, and figured they are mostly sold in-state, never reaching the East Coast.

Well, I’m wrong, as usual.

Parducci 2005 Sustainable Red ($10) is not only delicious, but politically correct in the green sort of way. Parducci is part of the Mendocino Wine Company, a leading proponent of sustainable, organic and biodynamic viticulture. This blend, unspecified on the label, includes merlot, cabernet sauvignon, syrah, primitivo, zinfandel (the winery cheat sheet doesn’t distinguish between those two), petite sirah, and viognier. It shows great fruit and balance and is deliciously fun.

Another pleasant surprise is Fess Parker Winery's Frontier Red Lot No. 91 (about $11), a multi-vintage blend that features the man himself in Davy Crockett/Daniel Boone finery (or at least millinery) on the label and a juicy, delicious red wine inside. Great for burgers, pizza, or just about any other casual fare that calls for red.

Oregon Pinot Noir - Sustainably Good

Oregon pinot noir offers an ideal opportunity to explore the effects of terroir, as the state’s main wine region, the Willamette (rhymes with ‘dammit’) Valley features two main soil types, each with its own expression in the wine.

I explore these expressions in my column this week in The Washington Post, written after my enjoyable sojourn in McMinnville at the International Pinot Noir Celebration.

The Oregon wine industry leads the way in the United States in sustainable, organic and biodynamic viticulture. There is a state certification for sustainable viticulture and a regional group called “LIVE” - that's Low Input Viticulture and Enology – that stresses environmentally friendly practices in the vineyard and in the winery. Its members include familiar names such as Adelsheim, Bethel Heights, Chehalem, and Rex Hill, among many others. LIVE works with the “Salmon Safe” certification that monitors wineries for practices that protect fisheries, and the IOBC, the International Organization for Biological and Integrated Control of Noxious Animals and Plants. (Whew – that's a mouthful!)

This environmental consciousness is to be applauded, for it stands to reason that healthier land will produce healthier grapes and better wine. No one can prove that yet, and any honest winemaker will admit that bad wine can be made from great grapes, and no great wine can be made from bad grapes. So maybe land wins out over the winemaker’s hand, after all.

Price, of course, is always a factor. Oregon has positioned itself in the $35 - $55 range for fine wines, and is beginning to feel the pinch of the recession, as luxury wines from other regions such as Napa Valley experience steep price cuts. Oregon pinot noir has not yet responded to this pressure, though Ted Casteel of Bethel Heights said his winery will be increasing production of its regular cuvee and de-emphasizing its top wines with the 2009 harvest.

Even without the economic climate making its presence felt (yet) on the price of Oregon pinot noir, there are several that provide good value at $25 or less. Here are a few worth seeking out, in alphabetical order:

A to Z Pinot Noir 2007, Oregon, $20

Anne Amie Cuvee A Pinot Noir 2007, Willamette Valley, $25

Benton Lane Pinot Noir 2007, Willamette Valley, $25

Firesteed Pinot Noir 2007, Oregon, $18

Of Cow Horns and the Cosmos

Biodynamics is a small but rapidly growing style of winemaking. Basically put, biodynamics is “Extreme Organics,” going way beyond avoidance of chemical fertlizers, pesticides and herbicides to include some rather esoteric practices. The wackiest of these is probably the only thing many people hear about biodynamics – burying cow horns full of manure throughout the vineyard at the autumnal equinox.

Equal parts agriculture, philosophy and mysticism, biodynamics somehow stops short of requiring the winemaker to dance naked among the vines at midnight under a full moon.

Shortly after I posted a link to today’s Washington Post column on biodynamic viticulture on Facebook, I received a message from David Page and Barbara Shinn (right), the husband-and-wife team behind Shinn Estate Vineyards on Long Island. I met them a few years back while researching an article on New York wines for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“We just dripped this year’s first compost tea brew through the irrigation system,” they wrote. “Turning millions of beneficial organisms into billions. Nothing about doing these kind of applications seems mystical to us, just good feet-on-the-ground modern use of old farming practices that too many good farmers abandoned for chemicals with names no one can understand, and only addictive results.”

I can’t say biodynamic wines taste better than other wines, but in many cases, they do taste different – more lively and vibrant. They often defy our expectations of what a wine should taste like, which is precisely the point Nicolas Joly, the mad professor of biodynamie, makes when he rails against “appellation l’Oréal.”

Conventional wisdom says biodynamic farming won’t work here on the East Coast. I don’t know how rigorous David and Barbara are in this regard, whether they are “as biodynamic as possible,” “practicing biodynamic,” or working on a Demeter certification. But I do know they make some terrific wines, and their message gave me a hankering for a glass of their Merlot or Sauvignon Blanc.

The moon is waning. Do  you know where your vines are?

A Toast to Earth Day

Today is a day to celebrate our planet. Heck – the government has finally acknowledged that we’re killing it with greenhouse gases. Maybe now we can take some steps to help the environment.

One step might be to support earth-friendly winemaking – sustainable, organic, or biodynamic viticulture, or what I cheekily call S/O/B wines. In my Washington Post column today, I explore the idea that taking better care of the land might actually produce better wines – something that, I will admit, I cannot prove. Today’s column focuses on sustainable and organic wines – more on biodynamics next week.

Cheers, and Happy Earth Day!

The Terroirists Are Coming!

The “Return to Terroir” tasting came to Washington this week, courtesy of the French Wine Society. It wasn’t as big a tasting as in New York the day before, but I only had to find parking along Reservoir Rd., not shlep to the Big Apple and back in one day.

I also had the opportunity to have an extended conversation with three leading apostles of biodynamic viticulture: Nicolas Joly of Coulée de Serrant; Christophe Erhart of Domaine Josmeyer; and Mathieu Deiss, the newest generation of winemaking at Domaine Marcel Deiss.

There were about forty wineries at the tasting, mostly from France, but also from Spain, Austria, Australia, Italy, Chile and of course the United States. I won’t bore you with tasting notes. One does not take notes at a tasting like this – one shmoozes, one kisses up and hopes to be kissed, one tries to get an impression of wines to be explored later, all the while keeping a vigilant eye out for a familiar face or an uncrowded spit bucket.

But I can give some impressions: Biodynamics is a fascinating and somewhat controversial farming philosophy – some call it a religion – and the wines are not by definition good. Many of them are, but there is still the possibility of too much alcohol or heavy-handed oak. The idea of biodynamics is to express a particular terroir, and some of these terroirs do not match our preconceptions of what wine should taste like – they are challenging wines; often delicious, sometimes not, never boring.

With biodynamics, I feel a bit like Fox Mulder on The X-Files: I want to believe. It makes sense that taking care of the earth will produce better wines. To be honest, though, I’m not at all certain that I could pick an organic or biodynamic wine from a blind tasting lineup.

I need to explore these more.

More on this tasting and my conversations with the winemakers to come …

The Green Revolution

Wine is going green. Like many of us trying to shrink our "carbon footprints" by using less electricity, recycling, or driving hybrid cars, the wine industry is becoming increasingly earth-friendly.

At the Fair Lakes Whole Foods Market in Fairfax, Va., customers gravitate to the "Earth Friendly" wine section, with 36 selections from around the world. At My Organic Market in Rockville, Md., the words "sustainable," "organic," and "biodynamic" appear next to the prices of earth-friendly wines. Chevy Chase Wine & Spirits in D.C. lists "green" wineries on its Web site. Biodynamic wines are singled out at Cork & Fork in Gainesville, Va., and the store’s new outpost in Maryland’s Bethesda Row. Organic and biodynamic wines at Franklin’s Restaurant, Brewery and General Store in Hyattsville, Md., come with promotional placards as big as the ones bearing Robert Parker’s seal of approval.

For wine, this is a dramatic change. Remember when "organic food" conjured images of bug-ridden lettuce and wormy apples at hippie co-ops? "Organic wine" used to mean oxidized juice trod by unwashed feet, destined to spoil in bottle before the cork was even pulled. The more chemicals dumped on the vineyard, it seemed, the better and more reliable the wine.

Now that organic foods are in demand and widely available, consumers are also responding to wineries that take care of their land. And vine-hugging wineries are learning that "green" buzzwords on a label help sell the product.

But just what are these trends? Are they real, or are they Madison Avenue marketing ploys? More importantly, can you taste the difference?

"Sustainable" viticulture has no legal definition, so it essentially means anything the winegrower wants it to mean. Sustainable is similar to organic, in that it reduces use of chemicals, except that vintners need not undergo an expensive certification process and they retain the ability to use chemical sprays if their crops are threatened by disease or pests.

"Organic" means the winery’s vineyard practices have been formally certified, most likely by a state agency. To be certified, the vineyard must be farmed organically – with no artificial pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers – for three years. Still, the word "organic" on a wine label is confusing: The USDA has decreed that an organic wine must be made without the addition of sulfites, a natural and essential preservative. That’s why you often see a wine "made with organically grown grapes" – this means the vineyard is farmed organically, even if the winery practices don’t meet some cockamamie government restriction.

"Biodynamic" farming goes beyond organics. Developed in the 1920s by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, biodynamics takes a holistic approach that focuses on biodiversity. The vineyard is at once a closed eco-system and yet part of a greater cosmos. Winery and vineyard wastes are used to produce compost and natural fertilizers to feed the vines. An international organization called Demeter certifies biodynamic farms, including wineries, but like sustainable viticulture there is no government-decreed definition of "biodynamic."

Derided by skeptics as a religion or "voodoo agriculture" more than a farming system, biodynamics can sound downright kooky. It mandates burying cow horns filled with dung throughout the vineyard on the autumnal equinox, or pruning vines according to the phase of the moon, for example. Yet its adherents include some luminaries of the wine world, such as France’s Domaine Leroy, Coulée de Serrant, and Zind Humbrecht; Alvaro Palacios in Spain; and Germany’s Peter-Jakob Kühn. Steiner’s disciples in California include Benziger, Grgich Hills, Quintessa, Quivira, Robert Sinskey and Bonny Doon.

"The one thing that distinguishes biodynamics from other forms of agriculture is that it rejuvenates the land," says Mike Benziger, of Benziger Family Winery in Sonoma. "Each year we take a crop from the land, but we’re giving back fertility and vitality."

Benziger has championed biodynamics for more than a decade, using the method exclusively on the 260 acres his winery farms. He also works with 40 growers who farm an additional 1,100 acres, all of which now use one of the green methods.

Earth-friendly wines are also attractive to some restaurants that feature organic ingredients. At the new Redwood Restaurant and Bar in Bethesda Row, sommelier Brian Cook features "sustainable" wines, a rubric he uses to cover all three green viticulture methods.

"It’s something I believe in, and it’s an easy bridge to the food menu," Cook says. "We’re sourcing sustainable and organic ingredients as much as possible. So if a producer practices sustainable viticulture, I’ll be more inclined to pick up his wines."

Okay, so taking care of the earth is a good thing, we can agree on that. Is there a reason to seek out sustainable, organic or biodynamic wines other than we don’t like dumping chemicals into the ground?

In other words, can we TASTE it? Or is all this "green" talk a cynical appeal to our new eco-sensibilities?

"I can’t tell you in good conscience that biodynamic wines are better than other wines, but I can tell you they are different," Benziger says. That’s because they reflect a vineyard’s individual characteristics – its terroir – more clearly without the interference of artificial chemicals, he explains. In part that’s due to the use of natural yeasts that grow in the vineyard; commercial yeasts often are designed to emphasize characteristics of the grape variety or a specific style, no matter where the grapes are grown.

"With biodynamics, the grapes are able to express the characteristics of place," Benziger says. "With chemicals, all you get are the varietal flavors of the grape." In other words, a least common denominator.

There is no scientific evidence that biodynamic farming is superior to organic or even sustainable viticulture. And there is certainly no guarantee against bad winemaking, even with the b-word on the label. Yet if "wine is made in the vineyard," then it makes sense to take care of the vineyard, and to seek out wines grown by sustainable, organic or biodynamic methods. Made well, these wines often taste fresher, more vibrant and alive than most. As wine lovers, we want wines to convey a "sense of place," whether it be lush fruit balanced with ample acidity because of cool nights and ocean breezes, or the stony austerity of wines grown in poor soil on steep mountain slopes. We should applaud vintners who coax these expressions from their vineyards through their farming practices.

The nuances of these wines may not be readily apparent at first sip. Are these flavors a matter of faith, discernible only to true believers? I think not. If responsible farming can make a better tomato, it can make a better wine. Winemakers are learning to listen to how grapes express themselves in the vineyard, rather than controlling that expression through chemicals. We need to listen to how these new wines express themselves in the glass.

Benziger 2004 Tribute, Sonoma Mountain, $75 (certified biodynamic).

An explosive wine, strong, gritty and earthy, one that definitely speaks of the soil. The flavors are hard to pin down – currant, mocha, then stone, earth and spice. I wish I were as alive as this wine.

(A slightly condensed version of this article appeared in the November 2008 issue of Washingtonian magazine.)

Quivira 2006 Grenache, Dry Creek Valley, Wine Creek Ranch, $26 (certified biodynamic).

Austere and well-structured, this delicious wine resembles a Côtes-du-Rhône Village, such as a Vacqueyras or a Rasteau, only with a bit of California fruit and flair. Quivira also produces a 2007 Sauvignon Blanc, Fig Tree Vineyard, $18, that is supple with tropical fruit and hints of Asian spices.

Domaine Carabinièrs, Côtes-du-Rhône 2005, $10 (made with organically grown grapes).

"Mountain fruit," like the satisfaction you taste after a long vertical hike.

Lolonis Lady Bug Red, Cuvee VII, Redwood Valley, $13 (organically grown grapes).

A multi-year red blend based on Zinfandel and named for the lady bugs used as natural pest control in the vineyard, this is a great value for an everyday red, perfect for casual fare.