How good are organic wines? For a start, there are far more of them out there than you might suspect. They’re not in some fringe niche either: They include, for instance, Château Margaux, the Médoc first growth; the wines of the Domaine Leroy in Burgundy; those of Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa Valley; and certain bottlings from the Penfolds vineyards in South Australia’s Clare Valley.
The question, then, would seem to answer itself, but there’s a catch: Wines like these rarely display the word “organic.” Sometimes it’s to avoid having the wine perceived as funky, or bought for what the grower believes is the wrong reason. Robert Sinskey says he doesn’t want people to think first about the way he cultivates his grapes and then about the quality of the wine. “We want the customer to buy our wine because it’s good. The way we nurture the vines is simply part of our effort to make it that way.”
Robert Gross of Cooper Mountain Vineyards in Oregon also insists that quality is the point of the wine and that organic cultivation is simply a technique. Gross does use the words “organically grown” on his label because he knows there are people looking for it. “But it can also be a turnoff,” he said. “Some wine drinkers see it and think we’re being preachy.”
Many producers of wine from organically grown grapes keep mum on the subject to leave their options open in the vineyard. Organizations that certify organic compliance sometimes impose parameters based on philosophically wholesome principles rather than on the practical needs of viticulture. In an extreme emergency, growers might be faced with the choice of spraying, as innocuously as possible, or losing a crop. They argue that it’s better not to carry an “organic” statement at all—even when the vineyard is certified—rather than find themselves obliged to explain, in such a situation, why it had to be dropped. And then there are the many grape growers of California who ignored the chemical revolution of the 1950s and continue to do what they have always done. As bemused as Monsieur Jourdain—the character in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who discovered he’d been speaking prose all his life—they now learn that they have long been practicing organic viticulture without having once given it a thought. “They just don’t make a big deal of it,” Bob Blue, winemaker for the Bonterra organic wines of Fetzer Vineyards, told me. “They don’t even bother to sell their grapes as ‘organically grown.’ But that’s probably because they’d have to get involved with the maze of certifying organizations and state regulators to do it. And the fees can be heavy for a small producer.”
Aside from those who had never grown grapes in any other way, the return to organic practices, both in California and in Europe, began in the early 1980s. I remember my surprise, sometime about then, when I found Ulysses Lolonis of Redwood Valley in Mendocino County dumping buckets of predator ladybugs among the vines in his family’s vineyard. He says he started because of concern about the pesticides being proposed to him. “Eventually we found we didn’t need them at all,” he told me recently. “If we left enough grass between the rows of vines to serve as bug territory, it soon had a mixed population of insects keeping themselves busy devouring each other without bothering us.
“We’ve come a long way since then. Now, rather than grass, we grow a nitrogen-rich cover crop to feed the soil when we plow it under. The bugs are just as happy, and we can do without pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Do these organic methods enhance the flavor or quality of our wine? Well, they don’t seem to take anything away from it.” (In fact, Lolonis’s Zinfandel is one of the best in California.)
John Wiliams of Frog’s Leap Winery in Napa Valley is more forthright. He is convinced that organic cultivation does make a difference to wine quality. “The first vineyard we purchased in 1987,” he said, “had been farmed by an old-timer on what we would now call organic principles. Wanting to do things right, we retained a firm to test the vines and the soil and make recommendations to us. They found many things wrong, but fortunately were able to supply us with all the chemical supplements they said we needed. The effort was grandly expensive and soon led to a general decline in the vineyard, the quality of its fruit, and the wine we made from it. “I was urged to talk to an organic-farming consultant. Amigo Bob [Cantisano] certainly looked the part—ponytail, shorts, and tie-dyed T-shirt. What he said made sense, and we decided to give it a try in a couple of test areas. We now have nine growers in Napa Valley producing organically grown grapes for us.
“We found that a soil rich in organic matter absorbs and holds moisture better—so we were able to go back to dry farming, the old way of growing grapes in California, instead of relying on irrigation. We discovered that plants fed by compost and cover crops, rather than chemical fertilizers, draw in nutrients in a measured way that helps control growth. Our vines are therefore strong and healthy and give balanced fruit. We’ve learned to think about the causes of problems rather than react with a quick fix to each one as it comes up. It’s made us better farmers. In doing all this, I’m not trying to save the world. I just want to make good wine.”
There are others who farm organically simply because they don’t like the idea of using industrial products in the vineyard. Jean-Pierre Margan of Château La Canorgue in the Côtes de Luberon (Peter Mayle country) told me he was taught in his viticulture courses which synthetic fertilizers to use and what and when to spray. “I never liked the idea,” he said. “My father and grandfather had made good wine in the traditional way, and when my wife and I started to revive her family’s dormant vineyard, I decided to do the same. It wasn’t an act of defiance.
“But confronting nature directly means you have to be vigilant. You must look ahead—mistakes are difficult to correct organically. You become more efficient because you have to stay on top of every detail of every vine—and perhaps that’s why the wine is better.
“Though the ‘organic’ aspect of the vineyard is simply the way we work, I put it on the label to allow those who want wine from organically grown grapes to find us. But there should be no need for me to say anything. Organic cultivation is and should be the norm. It’s those who use chemicals that should have to identify themselves.
“I’m not alone in the way I work. There has been a tremendous awakening among winegrowers in France. Usually it starts with the growers getting involved with a program of reduced reliance on synthetic sprays and fertilizers and the reintroduction of more benign techniques—but they soon see the difference in their vineyards and move increasingly toward the freedom that organic cultivation allows.”
That awakening has been greatly accelerated by the work of Claude Bourguignon, whose highly influential book, Le sol, la terre et les champs (The Soil, the Land and the Fields), is now in its third edition. Almost every French winegrower I’ve talked to in the past several years has at some point introduced Bourguignon’s name into our conversation. Now he’s one of the leading French experts in soil analysis—his client list includes Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Chatêau Latour and reads, in fact, like an honor roll of French viticulture. Much of what he has to say comes down to the essential role of microorganic life in the soil. He expresses regret, in the introduction to his book, that the issues involved have become noisily politicized.
In the second edition of his book Burgundy, Anthony Hanson describes a visit to Bourguignon’s laboratory, north of Dijon. Having collected a random sample of earth from a flower bed, Bourguignon shook it with water, added a coloring agent, then put it under his microscope for Hanson to look at. “I shall never forget the sight,” Hanson writes. “Tiny specks of solid particles (clays and other inanimate matter) were bathed in liquid which teemed with swimming, turning, thrashing, pulsing little organisms—bacteria, yeasts, microbes of all sorts.”
In an ounce or two of healthy soil, Bourguignon will tell you, there are billions of such microorganisms. They transform mineral elements in the soil to make them available to plants that could not otherwise assimilate them. They attach iron to acetic acid, for example, forming the iron acetate that a plant can absorb. This symbiotic relationship allows a plant to function properly, to capture the energy in sunlight. That’s where the energy-into-matter-and-matter-into-energy food chain starts. Soil bacteria need no human presence to flourish and do their work. It’s sobering to be reminded that our lives depend on them.
Biodynamic farming takes organic cultivation one step further by paying special attention to soil bacteria and to harnessing the rest of the energy in the cosmos in ways that strengthen the vine. It has developed from theories expounded by Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian social philosopher, in the 1920s. Those who practice it are used to the skepticism, even the mockery, of others—there’s an air of both New Age mysticism and Old Age witchcraft about it. But it works.
Robert Sinskey, who is heading toward biodynamic certification for all his vineyards, got interested because of a specific problem with one vineyard in particular. “The soil was as hard as rock,” he told me. “It was dead. It was planted with Chardonnay, and the wine from those vines was always green and lean. We put in a cover crop and began using biodynamic sprays to encourage the development of microorganisms in the soil. Gradually we brought that vineyard around, and the wine is now so appealing and distinctive that we will soon be bottling it with a special designation.”
Robert Gross, a physician whose interests include alternative medicine, is also moving toward biodynamic certification for his vineyards at Cooper Mountain. “It brings the vines into harmony with their environment,” he told me.
Two of the biodynamic sprays—500, a very dilute solution of cow manure that has been aged in a cow horn placed underground through the winter and then stirred into blood-warm water with a motion calculated to maximize its effect; and 501, a similarly dilute solution of powdered silica—are basic to the system. Other sprays, mostly homeopathic teas of herbs and flowers, are used by some and not by others. Working in accordance with phases of the moon and reserving certain days for spraying, pruning, or planting to take advantage of propitious movements of the planets are ideas that some accept and others reserve judgment on.
Farming with due provision for the gravitational pull of the moon is ancient wisdom. Jim Fetzer—who started the program of wines made from organic grapes at Fetzer and is now owner of the Ceago Vinegarden, a fully accredited biodynamic vineyard estate in Mendocino County—said he never has to explain any of this to his Mexican workers. “They’re used to the idea that various aspects of agricultural work should coincide with the phases of the moon,” he said. “It makes sense: If the changes in atmospheric pressure associated with the moon’s waxing and waning can affect the rise and fall of oceans, you can be sure it affects the position of the sap in the vines.” As for the special days, Alan York, Ceago Vinegarden’s biodynamics consultant (and consultant to Joseph Phelps and Benziger, among others), put it to me this way: “We don’t know why or how the plant responds to the changing positions of the planets. It’s like surfing. There’s this force and you try to ride it.”
There is much more to biodynamics than homeopathy and “root” days. A key element is the systematic introduction of other plants among the principal crop. There is a rich diversity of them growing among the vines at Ceago Vinegarden, including olive trees, lavender, and buckwheat—habitat to tiny wasps that lay their eggs inside the eggs of leafhoppers and stop that problem before it starts. When I was young, I took it for granted that most vines in Italy and France had peach trees and even a line or two of corn planted among them. I thought it was to make full use of the land, but now I know better.
“Biodynamics is neither a recipe nor even a specific technique,” says Nicolas Joly, owner of Coulée de Serrant, the white-wine jewel of Loire Valley vineyards. “It can’t be applied mechanically. It demands a complete understanding of what is happening in the life cycle of a plant and the formation of its fruit so that the functions can be enhanced.”
Joly, an articulate advocate and proselytizer, condemns completely what he sees as the sins of modern viticulture. “Herbicides and pesticides annihilate the microbial life peculiar to any particular soil, and synthetic fertilizers then standardize the vines’ nourishment and thus the character of the fruit. What is the point of talking about terroir in such circumstances?”
There is a wide gap between biodynamics and conventional viticulture, and a considerable one even between standard and organic practices. Part of that difference is cost. The abuse of pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers can create an imbalance ever more expensive to address. But the considerable handwork involved in organic viticulture is also costly—and justified economically only if higher quality attracts a better price for the wine.
In the detailed report on its experiment of organically cultivating roughly 125 acres of vineyard on its Clare Valley estate over the past 10 or 20 years, Penfolds (owned by Southcorp Wines) shows that the cost of cultivating those blocks of vines was as much as 50 percent higher than that of cultivating similar neighboring blocks by conventional methods. Australia has high labor costs, and that accounts to some extent for this startling difference; but, when expressed as cost per ton because of the smaller yields when compared with conventional viticulture, the cost of Penfolds’ organically grown grapes becomes 100 percent higher.
In the face of such numbers, we can’t ignore the fact that whatever satisfaction growers may get from the quality of their products and from their stewardship of the land, they accept the risk inherent in growing a crop as fragile as grapes in order to make a fair return.
In most parts of the winemaking world, particularly in California, there are programs designed and supported by growers’ associations to help members wean themselves from dependence on synthetic chemical treatments and to combine organic farming principles with a sound and limited use of environmentally safe products in a cost-effective manner. The program run by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission, -financed by an assessment on grape production voted by the growers themselves, includes a step-by-step workbook that encourages growers to meet regularly in small groups for mutual support and the exchange of information and to constantly survey every aspect of their work. They evaluate their progress in sowing cover crops, for example, and installing nesting boxes near their vineyards for predator barn owls. There are similar programs organized by the Central Coast Vineyard Team, and still more are being developed on a smaller scale in Amador and Lake counties.
These programs encourage growers to check their vines closely and, by thinking ahead, to discover new options for dealing with problems. They lead them to a system of fully sustainable agriculture—or beyond—and at the same time help them steadily improve the quality of their wines. Paul Pontallier, manager of Château Margaux—where herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers are rarely used—commented to me recently that there’s much to be said for organic farming and for biodynamic viticulture, whatever the circumstance, so long as the approach is always practical. “The danger comes,” he said, “when some particular way of doing things is turned into an ideology.”