January 10 2008
Green wine, the catch-all organic kind, not to be confused with the other “green wine,” Vinho Verde, the sprightly Portuguese white, continues to grow in momentum and consumer acceptance.
My hope for the coming year, amongst other things, is that the greening of our wines will also include a healthy dose of understanding and unity for the types of “green” standards. There is already too much confusion and obfuscation in the marketplace to add another level of complexity to the wine world.
As a consumer, I want to send a message to all wineries: marketing can be viewed as education and that’s not a bad thing.
Can you imagine “Susie Homemaker” or even “Joe Enthusiast” standing in the aisle reading the back label trying to figure out the difference between “organic” and “made with organic grapes?” Chances are he already is, and no, he doesn’t know the difference.
Wine Business Monthly wrote an article on the subject about two years ago, their timing is always right on trend, and now some two years later, it would be nice if the wine industry took their assumptive knowledge and translated that into some kind of industry wide barometer reading … an easy-to-read label continuum of sorts.
Hmmm … who could take the mantle of leadership for this initiative?
Randall Grahm, I’m paging you.
I’m thinking of something like the technical sheets that Jeff from Twisted Oak does for his wines, except this would be specific for organic. Your standard garden variety normally cultivated wine from a winery that has green practices on the left hand side and “I’m over the moon bananas about BioD” is on the right hand side—markers for other variations in between. Or, wait, given our country’s predilection for marking political ideology “right” and “left” perhaps the BioD goes on the left hand side …
If there is a continuum implemented, and plenty of wine label changes are coming anyways, at least a consumer could mentally categorize themselves against other consumer types and decide to buy the wine, or not, if for no other reason then your own personal wine buying coda for all things organic.
The recycling gal might not want the BioD wine whereas the Mother Jones-types might be all for the dung in cow horn Biodynamic program.
Thanks to About.com wine guide, I now know the following:
Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; petroleum-based fertilizers or sewage sludge-based fertilizers; bio-engineering; or ionizing radiation. Before a product can be labeled “organic,” a Government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.”
Types of Organic
100% Organic - Refers to wines that are produced with grapes that are certified 100% organically grown and do not have any added sulfites.
Organic - Refers to wines that have at least 95% of their ingredients from certified organic sources. These wines may have an additional 100 ppm of sulfur dioxide added to them.
Made with Organic Grapes - Refers to wines that have at least 70% of their grapes from organic sources. These wines may have sulfur dioxide added as well.
Biodynamic, obviously, is a supplement to the above.
The point is, with wine consumption growing, almost in spite of wine marketing (critter labels don’t count for anything good), it seems high time that the introduction of new elements to the wine marketing canon be treated sensibly and with some notion towards helping create a shared understanding.
Not all wine lovers are linear dolts, but sometimes its good to treat us like that, animals on labels notwithstanding.
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (2) |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License
Design by The Blog Studio
Print
Hi Jeff,
I think that you have hit the nail pretty hard on its head with today’s post.
In the UK for one, there is a great deal of interest and misunderstanding surrounding organic foods and wines and carbon neutrality. All of which leave the consumer, and many professionals scratching their heads in confusion. Organic and environmentally-friendly practices should make label-reading clearer, but due to the myriad of distinctions that you highlight above and those that we’ve been discussing at — shameless plug — InterWined.com recently in terms of carbon emissions, things are less clear than ever.
In terms of organics, one of the main prohibitions to a universally-recognised and acceptable ‘green’ label that I can foresee might be distinctions between what the EU (or Australia, NZ, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina) classifies as organic and what the USA does. More significant might be the fact that, even within the EU, members states have different certifying bodies whose certifications aren’t always accepted by the other bodies or EU member states. So, what the UK might classify as organic, France and/or Italy or Germany might not.
I know I sometimes discover that wines on sale in the UK without any organic logo or marking are recorded as organic by the winemaker or winemaker’s country of origin. I wonder if this is because UK and the country of origin disagree on the product’s green credentials. I can certainly imagine this happening in the US with the USDA. (Just remember what hay some politicians made of non-FDA approved pharmaceuticals from Canada.)