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A Primer on Organic Wines, and a Sweet Way to Bring Them to the Table 6-5-08
About 15 years ago, a friend brought an organic wine to a dinner party I was
giving. He explained to me that in addition to being made from grapes that are
grown organically, organic wines don't contain any added sulfites (some sulfites
occur naturally as a result of the fermentation process). Since I try hard to
use organic products as much as I can afford to, I began to look for organic
wines when I went shopping.
The choices were few and far between. Wine-industry people I knew seemed to hate
the organic wine. They'd say, "Organic wine is awful! No winemaker in his or her
right mind would make a wine without sulfites!"
Recently, however, I've seen more organic wines appear on the shelves, and I
decided it was time to explore this topic in greater depth. So I visited the
Boston Wine School to talk to Jonathon Alsop, the school's founder and executive
director, who kindly created a personal magical mystery tour of organic wines
for me.
He set out a plate of cheese and bread as well as a small dish filled with
shards of dark
Taza chocolate to accompany the wines. We sat down and began our tasting as
is traditionally done, moving from lighter selections to darker ones. First,
though, Jonathon gave me a brief primer on organic wine.
Great Wine Starts in the Dirt
Wise vintners, Jonathon told me, make great wine by taking care of the land and
the grapes and then "getting out of the way."
"They know that a good wine is made in the vineyard," he said. "These winemakers
do everything they can to minimize the amount that they interfere with the
natural processes that take place. They recognize that things like driving a
tractor through the vineyard instead of doing work by hand will ultimately have
a negative effect on the wine."
He added that, like all farmers, winemakers can't control the weather. When
there's more rain than usual, molds sometimes attack the vines, threatening the
harvest unless a fungicide is used. Such seasonal vagaries make some vintners
reluctant to seek organic certification, even when they generally use organic
techniques.
Luckily for consumers, most really good wines come from winemakers who avoid
agrichemicals as much as possible. "Winemaking doesn't really lend itself to the
practice of Big Ag, because whatever you do to the grapes you will ultimately
taste in the wine," Jonathon said.
Of course, some winemakers who use organic agriculture use sulfites in the
winemaking process. Sulfites act as a preservative and keep white wines from
changing to a golden or brown color. (They are not used as often in red wines.)
The labels on these wines may say that they are made with organic grapes, but
they do not -- and, by law, cannot -- identify the wines themselves as organic.
So the organic label is only one way to find wines that are grown with an eye
toward ecologically minded practices. Another way to look for environmentally
sound wines, Jonathon suggested, is to look for small-batch wines from a single
vineyard.
Comment:
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