Any farmer or vintner will tell you; the transition from conventional growing to organic/biodynamic is labor-intensive, expensive, and full of risk. Consider the Chablis growers in transit to organic certification who had to slam on the brakes in the rain-saturated growing season of 2024, simply in order to protect their crop, or to have a crop to protect.
But if you ride out the years it takes to make the transition, you may be (if you wish to be) rewarded with official organic (or bio-d) certification, from the several organizations who perform that function. If the risk is overly large, but you are essentially “responsible” environmentally, you can certify also, with (among others) Ampelos or Fair & Green, who claim to take a more holistic view of “green” stewardship with a wider range of criteria (they will say) than a strict accounting of what you use or don’t use in your soil. After all, strict organic growing may be forbiddingly difficult in very steep land or in locally super-humid environments, but those growers want to do something.
I respect those “sustainability” certifiers and the equipoise of pragmatism and conscientiousness entailed by the growers who go that route. The actual-organic folks despise them for green-washing and for claiming good-guy cred without taking the risks that would earn it. That’s what they often say. I don’t agree, but I do understand.
If you succeed in certifying, it remains an open question whether the market will reward you. Your product will cost more than conventional product – as it must. Some will pay, assuming they can afford to, and others may balk, and among those “others” are wine buyers, whom I often heard register some version of this complaint: “The wine costs 20% more but it doesn’t taste 20% better….”
In my merchant days, my dogma was to have no dogma. I resisted doctrine wherever I found it. By so doing, I drew the censure of organic purists, who argued that I wasn’t committed to the cause. I responded by saying that if you forced growers a choice of all or nothing, too many would choose nothing. I thought I’d do better by encouraging and applauding every step they took in a “green” direction, while refusing to shame them for the steps they didn’t take.
After all, what skin did I have in the game? Pride by association with good-guys didn’t buy me any moral high ground. Rather the opposite. Who was I to tell a vintner with a business to sustain and a family to support that he had to live up to my precious standards? That struck me as egregiously snooty and arrogant and disrespectful.
In the normal course of things my portfolio included more and more organic producers, which made me happy provided no purity tests were in play.
I have always assumed a wine estate moves toward organic cultivation as an integral element in a certain worldview. This includes a desire toward the wholesome (the good working of a good earth), a wish to respect one’s land, a nearness of accord that arises from that respect, and an overriding sense that, when options exist, you choose the one that does the most good. I find this to be generally true, which is all we can ask from a generality.
There is one glaring exception to this schema, and it’s a sad one. I refer – as you might have guessed – to the stupid pretentious heavy bottles often in use at even organic estates. I’ll risk laboring the obvious, but come on; these preening behemoths cost more energy to produce, more energy to transport, and apart from that they’re a royal pain in the ass to handle. What truly stuns me is that any organic producer would consent to use them. Even the good-guy German grower-group the VDP, vocally proud of its “green” cred, endorses (either tacitly or actually) the use of these affected bottles for its “top” wines, the lofty GGs. Even (many) members of the Fair & Green certifier, whose principes are laudable in their breadth, allow these bottles to be used. It defies logic.
For the hapless producer, what is it other than meaningless symbolism? It does nothing for the wine within the bottle. If you need to spend money to prove your “stature” then buy better corks, which actually do benefit both the wines and the people who drink them. Otherwise, we lived many years without such monstrous containers and we can do it again now.
Along those lines, I have a modest suggestion. It is this: Any certifier of organics, biodynamics or sustainability should WITHDRAW certification for any estate who uses stupid heavy bottles. After all, using such bottles is an insult to the whole idea of organics or sustainability, but it looks like it won’t stop until people risk losing something they value. The market won’t make it stop, failing an unlikely consumer boycott. The wine writers/reviewers won’t make it stop unless they act unanimously, which would perturb their business models’ dependance on “high-scoring” wines, many of which are afflicted with bruiser-bottle-syndrome.
I’m hardly the first to decry this situation. Alder Yarrow covered it several years back, and Karen MacNeil announced she would no longer write about any wine that came in a “Hummer-bottle” (her term, and exquisite), but these shots across the bow were barely a ripple over the surface of the pond. What it will take, I propose, is for ongoing certification to depend on discontinuing the use of these vulgar beasts. Can you think of another way to bring this about? If a grower has accepted the struggles (and enjoyed the soul-rewards) of certifying, will he really risk it all for the sake of the bottle weight?
What of the certifiers? How have they not already attacked this issue? What does their failure to do so say about them, their standards, and their actual principles? The fault isn’t solely that of the grower. He uses the bottles because he thinks customers want them, or expect them, or because his colleagues use them and he’d better get on board, or because he’s drunk the Kool-Aid that heavy-bottle-equals-important-wine. As pretenses go these are relatively harmless. What is really irksome is that people laying claim to upholding standards are failing to do so, and have never been asked to explain why.
This needs to change, and I can’t think of a better way to make it change. Comments welcome, civilly please.
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