The Essential Book of Fermentation (24 page)

The demand has resulted in a boom in organic viticulture, where total organic acreage in California has zoomed from 178 acres in 1989 to over 15,000 acres today. Big wineries are slowly moving toward organic culture, even if most are still at the stage of sustainable agriculture that minimizes but doesn’t eliminate chemicals. Tim Mondavi, winemaker at Continuum and son of the late Robert Mondavi, who’s been proselytizing for a more natural viticulture for close to twenty-five years, says, “The wine country is a beautiful place and it’s up to us to protect it.” At Gallo of Sonoma, viticulturist Jeff Lyon says, “We grow about two thousand acres of fruit in Sonoma County using IPM [integrated pest management, which uses the least environmentally disruptive pest controls first before moving on to toxic chemicals]. We also have a full set of weather stations that warn us when conditions are right for outbreaks of disease like mildew and pests like spider mites. So we can take measures only as needed, not as routine applications of chemicals. And soil is key, so we use permanent cover crops to increase the diversity of life in the vineyards and improve the soil naturally.”

Cardinale Winery in Oakville, Napa Valley, recently achieved certification for twenty-two organic acres. Both Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates and Jackson Family Farms (the two entities that wine behemoth Kendall-Jackson has split into) have announced a ban on selected pesticides, including methyl bromide, Omite, simazine, and Karmex, in its vineyards worldwide.

Jean-Charles Boisset, the scion of a Burgundian wine family with extensive vineyard and winery holdings here and in France, is adamant about turning acreage under his control into an organic and biodynamic culture. He has aggressively bought up some major wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties and moved them into organic and biodynamic production. He has set up his headquarters at Raymond Vineyards in the Napa Valley, where he has created a Theater of Nature, an educational display exhibiting the great wheel of life as it affects grape growing and winemaking. Don’t miss it if you visit the Napa Valley.

Smaller wineries with strict organic practices find sales booming, too. Jonathan Frey of the rigorously organic Frey Vineyards in Mendocino County says, “We’ve doubled production to thirty thousand cases just in the last five years.” Today, more than seventy vineyards in California are certified organic. And the phenomenon not only keeps growing, but is worldwide, with more than four hundred wineries producing more than two thousand organic wines, mostly in France but also in places as far-flung as Chile. The Carmen Winery, for instance, produces 100 percent organically grown Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon in the famed Maipo Valley there.

While peasant winemaking in most European countries has long been natural—that is, done the old way without factory-made chemicals—and qualifies as organic with a small “o,” it usually doesn’t qualify as organic with a large “O”—that is, it doesn’t follow an organic farming program that fulfills the requirements for certification. France has led the way in true organic wine production through several umbrella organizations, especially the National Federation for Organic Wine, created in 1998, and the National Observatory for Organic Farming, created in 1996, to keep records on the number of organic farms, their acreage, and produce. In addition, there are three independent third-party organizations in France that certify vineyards as organic (or
biologique
, as the French term it) according to standards approved by the French Ministry of Agriculture. They are Ecocert, Biofranc, and Qualité France. The organic (and biodynamic) movements in French viticulture have been exploding of late.

The Genesis of Organic Winemaking

The organic wine industry in the United States began in California in 1956 when Nick Lolonis of Redwood Valley, Mendocino County, began to farm his family’s estate vineyard organically. Founded in the 1920s by his father, Tryfon, a Greek immigrant, the original vines still exist, but the estate has grown to more than three hundred acres. Tryfon’s three sons, Nick, Petros, and Ulysses, share vineyard and winery management today, and Petros’s son Phillip handles the marketing of the winery’s 27,000 cases.

Lolonis’s commitment to organic viticulture stems from the old-country style of natural farming that Tryfon established and his sons have continued. “Uncle Ulysses is sixty-eight and has known these vines all his life,” Phillip says. “He will walk through the vineyard with me and say, ‘These vines need to be watered.’ I ask him how he knows, and he says, ‘The vines are telling me.’ His intuition and lifelong familiarity with the vines is amazing. And he won’t let me touch a vine—he says I don’t have enough gray hairs yet.”

Today’s Organic Viticulture

While Lolonis’s viticulture started as old-fashioned farming that simply abjured agricultural chemicals, today it is truly organic, including the use of cover crops in the rows, natural pest management, and fertilization with composts and manures. A key factor in organic grape growing is the use of cover crops such as clover, vetch, and legumes for soil improvement, and umbelliferae (plants like dill and wild carrot that form umbrella-shaped flower heads), which are prime food sources for beneficial insects. Another organic technique includes allowing some areas near the vines to grow wild. These wild patches provide food and habitat for the indigenous fauna, including beneficial insects, which add a healthy diversity to a vineyard’s ecosystem. “We have bats, eagles, hawks, and barn owls, all without putting up nesting boxes,” Phillip Lolonis says. And the wild blackberries that grow around the farm’s waterways, and are a prime breeding ground for beneficial insects, have been used “for Grandma’s blackberry pies since I was a kid.”

If there are any gaps in the protection afforded by natural beneficial insects like green lacewings, things are helped along by the monthly release of twenty-five gallons of ladybird beetles, better known as ladybugs, during June, July, and August—that’s about five and a half million predators looking for aphids, spider mites, and other pests. Lolonis also releases praying mantises, although these indiscriminate and voracious predators will eat whatever they can grab—beneficials or pests.

One stubborn problem for organic grape growers is the ubiquitous presence of phylloxera—a form of plant louse that eats away the roots of
Vitis vinifera,
eventually killing the vines. The world’s fine wine grapes are all cultivated varieties of
Vitis vinifera,
a botanical name that means “wine-producing grape,” and whose ancestral home is variously placed in the mild climate zones of the Caucasus and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia or thereabouts. It’s thought that during the great Indo-European migration that took place after the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, tribes from the Caucasus carried their vines westward as they moved into the Mediterranean area. Evidence of winemaking in the Near East goes back eight thousand years. The Greeks took their vines to Italy about 1000 BC, and shortly thereafter, vine culture reached France and Spain. Through more than a hundred generations, people have been selecting exceptionally flavorful varieties of
Vitis vinifera,
and today’s Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Syrah, Petite Sirah, and hundreds of other varieties are all types of this wild vine that still grows in the fields and forests of the Caucasus Mountains. Researchers have made wine from the wild, ancestral
Vitis vinifera,
and it reportedly makes a coarse but pleasant wine, one that would be infinitely pleasurable to ancient nomads who had no other wine to drink.

Because phylloxera is native to North America, however, wild North American grapes have evolved resistance to this pest. Their defense is a thick, corky bark that covers their roots, through which the root louse can’t penetrate. Almost all the
Vitis vinifera
planted in the United States and Europe is now grafted to phylloxera-resistant native American grape rootstock. A question naturally arises about phylloxera and Lolonis’s vineyards. How is it that just about every vineyard in the Napa Valley and many in Sonoma County had to be replanted in the 1990s because of outbreaks of the phylloxera root louse, and yet Lolonis’s seventy-plus-year-old vineyards have not? One reason is that when California viticulture exploded in the late 1960s through the 1980s (actually, it’s still expanding rapidly), many growers planted vines grafted to a rootstock called AxR, which was recommended by the University of California at Davis, the nation’s premier school for viticulture and winemaking. Unfortunately, AxR is not resistant to phylloxera (putting a nice dollop of egg on the face of UC Davis), which caused untold woe and expense when beautiful vineyards just entering their prime years showed decline and had to be ripped out. The old Lolonis vines may have been planted on an older rootstock called St. George, which was indeed resistant to phylloxera. But another reason may be found in the organic treatment of the soil.

In a recent survey of California vineyard soils, Frey Vineyards soil was found to be the most resistant to phylloxera. Frey is located not far from Lolonis, in Redwood Valley, a small, sleepy village that’s the hotbed of organic viticulture in California. Frey was founded by physicians Paul and Marguerite Frey in 1961, with their first grapes planted in 1967. In the 1970s, their son Jonathan studied with organic guru and soil specialist Alan Chadwick at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and eventually converted the family’s seventy acres to organic, and then biodynamic, culture. Chadwick, a charismatic Englishman, was responsible for touching off a huge interest in organic farming and gardening in Northern California. All Frey’s acres are Demeter-certified (Demeter is the international certifying body for biodynamics), and all the grapes they purchase off the farm are either Demeter-certified or certified organic by the California Certified Organic Farmers. The vines are dry-farmed (without irrigation), the soil is improved with composts from a neighbor’s five-hundred-cow dairy herd, and clover, vetch, barley, rye, and mustard are used as green manure and cover crops.

In the Napa Valley, John Williams, the owner and winemaker at Frog’s Leap Vineyards, claims that organic soil improvement revived a phylloxera-plagued vineyard he bought in the early 1990s. It had been given up as dead by the previous owner, who didn’t want to go to the expense of replanting (about $50,000 an acre currently). Williams has dry-farmed it organically since, using composts made from grape pomace—the skins, pulp, and seeds left over after the juice is pressed out. The vineyard came back to life and the vines were saved.

The Core Principle of Organic Farming

A healthy soil is one that is home to a great diversity of plants and animals, from the large to the microscopic, by virtue of its content of actively decaying organic matter. Organically treated soil may be resistant to phylloxera and other pests and diseases because the good microorganisms whose numbers have become myriad in the composting process have colonized all the ecological niches, leaving no room for pathogens to take hold and multiply. Does this idea sound familiar? If you remember the discussion of resistant soils, a healthy intestinal ecosystem in the human alimentary tract, and the actions of bacteria and their bacteriocins (see Chapter 2), you’ll see that the same principle is at work: The more diverse the ecosystem—that is, the more hospitable the system is to a large number of creatures—the healthier it is.

The USDA’s Final Rule on Organic Wine

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has promulgated the rules on what’s organic and what’s not, and the definitions regarding organic wine are set in law. It wasn’t an easy process for organic grape growers or winemakers, especially when it came to the knotty problem of sulfites. Potassium metabisulfite is a compound routinely added to grape juice to inactivate or kill spoilage organisms and as an antioxidant to preserve wine freshness. When it’s added to the liquid juice, it dissociates and forms free sulfur dioxide, a radical that will bind with and destroy spoilage organisms, primarily bacteria that cause off flavors. At high enough levels, it will do that to yeast, too, but at the low levels used in organic winemaking, usually 100 parts per million or less, it inhibits bacterial spoilage. Just as important, it has the ability to bind with oxygen, and thus functions as an antioxidant. (An oxidized wine develops off and sherry-like flavors, seems old and tired, and loses its fresh and fruity flavor.) Winemakers consider the use of sulfites, as the compound is called, essential to prevent spoilage and preserve the wine’s integrity. Sulfites are a naturally occurring substance in the human body, by the way, which exists at much higher levels than those found in wine. Some people claim that wine—red wine, especially—gives them a headache, and blame sulfites. While a very few people may be sensitive to sulfites, most studies show that people are sensitive to other substances in the wine (alcohol, for instance, or tannin).