Wine X Staff
Wine X Online Edition
One wine label says “Made with Organic Grapes.” Another bottle has “Certified Organic Wine” plastered on the front. Still another has “Certified Sustainable Growing Practices.” What’s it all mean? In this day and age, we are all looking for cleaner, healthier products that are made more responsibly. But how do you dig through the marketing speak and get to the finer details of how your wine was made? Keep reading for your primer on the differences between these catchy terms.
Sustainable: Sustainable is arguably the easiest of these three to accomplish in a vineyard or winery, and it is also the least scrutinized. Imagine owning a business and you decide you want to be able to use sustainable in your marketing, what with all the talk of climate change in the news. What do you do? You could easily do something like a water-use audit and cut down on your water usage in one area of winemaking and BOOM. You’re sustainable. (You could also just lie to the consumer and say you are what you actually aren’t, but let’s not open that can of worms.) Some people call it greenwashing, others call it progress. Either way it’s pretty easy to do in most cases, and you’ll get a little marketing bump from it. You might even be able to raise your price a little. Though there are sustainable certification groups out there that will come in and make sure you’re actually doing enough to be considered *truly* sustainable, in my experience it doesn’t mean a whole lot to call yourself sustainable. It requires a little more digging on the consumer’s part to see just what “sustainable” means to that particular winery.
Organic: This one gets confusing. You can be one of two things when it comes to organic wine: Wine Made with Organic Grapes, or Certified Organic Wine. They are NOT the same thing. Wine Made with Organic Grapes means what it sounds like. They made wine from a certified organic vineyard. What it DOESN’T mean is that the winery was fully organic in winemaking process, for example they may have used more sulfur or other additives than would be allowed with a Certified Organic Wine. However, because they started with certified organic grapes, they can still put that on the label. That Certified Organic Wine, however is organic through and through, from picking the grapes to aging to bottling. And there are stringent guidelines for additives that cannot be changed or shifted. The nice thing about either of these certifications is that because they are USDA certifications, you can get in big trouble if you call something organic but it actually isn’t (unlike sustainable, where the definitions are a little broader). So if you buy Wine Made with Organic Grapes or Certified Organic Wine, you can rest assured that you are getting an organic product.
Biodynamic: Let the kookiness commence. Biodynamic is like Organic on steroids. Where an Organic grapegrower might just not use pesticides or herbicides, a Biodynamic grower will do that AND plant a cow skull full of fertilizer “tea” to rejuvenate the soils. Oh, and they’ll only do it on certain cycles of the moon, and they might still use a horse drawn plow to till their fields. Yeah, they get real funky with this stuff. But if you want truly the most natural experience from grape to glass, a Demeter-certified Biodynamic wine will provide what you are looking for. Native yeasts, little to no additives, minimal intervention in the vineyards, etc. And while you could lie and say you were growing biodynamically when you actually aren’t, the natural wine police (they’re an informal force, no training, but strong willed and with powerful fingers for typing angry emails) would call you on it very quickly. These wines can be funky, but they can also be normal wines that are made in an ultra-traditional manner.
So there you have it, a quick and dirty rundown of these three very “in-vogue” terms. While they can seem confusing at first, they…well they’re always kinda confusing, aren’t they? But hey, as usual, do a little research, find your favorite wines, and stick to them.
