Going green and liking it — organic wines grow in popularity, quality

Meinklang vineyard scenes
Meinklang vineyard scenes

Let’s be frank about this – the reason we drink wine isn’t just for what wine literati might call the lush aromas and fruity complexities.

Sure, those things are a big part of it. But the main reason I like wine is that it makes me feel good.

At lunch this past Friday, I discovered how to get an even better feeling out of it. I ordered an organic wine.

Knowing that the wine came from an earth-friendly vineyard somehow made it even more pleasurable.

Maybe it was because on that same day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for a green cause. Or maybe it was my body subtly telling me something on a deep level.

The wine was a 2006 Meinklang Pinot Noir from Austria, fuller and more darkly aromatic than most other Pinot Noirs I’ve had. My lunch companion seemed surprised and pleased by a Zinfandel richness.

The wine is made by the extended Michlits family on a mixed-agriculture farm using biodynamic principles, in the belief that “vital and robust grapes thriving in healthy, living soil bring exceptional wines of character.”

Biodynamic winegrowing techniques are free of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. There’s admittedly also a strange mystical quality to some of the practices that followers say are aimed at promoting harmony with nature, like the one that calls for burying a cow horn filled with dung under the vineyard soil.

“Yet before you consign practitioners of biodynamics to the distant corner of your mind reserved for Shirley MacLaine and the weird sisters in ‘Macbeth,’ consider that among the people who practice biodynamic viticulture are some of the world’s great wine producers,” Eric Asimov observed in The New York Times a few years ago.

Not all organic wines are biodynamic. For that matter, not all U.S. wines made with organically grown grapes can be labeled “organic” if there’s been any sulfites added as a preservative, as this San Francisco Chronicle article explains in some detail.

In part because of those stringent labeling requirements, organic wines are still in the minority on wine store shelves in this country, but they have been steadily improving in quality even as they grow more popular and winemakers become more adept at organic methods.

“These eco-friendly wines, in many cases, have moved beyond their funky past,” according to this review by The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher. “They’re worth discovering.” Four of the dozen wines they describe in the article were under $15 when they bought them last year.

“Tides are certainly turning as more vintners are discovering that the common-sense approach to both organic and biodynamic growing methods results in not only ‘healthier’ vines, but in wines with greater flavor, more distinct terroir character and at times a noticeable cost-savings on their bottom line,” adds Stacy Slinkard, wine guide at About.com.

In the Cooking Up A Story video below, Dr. Robert Gross of Cooper Mountain Vineyards in Oregon gives a nicely illuminating account of why he runs an entirely organic operation.



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While doing research for this article, I ran across a Bon Appétit piece from earlier this year that offered as good an explanation as any on why that Meinklang Pinot Noir seemed so extra good to me. The explanation came from Mike Benziger of Sonoma’s Benziger Family Winery.

“We’ve become so disconnected from the environment,” Benziger said. “When we taste a biodynamic wine, we’re able to make that connection back to nature, if only for an instant. And that’s powerful.”

It only seems right. The earth gives us this great gift. We should give something in return.

The Web’s latest wine buzz, 9/24/07

Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with handpicked highlights of their latest and greatest.


“The great wines of the world are expensive and often hard to find,” says Food & Wine. Okay, your first reaction may be, tell us something we didn’t know. This article, however, is well worth a read for what it goes on to say — namely, that it’s possible to find affordable wines that “echo the characteristics of the truly extraordinary.” If, of course, you look hard enough, which is what Ray Isle did for us in his piece aptly entitled Superstars & Super Steals. Nine different pairings are offered — with prices as low as $13 for the affordable-steals class and and as high as $114 for the extraordinaries — for types ranging from Alsace Riesling and white Burgundy to red Bordeaux and Oregon Pinot Noir.

Another penny-pinching reason to drop by Food & Wine is an additional Isle report, this one focusing on an assortment of top Italian wines under $20. Isle wise-crackingly demands our pity for having to taste his way through 187 under-$20 Italian wines. An “exhausting” job, he declares, but eventually admits the assignment was “entirely enjoyable.” Most intriguing of his picks, perhaps, is the 2004 Librandi Cirò Rosso ($10) from the southern Italian region of Calabria. It’s made from the Gaglioppo grape variety, which is obscure virtually everywhere else in the world, Isle observes.

Speaking of penny-pinching, Eric Asimov at The New York Times spotlights a variety of wines that the headline touts as Happiness for $10 or Less. In addition to providing a “Tasting Report: Structure and Personality, With a Small Price Tag” for 10 national and international picks, Asimov serves up some worthwhile insider factoids, such as this interesting peek into restaurant mentality: “The restaurant industry has a longstanding belief that the lowest-priced wine on the list will never sell. Nobody wants to be seen as cheap. But the second-lowest-priced wine, that’s the one people will gobble up.”

There is absolutely nothing cheap about wines produced in the California vineyard sketched by Jay McInerney in House & Garden. This is the story about how the former CEO of Northrop Corporation decided to start a vineyard in what “may qualify as the most unlikely patch of vines in the world.” Or at least the ritziest — the Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air. But make no mistake, Moraga Vineyards is not a rich man’s plaything. We learn that the former sommelier at Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris, Stephane Colling, now the wine director at the Modern in New York, calls Moraga his favorite California winery.

A different winemaker altogether is profiled by Jerry Shriver at USA TODAY: Randall Grahm, who officially calls himself “President for Life” of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, Calif. “But a more apt title would be ‘Supreme Seeker/Philosopher/Gadfly/Court Jester,’ ” Shriver observes. Now Grahm says he is rethinking his direction, heading into the realm of biodynamics. Grahm’s metamorphosis-in-progress, aka “existential crisis,” is a clicker.