Red Burgundy: A Heart-warming Wine with a Blood-chilling Price

Diane and I have been drinking a lot of French red lately – mostly Burgundy and Rhône wines, very little Bordeaux. This is more than a little odd, for two reasons: one, that Burgundy is so appallingly expensive and two, that I used to love Bordeaux.

Bordeaux was what I learned wine on. In the US, way back then, wine was French, and the pinnacle of French wine for us tyros was Bordeaux. Bordeaux was affordable: Macy’s had a wine cellar then that sold 1966 Château Gloria and Château Brane Cantenac for $3 a bottle, with a 10% discount on a case. The great first growths were only a few more dollars a bottle. Sigh. We shall not see such days again.

Even more important, Bordeaux was comprehensible: Its classifications were easy to understand. And Bordeaux wines had the additional advantage of being abundant, and readily available on the American market. Bordeaux produced a lot of wine, especially compared to Burgundy, which besides being scarcer was also complicated – and already, in those days, expensive. So I learned Bordeaux, and I learned to love it. Cabernet Sauvignon was the grape for me.
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Cabernet Sauvignon

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But, as somebody or other in Shakespeare says, the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. Over many years, I found I was losing my taste for Cabernet. Was the grape changing?  Was the way it was cultivated and/or vinified changing?  Was my palate changing?  The latter was probable, though I couldn’t rule out any of the former either.

Certainly, as my knowledge and appreciation of Nebbiolo deepened, it affected the way I experienced other varieties, most notably Pinot Noir, whose intricacies and nuances in many ways mirror those of Nebbiolo. So by way of Nebbiolo, I came to relish Pinot Noir, and to Nebbiolo I owe the few fine older Burgundies I am now enjoying. I wish I had more, but they were always expensive, and my budget always limited. I’m just grateful for the ones I have, and I choose carefully my opportunities to serve them.
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Pinot Noir

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Long-time friends are always a good excuse, so when two prime examples of such recently had a lull in their hectic schedules, Diane put together a French-ish dinner and I pulled out appropriate wines. To accompany the Simca-inspired eggplant quiche we started with, a 2011 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle. And to match with an elegant chateaubriand and our very rich version of pommes duchesse, a 2001 Bonneau de Martray Corton Grand Cru.
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Those steep Hermitage vineyards bordering the northern Rhône tame the wildness of Syrah and turn it into a wine of lovely depth and impressive restraint. More than a decade of age had made that bottle’s suave character even better: unquestionably Syrah, but Syrah that had been to a top-flight finishing school. The quiche was smooth and sharp, lush and acidic. The Hermitage matched it note for note, as harmoniously as an operatic duet.

The Corton, from one of Burgundy’s most storied sites, and ten years older, showed every bit as elegant but slightly heftier, as if it were putting on weight with age. Nothing flabby, mind you: this was all muscle, smooth and sleek and just loving to play alongside that tender red beef. The two seemed made for each other, which – of course – is exactly what I had hoped for, and exactly the kind of thing that great Burgundy does best. This was a duet too, but baritones rather than tenors.

Much as I love pouring wines like this for friends, I can’t help feeling a twinge each time: I wish I had more. If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have bought and cellared my wines a lot more systematically. Wouldn’t I have? Sure I would: Diane can tell you what an organized, systematic person I am.

Three Cheers for the Right Wine – Be It Ever So Humble

No, I am not boosting my by-now antique book – just the concept behind it: The right wine – the wine that really fits the occasion and meshes with the food – can elevate any meal to a memorable experience. Grilled chopped sirloin and an eight-year-old Ridge Zinfandel aren’t just fuel, and they’re miles beyond a burger and a beer: They’re Dinner.

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You don’t even have to go as lofty as Ridge. For our traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner of corned beef and cabbage, I opened a two-year-old, very inexpensive bottle of Gruner Veltliner, from a producer I knew nothing of. It was what I had on hand. That bottle of what might have been just plonk made a fascinating and utterly pleasing companion to the spicing of the corned beef and the sweetness of a Savoy cabbage. We couldn’t have had a more enjoyable meal with a much more prestigious meat or wine than that great match gave us.

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And that’s the point: The mesh of the food and the wine doesn’t depend on the rarity or reputation or prestige of either. It depends only on those simple miracles that can happen in your mouth every day.

Yes, you need to know something to make that miracle happen. You need to know your own likes and dislikes. You need to have at least a rudimentary idea of what the food you’re about to eat tastes like: You can’t match a wine with a dish you don’t know. And you need to know at least the general character of the kind of wine you’re considering, if not the specifics of any producer’s bottlings.

That’s why sommeliers are useful: They know their restaurant’s food, and they know its cellar, far better than you could. For your home cooking, you’re the sommelier.  You know your cooking, and you know your bottle: All you have to do is pay attention, think about the meal for a minute or two, letting your own experience of the food and/or your wine guide you. There is no mystery. The only equipment you need is taste buds.

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Some examples: With a plainly grilled or broiled red meat, any number of inexpensive young red wines will match quite nicely. If you want a soft wine, a negociant’s basic Burgundy or a Dolcetto will work well. If you want something with some acidity, Côtes du Rhône or Barbera, Beaujolais Villages or Lacryma Christi will provide it.

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This is not to say that the matter can’t be made complex: Dining at Taillevent on its ris de veau en croûte and trying to choose a wine from its intimidating wine list (Where was the comma in that price?) is complex indeed and, if your bank account can stand it, thrilling, but that isn’t simple food or everyday wine.

For a different sort of example of what I mean: A fresh filet of flounder, salted, peppered, lightly floured, and quickly sauteed in butter is going to be lovely with a young, unoaked Chardonnay – or Fiano, or Riesling, or dry Chenin Blanc, or even Muscadet. Any young, dry, unoaked, not-too-assertive white wine will make a nice match with that fish. In the right circumstances – say, on the sunny terrace of an ocean- or bay-side restaurant, with a light, fresh breeze gently cooling you – it can even become memorable in its simplicity.

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Raise the ante a little – make it crabmeat or lobster steeped in butter – and you want a bigger wine, with more character, one with a little minerality to play off against the sweetness of that shellfish. Then you’re going to need a Chablis, or a fine Lugana or Soave Classico, or even a good white from the Rhône – a wine that won’t be obliterated by the flavor of the lobster or crab. The key is only that the kids should play together peacefully, with no bully dominating the playground. Any moderately careful parent should be able to deal with that.

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As I said, it’s not complex, and it certainly need not be expensive. We are lucky enough to be living at a moment when, whatever else may be wrong with the world, we have more good wine in greater variety available to us than at any previous time. Probably the only real problem confronting us is the sheer number of choices available – but as one who can remember the days when the finest, and one of the few, white wine choices on many restaurant lists was “Soavebolla” (for all practical purposes, one word), I can assure you that’s a great problem to have.

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Should you want go a bit deeper into matching wine and food, or should you be perverse enough to enjoy complexity (I confess I do), here are two handy wine-and-food wheels I devised way back when for my book. I still like them, and I think you may find them handy.

 

A Magnum of 25-year-old Conterno Barolo

This wine – 1999 Conterno Barolo from the Bussia cru – tasted like the love child of Nebbiolo and velvet.

One dinner guest, on first sip, rightly called it youthful – which it was; it was also vital, and complex, and deep, and it evolved kaleidoscopically in our glasses as we progressed from a rich main course to a pair of fine cheeses. But I am getting way ahead of myself.

I don’t keep many magnums, because we rarely have occasion for them. I’m a wine drinker, not a wine collector. But a recent convocation of our octogenarian Gang of Six seemed an appropriate moment for a fine magnum – especially since the dinner we were making for it was La Finanziera, a Piedmontese tour de force of mostly innards. (Diane has written about the dish on her blog.)  On its home grounds of Italy’s Piedmont, the characteristic feature of La Finanziera is its inclusion of cockscombs, which the USDA will not allow us to buy. (Boos and hisses are appropriate here.)

We had originally conceived of this feast back in the depths of winter, but such is the mobility of our coevals that it took until early March to get all six of us together in New York at the same time. (I guess that’s a good sign, no?) For several days in advance, that big bottle of Barolo stood patiently – upright, to settle its sediment – on a very cool, shady windowsill, awaiting its moment.

Barolo fans will know that Poderi Aldo Conterno is one of the most prestigious of the whole panoply of Barolo vignerons. The three brothers now running the farm work 25 wonderful hectares in the heart of Monforte d’Alba. The hillside of Bussia ranks among the best vineyard sites in the entire Barolo zone – so my magnum came with an impressive provenance.

Barolo fans will also know that 1999 was one of the string of top-flight vintages with which Piedmont rang down the curtain on the 20th century. I had been saving it for an occasion that would show it at its best. Now it had its moment, alongside an opulent dish it had grown up with, and for palates that would appreciate both it and the food. I was really looking forward to this.

Conterno’s Bussia did not disappoint in the slightest. From those first sips, arresting in their freshness, to the vigor with which it matched a fine Stilton and a luscious soft-ripening Brebirousse, it offered peak experiences. Each sip was slightly different from the last, as the wine evolved in the carafe and glass and as the accompanying food called out different components in it. It was a palatal – the only word I can think of to describe it – kaleidoscope.

Large formats like magnums are marvelous for allowing wines to preserve their youthful vitality and at the same time giving them room to grow. I’ve known that for a long time – but it’s also been a long time since I experienced it. All I can finally say, in the most esoteric winespeak, is: What a treat! Good wine, good food, good friends. What a treat!

More Cheer for a Year No Longer New: It’s Produttori del Barbaresco Again

Among the small selection of older wines I acquired late last summer – promptly dubbed “Tom’s Treasures” by Diane – and squirreled away for special occasions, I thought I detected a slight leakage from the capsule of a bottle of 1976 Barbaresco from Produttori del Barbaresco. 1976 was almost 50 years ago, so if the cork was beginning to fail, it could spell doom for the wine. That possible leakage was enough to make me resolve to use that bottle at the first appropriate opportunity.

Well, Diane and I are pretty resourceful at manufacturing occasions for a good wine, so when I recently underwent two successful cataract surgeries, we decided the moment had arrived. We got a fine New York strip steak (thank you, Ottomanelli) and some good mushrooms to accompany it, pulled out of the freezer one of Diane’s excellent three-cheese tarts for a first course, and addressed the worrisome bottle.

Because the wine, if alive at all, might be very fragile, I didn’t pull the cork until we were ready to sit to dinner. It came out with no trouble and seemed sound enough, if quite evidently old. There was very little ullage, so I poured, and we proceeded. The wine was pale, but no paler than many younger Nebbiolos I’ve drunk. It had very little aroma. The first taste showed almost nothing: it didn’t seem dead, by any means, but it just wasn’t giving anything.

The very good news is that that changed quickly. That Barbaresco began opening in the glass, and did so steadily all through the meal. Its aroma, and the flavors on the palate, kept getting bigger and richer. By the time we had drunk that bottle as far down as we dared – there was a substantial layer of sediment – we were relishing a first-rate Piedmontese gem, Nebbiolo at its richest and best.

This was all the more remarkable not just because of this bottle’s age, but also because, according to my memory and all the charts I’ve been able to consult, 1976 wasn’t a very good year at all.

I’ve always admired the Produttori del Barbaresco, as some of the posts I’ve done already this year will attest, but my admiration for their work continues to grow. Bottles like this are monuments to old-school Piedmontese winemaking (in 1976, stainless steel tanks and temperature-controlled fermentation were still new wave in Piedmont) and to the amazing character of the Nebbiolo variety.

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A small teaser for those who follow such things: This bottle was #3 of my small trove of treasures. I have a few more yet to taste, including two Gattinaras (one from the legendary 1961 vintage), a classic Mastroberardino Taurasi, and a real curiosity – a 50 year-old Grignolino. So far, these wines all seem to have been stored very well, so my hopes are high. Stay tuned.

Sipping Wine While the World Burns

With everything that’s going on in this country and the world, it can seem trivial to be concerning oneself with wine. Certainly, from some points of view, it is trivial. To which the trivial part of my brain responds “so what?” From one point of view, anything and everything is trivial – and that’s true too, in a far more profound way than most of us are willing to admit. The trivial part of my brain knows something too.

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From another point of view, thinking about wine now is like clinging to the raft of the Medusa. You remember Géricault’s famous painting: exhausted survivors cling to a battered, makeshift raft, trying desperately to signal a far distant ship as a storm approaches and a close-by towering wave is about to crash down on them. Not a pretty picture. Not a pretty thought. Yet true too – from one point of view.

From yet another point of view, talking about wine now is skipping down the yellow brick road with Dorothy and company – a pleasing hallucination, but a hallucination nevertheless. And all the more pleasing because right now the real world – or what we are willing to accept as such – just isn’t comforting or reassuring. And that’s just as true – and as untrue – as the other points of view.
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What lends all these points of view their degree of truth is the underlying fusion of the cosmic-catastrophe scenario and the personal-doom scenario. Which we all fear, but neither of which most of us truly believe in our heart of hearts. If we did, we’d be behaving very differently, and not merely fretting.

Besides all that, I believe firmly in the value of normality and in its continuation. All my life, I have taken great pleasure in wine, in drinking it and in talking about it: That is normal for me, and I see no reason to stop now. My stopping would benefit no one, and would certainly distress me – and I fail to see how that would better the world in any way, except to please the self-righteous, which I always prefer not to do.

On the positive side, wine gives me – and many other people – great pleasure. At my age, as my physical debilities increase, it’s one of the most rewarding simple physical satisfactions I’m still capable of. And important as that is to me, it’s the least of the matter: my nightly wine with dinner is my daily oasis. It relaxes me, it enables me to appreciate my life, it enables me to think clearly – at least as clearly as I ever could – about the things I have to do, the things I want to do, and the things – far fewer – I actually can do. It lets me reflect with tranquility, unfrightened and unpanicked, on the cockamami-ness of the world I have to live in. And I’m pretty sure it confers those benefits on the many other people who love it too – not to mention the benefits it confers on the people all over the world for whom wine provides employment and a decent living. None of that is at all trivial.

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I don’t think that if I were to give up drinking and writing about wine, the worldwide wine industry would collapse – though my doctor seems to think I’m its mainstay. I’d like to believe that, but neither my capacity nor my finances could stand it. No, I’m just an ordinary wine drinker who prefers in these harsh and abrasive times to take daily refuge and comfort where I can easily find them, in a fine wine.

So maybe I am being trivial – but, as Diane will testify, I’ve always had a broad trivial streak, which over my lifetime I’ve grown quite fond of, occasionally to her annoyance. Diane is a much more serious person than I am. So I’ll take refuge in the words of another serious person, Jonathan Swift, one of my favorite authors. He lived in violent and parlous times some 400 years ago, and his thoughtful response to its trials was the pithy, pertinent, eloquent, and eternally trivial Vive la bagatelle!

Shall we open another bottle?

The Warmth of Winter Cooking and the Elegance of a “Simple” Wine

Here’s a happy coincidence of subjects: one of my favorite “drink it every day with everything” wines and one of my favorite producers of almost the whole range of fine Piedmont wines. As you might easily guess, this post was triggered by the bottle in which the coincidence occurred, at dinner on a recent evening.

It had been a very cold, sunless, windy, “wintery mix” of a day, calling for a lot of time in the kitchen playing with stove and oven, as much to keep ourselves warm (the heat is less than tropical in our apartment) as to avoid that “trapped indoors” cabin fever feeling. Our menu featured three long-time favorite dishes, earlier versions of which Diane has written about in her own blog, should you be interested in seeing them:

Individual Cheese Tarts

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Honeycomb Tripe with Parmesan Cheese

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Pear Cake

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With that lush, comforting oven-braise of tripe in mind (I know: some of you are making yecch! sounds, but just taste it some time), I opened a 2021 Poderi Colla Barbera d’Alba Costa Bruna. Brilliant choice, Tom! The combination was wonderful: food and wine meshed perfectly to create a truly restorative, wonderfully enjoyable dinner.

Most Barbera d’Alba is enjoyable with a wide variety of foods, but Colla’s Barbera Costa Bruna is an exceptional wine – period, no qualifications. The Colla family (I’ve written about them before) knows its business: It has been making wine in Piedmont since the 1700s, and since the mid-twentieth century, under the leadership of the late Beppe Colla, it has been in the forefront of quality production of the most important Piedmont wines – Barolo, Barbaresco, Dolcetto, and Barbera d’Alba.

On its prestigious Barbaresco site, Roncaglie, it has what it refers to as “a jewel within a jewel,” Costa Bruna, a two-hectare field long planted with Barbera. How long, no one knows for sure, but best guesses put the oldest vines on the site at 90 or more years. Vines like that, on the kind of soils that turn Nebbiolo into glorious Barbaresco, yield wines of intensity, concentration, and, above all, elegance.

You read that right: I’m talking about elegance in a Barbera with no admixture of any other grape and no long new-oak regimen. I hate tasting notes, but contrary to my usual practice, I’m going to give you mine from that night:

• Lovely deep garnet color. Great brambly, fruity Barbera aroma.
• Big, round, and soft in the mouth, but with lively, invigorating acid.
• Gorgeous complex fruit – very dark cherry, black currant and plum, hints of herbs and even some underbrush, with a very long finish.
• Big and mouth-filling, but nevertheless light and elegant on the palate.

This Costa Bruna was fine and fresh with the little tarts of three kinds of cheese that we started dinner with. It loved the tripe, broadening and opening to match its richness. The last of the bottle even drank companionably with the homey, sweet, pear cake, leaving the two of us contentedly patting our stomachs and congratulating each other on a fine meal.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow: we’ve got Colla Barbera to keep us warm.

Good Cheer for the New Year

Reinvigorated by my year-end respite, I want to start this new circle around the sun with a nice, succinct set of good tidings. Not peace on earth, alas, but good tidings nevertheless. To wit: It is impossible to overpraise the wines of Produttori del Barbaresco.

I’ve enjoyed several very fine bottles over the past few weeks (and one or two disappointments, to be sure: life is always a mixed bag), but the one bottle that really stood out for me amidst all my holiday indulgence was this: a 2005 Barbaresco from Produttori del Barbaresco.

That’s it: not a riserva, not a cru bottling – just the plain basic production from what has to be the finest cooperative winery in Italy. I know I’ve written here about the Produttori before, and I’m pretty sure that most of my readers have at least tasted some of their art, but this 2005 was just plain gorgeous. It was still fruit-forward in the manner of a vigorous young wine, but the fruit was mellow and maturing, and wrapped in a velvety, mid-weight body of perfectly balanced soft tannins and unassertive acidity.

When the 2005 Nebbiolo was first released, it did not seem an imposing vintage that promised very long life, as did the wines of 2004 and 2001. Rather, 2005 was soft and welcoming: Charming, I thought it at the time, and charming I still think it, but this is now the charm of wizardry rather than the charm of puppies. Rich and mouth-filling yet also elegant and light, this Produttori example of the vintage was a bottle that seduced and satisfied by both its paradoxes and its straightforwardness – unquestionably the most enjoyable bottle I drank from Thanksgiving to Twelfth Night.

I wish all us jolly survivors of 2023 many bottles like it, all through 2024 and beyond. Winemaker Aldo Vacca and all the growers of the Produttori, thank you most sincerely, and a very Happy New Year to you all!

Anima Vagula Blandula Needs a Nap

With the holidays – all of them! – fast approaching, it takes all the energy I’m capable of not to turn into a Grinch. So as not to inflict my Seasonal Affective Churlishness (SAD SAC) on my innocent readers, I’ve decided to follow Diane’s excellent example and take a brief sabbatical from this blog.

I have in fact been blogging without a break about every two weeks for more than a dozen years now, and I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit to feeling a little stale at it. So I hope that a short break will refresh me – and you too, O faithful readers – and let me return with renewed enthusiasm to the pleasures of wine and the purple prose it moves me to.

I hope you all have a splendid set of holidays, whichever of them you choose to celebrate, and that you enjoy many fine bottles to celebrate them with. I’ll see you again early in 2024, when I hope to be back to my usual (I think) cheerful state.

Buone Feste!

 

Ole Udsen’s Article on Wine and Vine Sustainability

My good friend and colleague, Danish wine expert Ole Udsen, has published a very important and detailed article on what sustainability really means in the vineyard, in the cellar, and in our wine consumption. I think his piece so significant that I’m breaking with my usual practice and reprinting it here. (It originally appeared in Ole’s blog.) It’s a long read, and well worth every minute.
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Organic and Biodynamic Is Not Enough: Sustainability and the Wine Industry

by Ole Udsen

I was recently asked to write up some thoughts on real sustainability as it relates to the wine industry. The request came as a result of some comments I had made in social media regarding wine professionals’ knee-jerk equation of organic and biodynamic practices with sustainability. My point was that, while there may be elements within those practices that favour sustainability, real sustainability is a much wider and deeper practice that requires greater focus and more work on the part of those who claim sustainability than the mere constatation that organic or biodynamic practices are in play. In fact, claiming sustainability merely based on those practices will soon become illegal. My piece on this appeared in the Danish Sommelier Association’s membership publication in September 2023. For space reasons, I could not unfold the full scope of my arguments, so I take this opportunity to expand upon that piece here, in my own little echo room.

Very briefly, wine is not currently a sustainable practice, but it can be made so, and the road ahead involves existing, and to some people controversial, science and practice.

Note: If you wonder about my professional sustainability credentials: For the past 5 years I have been working within the circular economy sphere, which, if anything, is all about sustainability. Initially with now defunct Maersk Decom, which decommissioned offshore oil & gas fields, and now with start-up Renable (www.renable.eu), of which I am a co-founder. A large part of my work in both settings has been about real sustainability, in its broad sense. I write this piece on that basis.

Setting the Scene

As you may gather, I have lost patience with the automatic equation of organic and biodynamic with sustainable. In fact, overall, one may even argue that – in a “feed the world” context, with a growing global population – organic and biodynamic are unsustainable practices, since those practices generally reduce yields and therefore both increase CO2 emissions per produced unit and lead to the need to increase the surface of land under agriculture to sustain – and certainly to increase – production levels. The results in terms of food insecurity, increased climate risk and lost biodiversity (let’s face it, even when producers are very biodiversity conscious, they are mostly growing monocultures, which does no good for natural biodiversity) would be notable if those practices were employed at large. They are not. Less than 2% of the world’s agricultural land is farmed using organic or biodynamic practices. And wine is drunk by a small, but wealthy, minority of the world’s population. This essentially means that organic and biodynamic wines are rich-world, old-white-men luxury pursuits, and basically make a negligible contribution towards saving the world, if at all. Sorry, but that’s what the numbers tell us.

To be sure, there are significant problems with so-called conventional farming practices that both impoverish soils and lead to unsustainable levels of nutrient run-off, so conventional farming as currently practiced is not long-term sustainable either. However, as argued, the large-scale problems with current conventional practices cannot be solved using merely organic or biodynamic practices. A much wider and deeper approach to sustainability is required in order for the world not to run out of food production capacity, and while vines are often grown on marginal soils that are not well-suited to food production, the same goes for viticulture, for viticulture has significant problems. To illustrate that, a few simple ratios: In Europe, viticulture takes up about 3% of agricultural land, but employs nearly 65% of all fungicide, 15% of insecticide and 4% of herbicide used on an annual basis (all per EU Parliament data). Why? Well, the vine, a riverside liana, has been removed from its normal riverine habitat in theCaucasus and the Levant and is now grown in disease- and pest-attracting monoculture, using methods that force it to grow in ways that are not natural to it. Further, human intervention has meddled with the vine’s DNA over millennia, and has narrowed its natural range of expression, meaning that vines are now more susceptible to diseases, because they have less natural variation in defences.

Probably the major problem with viticulture is the cultivated vine’s frankly miserable resistance towards fungal diseases. The European cultivated vine, vitis vinfera, taken from its natural habitat and selectively bred, simply lacks the so-called R genes, which for instance give the robust American wild vines their great resistance to fungal diseases, phylloxera and assorted other vileness. Growing vitisvinifera commercially therefore requires, more than any other crop, an intense chemical regimen. If not, you stand to lose your harvest and / or – and much worse – harvest grapes infected with all sorts of noxious substances. Apart from the significantly quality-reducing effect of harvesting grapes attacked by fungi, mycotoxins (the toxins left by fungal attacks) are not to be trifled with; they are known, among other things, to be carcinogenic.

So, is wine sustainable at all? Well, no, not as currently practiced. Nor can organics or biodynamics improve on that in any meaningful way. But should we give up on wine? No! Wine has provided untold enjoyment, solace and cultural expression over the course of millennia and, as I will argue further down, can be brought to a sufficient level of sustainability.

Sustainability is a highly complex and detailed jungle, and while my blog in principle has unlimited space, I doubt if your patience with my long-windedness is equally unlimited. However, I do need to get rather technical before I can get to what must be done, so in the following I go into a little bit of history as it relates to sustainability, then delve deeper into sustainability categories, listing relevant aspects as they relate – first – to wine production and then to wine import / distribution. I briefly discuss sustainability certification options, to what extent organic and biodynamic practices can be considered (automatically) sustainable, and conclude with a bit of opinion as to the opportunities and dangers of claiming sustainability.

Wine and Sustainability – A Tiny Bit of History

The practice of viticulture has deep roots, going some 11,000 years back, with two domestication centres in the Caucasus and the Levant. Here, wild vines – vitis vinifera sylvestris – were domesticated from their local riverine habitat.

Pre-historically and historically, farming vines and making wines was inherently more sustainable, since many of the diseases that we now need to fight in the world’s vineyards had not yet found their way to vitis vinifera, and since winemakers relied on entirely natural processes, local resources and farming practices that were integrated out of necessity. We don’t discuss wine quality here, since the great majority of wine up until fairly recently seems to have been rather vile and went bad quickly.

It was only with the advent of industrialised agriculture and the global spread of certain, mainly North American, fungal and parasitical diseases, that wine production started to diverge from these practices. But exactly because of the now global nature of vine diseases, and because the demand for wine is now far greater than ever before, there is no way we can turn back to the ancient practices in any meaningful way, even if some of the ways in which wine production was once local and integrated can offer interesting insights if brought into a wider sustainability context.

What is Sustainability?

In the world at large, sustainability is now being discussed and measured in relation to so-called ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) factors. With increasing global attention on climate change and sustainability, the ESG concept has become increasingly relevant, and legislation is for instance being passed on an EU level to define, measure and report on real sustainability. The most relevant piece of legislation in this regard is the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which contains a taxonomy of sustainable practices, rules for gathering and reporting on data and sanctions in the case of non-compliance and false claims of sustainability. The CSRD has been passed and will enter into force for the first group of companies (mainly very large corporations and entities listed on stock exchanges) already in 2024. Other businesses – including wine businesses – will be phased in until 2026, but because of the market power of the large entities, it is to be expected that CSRD requirements and practices will filter down into most parts of the EU economy before then. EU leads the world in this type of legislation, so we should expect to see the same type of regulation appear elsewhere within short.

While the wine industry consists of few large players and many small and medium-sized enterprises, and has a delightful tendency to be rather conservative in terms of corporate fads, both producers and dealers of wine will soon be faced with requirements to gather and report on ESG data in a much more comprehensive, structured and detailed manner than is currently practiced.

ESG Aspects in Wine Production

Typical environmental aspects of wine production include:

• Sustainable soil management: Soil conservation, green fertilizers, potentially organic farming

• Water management: Efficient use of water, water recycling, and protection of water sources.

• Climate impact: Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, use of renewable energy, efficient energy usage, climate adaptation. Aparticular issue here is the choice of packaging used: Glass bottles emit orders of magnitude more CO2 than other packaging options, so when it comes to wines that are not destined for long-term bottle ageing, there should be no reason to sell them in glass bottles, stoppered with the finite resource called cork. Also, when it comes to the glass bottles themselves, there is a particular issue with their weight; the heaviest bottles have a negative climate impact orders of magnitude larger than the lightest, because they not only emit more greenhouse gases in their production, but cause much greater emissions during transport and recycling. In a normal glass bottle of wine, as much as half of its carbon impact comes from the glass alone, and for the heaviest bottles, this comes in much higher.

• Biodiversity protection: Preservation of natural habitats, promotion of biological diversity

• Waste management: Minimization and recycling of waste, including packaging (a new EU packaging regulation will come into full force in 2026, with stringent requirements, and the rest of the world will soon follow)

Social aspects include:

• Working conditions: Ensuring safe working conditions, fair wages, no child labour, abiding by human rights

• Community impact: Support for local communities, including investment in local projects

• Health and safety: Ensuring health and safety standards for all employees

• Consumer health: Quality and safety of the product, including lawful use of pesticides

And governance aspects include:

• Corporate governance: Transparent, accountable and effective management

• Ethical supply chains: Ensuring that suppliers also meet ESG standards

• Anti-corruption: No tolerance for corruption and bribery

• Regulatory compliance: Compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, including CSRD

• Diversity and inclusiveness

• Profitability: Yes, to be sustainable, a business also needs to be profitable

ESG and Wine Import / Distribution

Most aspects for “the dark side” of wine remain the same as for wine production, but it is important to note that importers / distributors will be responsible for ensuring that the wines they bring to the market meet ESG criteria. This means that they must conduct due diligence on their suppliers and be transparent with consumers about the wine’s origin and production methods. If you might wish to go deeper into best practices in this regard, go look for material relating to EU’s upcoming Corporate Due Diligence Directive (CDDD); this is a major piece of work, still in process, but set to become law during 2026 or 2027.

Additionally, wine dealers will also need to account for the environmental impact of their distribution and packaging. This can involve choosing sustainable packaging materials, minimising transport distances, choosing less-emitting transport modes and optimizing inventory management to reduce waste. Emissions and other impacts may be difficult to measure, but most transporters nowadays offer emissions calculations. Ultimately, emissions from the distribution activity may be unavoidable, so importers / distributors may need to buy offsets; luckily, while there are many more or less dubious offset possibilities, the reputable ones will normally contain an option to approximate a business’s overall emissions, and if one does that in a conservative manner, it is indeed possible to cover one’s emissions in a reasonably cost-effective manner, as do I in my own little importing business.

Sustainability Certifications for the Wine Industry

One way to enable greater certainty as to sustainability claims within the wine industry is to rely on the various sustainability certifications that are available. Unfortunately, there are many – in France alone, you have a choice of some 13 certification options that somehow relate to sustainability, per Danish wine writer René Langdahl Jørgensen – and some are more reliable than others, including those that are government-backed and comprehensive. Certifications include:

• Organic and / or Biodynamic Certification: These should be relatively well-known to the readership, but for the sake of good order, let’s not forget that these practices do not abolish spraying with chemicals or use of fertilizer, they limit the spraying and fertilizer options. There are numerous organisations across the globe that provide these certifications, and some of them are fighting each other, but as a general rule they are quite reliable

• Sustainable Winegrowing: Organizations like Sustainable Winegrowing Australia and California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance offer certifications that take into account both environmental and social aspects of wine production

• Fair Trade Certification: The Fairtrade label guarantees that workers receive fair wages and working conditions, and that environmental considerations are taken into account

• Corporate Sustainability Certifications: Businesses may choose to subject themselves to corporation-wide certifications such as B Corp or VIVA, which asses the impact of the production process in respect of environmental protection, social progress and economic development

So, Are Organic and Biodynamic Winemaking Practices Sustainable in an ESG Sense?

Organic and biodynamic agriculture are often automatically viewed as more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture, but it’s important to remember that “sustainability” is a multidimensional, holistic concept that includes all ESG aspects.

Organic wine producers avoid the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, which can benefit the local ecosystem and biodiversity, and may improve soil health. However, one reason why viticulture uses 65% of all fungicides sprayed in the EU is that many vine growers, with peaks within the organic and biodynamic practices, rely on copper sulphate – so-called Bordeaux mixture – as their primary fungicide, and copper sulphate is very ineffective, so large volumes need to be used. Copper is poisonous to life, and its widespread use should be a cause of much concern. In terms of climate impact, the picture is more mixed. Organic farming generally has higher greenhouse gas emissions per unit produced, because organic practices require more interventions in the vineyard – due to the reduced efficacy of the pesticides etc. being used – and because of generally lower yields. Additionally, organic farming is often more dependent on manual labour, which can increase social costs, including the use of slave-like conditions for seasonal vineyard workers.

Biodynamic viticulture’s focus on farming as a holistic, living concept generally benefits biodiversity and soil health, which contributes to long-term sustainability. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, biodynamic methods could potentially contribute to storing more carbon in the soil, which can help offset the climate impact of wine production. But like with organic farming, use of copper sulphate is high, yields are often lower, vineyard interventions more numerousand manual labour more widespread, so the exact sustainabilityimpacts vary depending on specific practices and local conditions.

Can Wine Become Sustainable?

There is a romantic notion out there, that if we just “go back to nature”, all will be well, because Nature wishes us well. But nature really wants you dead, for you are not good fertilizer while alive. And, more seriously, we are now far too many people in the world, with far too great a wish for obtaining personal well-being and freedom, for humanity to return to a life that is wholly consistent with nature in its unmanipulated state. Besides, more narrowly, there is nothing natural about growing and making wine; none of the methods in use to do that can or would occur naturally, i.e. without the intervention of mankind.

So, intervention on our part is required, and I believe that this intervention needs to be deep. It is, after all, us human beings – with our constant, and entirely natural, need for improving, simplifying and increasing – that have brought things to their present state, so we, too, must get us to somewhere better, and preferably in ways that enable us to keep improving lives and do not infringe on personal freedoms.

If wine is to become truly sustainable, I think we need to approach it in a manner that to some will appear directly heretical, and to manyrather controversial:

• We need to begin with using more of the so-called PIWI (strongly fungal-resistant) recent hybrid crossings in the vineyard. They are there in good numbers now, and actually make excellent wine in some places.

• For what little spraying will be needed, we must use the most modern, systemic sprays, for then we need to use much less of each compound than with surface contact compounds; this will also result in much less vineyard intervention, hence better soil health, better nutrient retention, less emissions etc.

• We need to get away from humans and tractors in the vineyards, and start using drones and robots.

• We need to move away from glass bottles except for those (few) wines that are destined for long ageing; read an impassioned plea for that (and for not drinking wines too young) by my wine-writing friend Paul Balke here: The wine market has forgotten the concept of time – Paul Balke

• If we want to keep the wines we know, from the places we know (and don’t we all?), while being pummelled by climate change and influenced by the movement towards greater biodiversity and less intervention in nature, we must start genetically manipulating existing varieties towards greater resistance to disease, drought, temperature etc., while they at the same time ripen in a balanced way at the new temperatures, all while maintaining the characteristics we know. Climate change is moving too quickly for us to sit down and wait for natural selection to find its own way.

• And when all of that is in place, we can assign bit parts to organics and biodynamics in the greater context called regenerative agriculture, maybe even permaculture, for these latter two bear the promise of real, scientifically valid sustainable growing practices, rather than romantic, but ultimately backwards, “natural” dalliances

• And finally, we must not forget the social and governance aspects of sustainability, including the fact that sustainability is also about profitability, even if we great spirits of course can only nurture scorn for filthy lucre

Sustainability is not just a fad in the wine industry, it is a fundamental and necessary shift in how companies must operate. Both producers and dealers are realizing that it is not only good for the planet but also for the bottom line. As documented by i.a. McKinsey, a strong ESG profile can create loyalty among consumers, who are increasingly choosing products that are produced in a sustainable and ethical manner. Further, while it may be work intensive and tedious, actually going into detail about the many aspects of holistic sustainability will eventually pay dividends in the form of greater knowledge of your activity and business, which lays the foundation for greater innovation, both in terms of sales and costs.

There are pitfalls in respect of sustainability. False or unsubstantiated claims of sustainability may not only reduce a business’s standing vis-à-vis its customers, which can be lethal enough, but may also attract fines or other sanctions once the full range of sustainability regulation has been enacted.

The wine industry, like the rest of the world, faces having to adapt to this new reality of sustainability, and soon. There is no longer time or space for facile shortcuts in respect of these issues, and a holistic, scientifically valid mindset must be put in place.

It is to be hoped that this is not one area in which the wine industry will be a laggard.

Cruising Into A White Wine Surprise

I’m just back from a not entirely great cruise down the St. Lawrence River from Montreal through Québec and around Nova Scotia to end in Boston. We’d hoped for long stretches of forested shores and autumn leaves and even some birds, but it was not to be: It turns out that beyond Québec City the St. Lawrence broadens out so far you might as well be at sea, with nothing but water to look at in every direction. Sigh.

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Thus scenically deprived, we spent more time than was truly wise eating and drinking, and that too not entirely happily. Our noble vessel – Windstar Cruise’s Star Pride – sported a quite lengthy wine list, but it was far too Californicated for our Europe-oriented palates: much too much New World wine, far too little French, Italian, or Spanish. Sigh again.

The crew did its best to stress the strengths of what the ship offered. Beverage Director Antony Cruz and Sommelier Johnbosco Pereira (pictured below) organized several tastings, starting with an introductory one contrasting New World and Old World styles, which was very appropriate for the majority of the passengers, and going on to tastings of premium wines, single malt whiskies, of which the ship stocked a goodly number, and Cognacs.

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Nevertheless, every day we had to deal with that dominantly New World list. This is not to say that we found nothing to drink: On the contrary, there were several bottles that we made the most of – particularly a lovely Prosecco for aperitifs and light lunches and a charming Barbera d’Asti from Batasiolo, as well as an Antinori Pèppoli Chianti Classico that served well with lunch.
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But the menus of our ship’s several dining venues were strongly white-wine oriented, with more chicken dishes than I had feared. Inescapably, this led to our heavily relying on the few white Burgundies and Spanish whites available, especially a good sturdy pair of Albariños and Verdejos, a very nice Labouré Roi Pouilly Fuissé, and one fine Chablis from Domaine William Fèvre.
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Some consequently unorthodox food and wine pairings led me to the conscious realization of something I had sort of known but never really formulated for myself: to wit, that white wines are unexpectedly versatile with all sorts of food, including dishes that you would normally match with red wines. Forget about red wine with fish, which really only ever worked well with salmon and pinot noir anyway: Try white wine with red meat.

Not just any white wine with any red meat, of course. You still have to pay attention to the complementarities of the weight and intensity of the two. For the more assertively flavored meats, you definitely want a white wine with some heft and authority of its own, and especially one with a respectable amount of acidity to deal with red-flesh sweetness and to cut through the fats of, for instance, a grilled lamb chop. It’s not ideal, but we did find a few Old World whites on the cruise that could do that very satisfactorily.

Spanish whites are generally sturdy enough to do the job. Among French wines, bigger white Burgundies will serve, but best of all – sturdier and richer in themselves – are Rhône whites. I think several Italian whites from Friuli and Campania would also handle red meats with little trouble, but we weren’t able to test that theory because the ship’s wine list was – for our palates at least – very deficient in Italian whites.

You will probably in most cases want to stick with the old red meat/red wine paradigm – but if you ever find yourself in a situation where the best wine on the list is clearly a white and you don’t want to eat fish or, heaven forfend, chicken, don’t be afraid to give a big, well balanced white a try with steak or chops. You might be surprised by how pleasing it can be.