Not many years ago, the word "organic" was something of a pejorative among top winemakers. Initially associated with fretful consumers preoccupied more with personal health than wine quality, the term had a compromising ring to it. Great winemakers, in the end, want to be known for great wine, not for health drinks destined to be paired with bean sprouts.
It also didn't escape those winemakers that many brands conspicuously waving the organic flag in the 1980s and 90s were pretty mediocre.
Fast-forward to today. The best producers now preach the organic gospel far and wide, as several dozen did at the Return to Terroir organic road show that held public tastings in Montreal and Toronto this year. They also boast about it to reporters without prompting. The subject came up several times as I toured the cellars of top winemakers in Burgundy recently, including the dark and mouldy cave of Michel Lafarge in the village of Volnay. "Biodynamic wines give pure, clean fruit flavour, better balance," Lafarge told me as we sipped a barrel sample of his Domaine Michel Lafarge Clos du Château des Ducs 2006, one of several delicate and gloriously perfumed pinot noirs we sampled that morning.
Lafarge, who is 79, has been making acclaimed wines his entire life yet converted to organic only in 1997. Since 2000, he has also been farming biodynamically, a zealous form of organic agriculture that involves lunar cycles and bizarre fertilizer concoctions made in cow horns. Now, he's harvesting smaller grapes with thicker skins, he says. That's a good thing for wine grapes, because much of the flavour, longevity and structure comes from compounds in the skins.
With ease, he rattles off a litany of Burgundy's most esteemed producers, all devoted to the organic cause. The list includes Domaine Leflaive in Puligny-Montrachet, Pierre Morey in Meursault, Marquis d'Angerville in Volnay and Comte Armand in Pommard - a veritable Burgundian dream team. At the excellent Domaine Jacques Prieur, which I also visited, about 60 per cent of the vineyards are organic. As for Burgundy's most vaunted estate, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, it's been organic for the longest time, though I suspect few of the trophy hunters who can afford to plop down $600-plus for its pinot noirs tend to do so out of health or environmental concerns.
What changed? One thing was the growing awareness that many great estates, such as Romanée-Conti and France's Château de Beaucastel, had been quietly operating organically for ages and producing some of the world's best wines.
Also, an important schism within the movement occurred. Time was when the word "organic" was generally reserved for that extreme branch of winemaking that eschews all chemicals, notably sulfites in the winery. Then consumers got wise. They began to realize sulfites, which occur naturally and are common to foods such as dried apricots, were not the chief cause of wine headaches and do not pose the cancer risk of their cousins in rhyme, nitrites, found in hot dogs.
Sulphur dioxide, one member of the sulfite family, is a key antiseptic and antioxidant, crucial in maintaining freshness. Now a winery that employs minimal sulphur can still boast its wines are produced "from organically grown grapes." (About 5 per cent of asthmatics can have severe reactions to sulfites, the main reason governments started mandating label warnings.)
Organic-wine leaders such as Bonterra in California have done much to spread the gospel. Practices include planting grass between vine rows to retain soil moisture and control weeds, as well as allowing trees to grow among the vines to encourage a more diverse ecosystem, which cuts the chance of a single pest overwhelming the vineyard.
