The Battle for The Clean, Green Mantle: Bonterra Fights Back Against "Clean Wine" Claims With "Beyond" Video

Dry Farm Wines, WINC, Scout and Cellar, and a host of other direct to consumer wine brands are touting "Clean Wines" as better than anything. 

Why organic certification doesn't count for as much as "clean wine" is a byproduct of the natural wine movement, which has made consumers focus on additives in wine - additives like sugar, MegaPurple and other baddies. Consumers like focusing on additives, because they can read lists of additives on food products. It's familiar ground. 

And natural winemakers like focusing on them, too, since, in the US, very few natural winemakers grow grapes (which was supposed to be one of the essential definitions of natural wine) and focus instead on all the things they DON'T add to wine instead of what they do do - choosing fermentation vessels, aging vessels, deciding on length of various processes, etc. etc. 

The Clean Wine Crowd haven't yet really addressed farming issues. ("Trust us" is a common refrain.) While they often try to avoid the O word - organic - they don't mind if their version of organic is what is increasingly referred to as "non-certified organic." 

(Were there too many sulfite questions from confused consumers over the USDA's idea of Organic Wine being sulfite free?)

This week, an indie vintner and I tasted wines together and she assured me one of the wines was from a "non-certified organic" vineyard. The next day I looked it up on the county's pesticide use report. Not organic. A lot of fungicides. 

She was dismayed and felt betrayed. I've seen the same response from many of my colleagues. "How could someone lie to me?" they say.

I've been dismayed often, too. It's hard not to take it as a sense of personal betrayal when someone is untruthful, as if you will never find out what they are really farming with in their vineyard. Do you really appear to them to be that much of stooge, you wonder? Or, to give some of them the benefit of the doubt, do they themselves not know what their vineyard management company is doing?

I've come to the conclusion over years of researching this topic, that, although there are some innocents out there, many vintners just lie. They are just so used to no one ever reading the pesticide use report. 

Do they must think the pesticide use data stays inside a database in Sacramento for its entire life? 

Apparently they do. I could give countless examples of this phenomenon but I won't - at least not today.

The companies staking their claim on making "clean" wine are often using "non-certified organic" grapes. Some are also buying certified organic - from Bonterra's former growers (who are organically certified) in Mendocino (Bonterra found cheaper organic grapes elsewhere and abandoned many Mendo growers) or from certified organic producers elsewhere, including Emiliana in Chile - without telling consumers the grapes are actually certified organic.

Now Bonterra's taking aim at these green mantle wannabees - certified organic's thieves - and the thieves' soaring sales and popularity (WINC just filed for an IPO this week, meaning it could go public) and fighting back with this new video, released a month ago. Take a look in this Bonterra video below. 

(Bonterra's lawyers must have gotten more powerful, since this video, unlike most wine videos, appears to only be viewable on YouTube - where your age can be confirmed? Pullease. [That is not the spirit of Dionysos, is it?] Still, click on over.)

One quibble: though the Made with Organic Wine standard IS better than 95 percent of the wines out there in terms of the additives that can be used, it should be noted that all organically grown wines in the U.S. can use a LIMITED number of additives, and that list of permitted additives does NOT include MegaPurple, etc. 

On other fronts, Bonterra's sales are going well. Here are the latest stats from Concha y Tora's annual report:

Until now, Bonterra has pretty much had a virtual monopoly in regular supermarkets as the only Made with Organic Grapes brand ($11-16ish), while Bronco brands like Shaw Organic have a captive spot at Trader Joe's for the $4 buyers. Newcomers like Scheid are lining up to fuel domestic organic options at Whole Foods, which has been not stocked much organic for years.

This week, The Drinks Business named Concha y Toro, Bonterra's parent company, "International Drinks Company of the Year." The Chilean based winery became a B Corp this year, a prestigious achievement, which the publication cited as impressing their judges.

Fetzer Vineyards, owned by Concha y Toro, already had become a certified B Corp. in 2015.

While Bonterra's wines are organic, those branded with the name of its parent company, Fetzer Vineyards, are not, although a newly released Fetzer Vineyards brand sustainability marketing video obscures that fact, branding the entire Fetzer Vineyards with the organic halo effect. It's like Coca Cola trying to say it's sugar free - taking a product attribute and applying it to the corporate brand. 

Is this ethical?

Bonterra's case production is dwarfed by that of Fetzer's, which is not clear in the video.

Fetzer Vineyards' branded wines are made from grapes treated with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides primarily from Lodi and Central Valley growers, despite the happy picture the video paints which refers ONLY to its organic estate vines, which all go into Bonterra, not Fetzer Vineyards' other brands.

A frame grab from the video may imply that Fetzer's 
wines all use these practices. Fetzer Vineyards the company has 
certified organic vineyards it owns and uses
for Bonterra wines. But Fetzer Vineyards' (the company) other wines do not.
The 900 acres of estate vines are a fraction
of the grapes the company sources from. 

Fetzer has made much of its "sustainable" sourcing, but sustainable wines may use many toxic substances in the vineyards that, in my humble opinion (which counts for naught), are not worthy of a B Corp award. Consumers will have to learn that B Corp does not mean organic and apparently, it can mean deceptive branding as well.

But many other green halo wine brands do the same. While it is commendable that Boisset and Benziger have biodynamic estates - and Boisset's is growing quite a bit - both of those brands could be painted with the same brush. Boisset makes fewer than one percent of its wines from its biodynamic vines. (For years it prominently displayed the biodynamic calendar on its home page, but has since stopped that.) At Benziger the number is seven percent. At both of these brands, as well as at Bonterra, the biodynamic wines are the most expensive wines. That is not the case for many other biodynamic wineries (Emiliana, Lunaria, Cooper Mountain in Oregon, Montinore Estate in Oregon, and others). 

Good luck, consumers! It's tricky path to dodge the greenwashing and find the truly green gold. Remember it's often the wine, and not the brand, that is organic.