Just What Exactly is Clean Wine? Shall We Count the Definitions?

Can a lot of the controversy over "clean wine" be explained as the wine industry's refusal to be more transparent about growing grapes and making wine? 

Unverifiable claims abound in these ads.

Might be true. Might not. What does "grapes" mean? Are they
grown with toxic chemicals? We will never know from this ad.

The desire by consumers to know more about wine, the least transparent beverage product, has gotten all tangled up, because, aside from organic certification, no one knows much about a wine–how it was grown and how it was made into wine.

The wine industry and consumers can either live with it, buy organic certified or just resign themselves to it all being a mystery.

Where did it all begin? 

Act 1: The Natural Wine Movement - You Grow It, You Make It

The first "big" movement in wine, the natural wine movement, told consumers to focus on additives, native yeasts and sulfites. Its pioneers–Alice Feiring and Isabel Legeron–eventually coalesced fervent supporters into Raw Wine events–decreeing that a wine could only embody their highest ideals if, for Feiring, the winemaker was a true vigneron, who grew and vinified their own grapes, building on the European vigneron model. 

No added sulfite USDA Certified Organic Wines from the US like Frey were verboten, despite the lack of sulfite additions and the fact that the Frey family grows many of its wines. "Too industrial," Fearing once told me at a natural wine movie event in San Francisco.

Act 2: Natural Wine Redefined - You Make It

Raw Wine didn't define wine that way and the movement's biggest stars in California mostly all make wine from purchased grapes they do not farm. (Owning land is expensive). In their world, winemaking superseded the integrated role which supported a belief system that wines are made in the vineyard–i.e. the grower makes the wine. Natural wine inspired a frenzy of low sulfite wines, some from chemically farmed vines. Low sulfites could be defined by Raw Wine's entry requirements which include a max of 70 ppm.

Native yeasts were also core features. 

It should be pointed out that natural wine is a branding strategy and not everyone who makes wines according to these standards is making those brand claims. Many of the best and most prominent producers in the US meet those standards of estate grown grapes, native yeasts and low sulfites, but do not market themselves to the segment, because they don't want negative baggage associated with the high rate of spoilage from many natural winemakers. The biggest advantage of natural wine marketing is that there are a whole series of wine bars in every major city catering to the natural wine meme and these bars are cool gathering places, with plenty of handsome/cute hipsters hanging out. Who needs Tinder when you can have insta-community. 

Natural winemakers in France were busted for using chemicals, when a group tried to define natural wine standards and some were found to contain pesticide residues at such high levels, that the group felt obliged to mandate organic certification of the grapes as part of the Natural Wine standard in France.  

Act 3: Clean Wine = Organic Wannabes?

That was followed by the "clean wine" movement which I thought was more or less organic wannabes, in various stages of deception and, as Stephen Colbert used to say, "truthiness." Brands like Scout and Cellar say they only deal with growers using organic practices (i.e. no toxic chemicals), and since so many growers practice organic farming without being certified (since they don't see the market payoff in their own mind's eye for the reporting and monitoring required in certification), they've been able to follow through because there is grape supply and because California has mandatory pesticide use reporting (which enables them to see how a grower is farming). 

Scout and Cellar is a straddler–not requiring certification but trying to source from certifiable vineyards. Sometimes they also source wine from bonafide certifieds, but it's not baked into their brand identity.

Act 4: "Better for You" = Same Old Chemically Farmed Wine, But Labeled With Calorie Counts

The other wave is wines that have no claim to organic farming, but brand themselves as "better for you" on the basis of of putting their calories on their bottle or can label–to be in step with the way consumers buy other types of beverages like hard seltzer, beer and ready to drink cocktails.  One big brand here is Scheid's Sunny with a Chance of Flowers (a brilliant brand name), but there are lots of others. 

Act 5: Sugar Free and "Tested"

Dry Farm Wines has probably angered more wine writers than any other single brand, for many reasons, not least of which is its millennial centric success in the marketplace with a message resonating with consumers. Its carbon footprint consists of all imported wines, from countries where irrigating grape vines is illegal, so it's doing very little to help our own ecosystem get "clean" but it is capitalizing on the plentiful supply of (mostly organically grown) wines from France, Spain and Italy where organics is 18 percent of production (versus 3 percent in the US).

Dry Farm Wine ad–Note statement that says that organic wines
frequently test positive for the presence of glyphosate.
Well, guess why–because, according to the USGS, glyphosate is in the RAINWATER.

What the ad fails to mention is the VASTLY LOWER
residues found in organic vines versus their chemically farmed
counterparts–Gallo's Pink Moscato had 61 times more herbicide residues in it
 than Bonterra's organically grown wine in a recent test

PS Most wineries do not use GMO yeast; it is permitted but not widely used

Its most successful ads on Facebook and elsewhere tout that it tests the wines it carries (which are all low alcohol) – but what is it testing for? I've asked several times and the only answer has been that they test for sugar, not pesticide residues. (I've asked about them about pesticide testing specifically with no response).  

Winc is another brand that millenials love is  and while mostly selling chemically farmed wines, they've recently acquired organic experts Natural Merchants, who have been importing many European wines sold to Dry Farmed Wines. 

And let's not forget FitVine with its low sugar promise.

Act 6: The Original Meaning: As Winemakers' Term Meaning Wine Made Without Faults

I called winemaking instructor extraordinare Bryan Avila to see what he thought clean wine meant. He gave me the winemakers' textbook answer: a wine made without faults. 

Act 7: Organic Fights Back

Clean Wine got a lot of play, which led Bonterra to launch a fact filled video taking issue with Clean Wine–was Clean Wine stealing their thunder?

In response, Bonterra played the eco-card, using sustainability tactics along with organic certification to up the ante on its "clean wine" competitors. Fetzer, the parent company, is playing the eco-card on both its Bonterra (organic) and Fetzer Vineyards (non-organic) widely, emphasizing how it uses renewable energy, etc.

It is also owned by a publicly traded parent company, Concha y Toro, which is required by law to publish its sustainability data these days. And so if you have the data in hand, it's not a bad idea to use it in marketing. 

(Sadly, Bonterra abandoned a lot of its local Mendocino organic growers in favor of cheaper organic grapes elsewhere in the state, according to its former vineyard director.  Those companies like Scout and Cellar and others went into Mendo to buy those organic grapes. It's a lot to keep track of). 

So Bonterra made a choice not to align itself under the Clean Wine banner, but Avaline did. Those are marketing choices. Which every brand needs to make in order to get consumers. The only thing wrong with this picture is that most consumers are not able to get honest, verified information about how wine is made if it ain't certified. And too many wine writers don't yet understand how certification works. 

BOTTOM LINE - LET'S GET AN ORGANIC LEARNATHON GOING

I don't really want to waste any more time–yours or mine–on clean wine. Because as you can see, the assumptions about what it is vary so widely as to make the term confusing and ripe for more arguments. 

But the real takeaway from my POV is that organics do matter and certification is important. And if we all were well versed in that topic, we would be able to look at clean wine and know what to ask. 

Is this product from certified organic grapes? If the answer is yes, then okay. Is this product a certified organic wine (of the two types in the US)? Ok, yes, we know something about it then. 

Market research shows us that we have basic trust and transparency about the facts in organic land. 

If it's simply "clean wine," we don't know much other than that the producer is branding themselves that way. In fact, there are hundreds of organically grown wine producers in the U.S who could decide to brand themselves as clean wine. But why would they? They'd rather compete on other terms–like price or their terroir or use their well established distribution channels and sales people.

WOULD THIS HELP?

Here's an invitation–feel free to reach out to me, fellow wine writers, and I'll give you some background, if you're interested, on organic wine categories. Or we can have a zoom "intro to organics" session so you can get the real skinny on organic certification.

And to all–start reading the pesticide use reports if you really want to know what's happening in vineyards. Distributors will tell you ANYTHING they think you want to hear, but the state data doesn't lie. Why not get the facts? You can ask the county ag commissioner for a copy of the pesticide use reports (this is public information made public upon request). You can also just ask the winery if they would share theirs, too.