News from Slow Wine Fair 2024: "Chianti Classico Now More Than 50 Percent Organic'

Slow Wine Fair features more organic producers every year. Enjoy these remarks from FederBio's president, Maria Grazia Mammuccini on the progress and strategy underlying organic viticulture. 

Read more from her Slow Wine Fair interview here. 

“In the last 10 years, organic vineyard surface area has increased by 145%,” emphasizes Maria Grazia Mammuccini, President of FederBio. “Organic viticulture covers an area of almost 136,000 hectares, 19% of the entire national vineyard area, with peaks reaching 38% in some highly suited regions such as Tuscany, where in Chianti Classico, organic vineyards now exceed 50% of the total. 

Organic viticulture is an excellent example of resilience and adaptation to the climate crisis, which simultaneously contributes to preserving soil fertility and ecosystems. It represents a virtuous model capable of combining the value of the territorial identity of our country’s designations of origin with that of organic sustainability.”

“At Slow Wine Fair, which consolidates our partnership with Slow Food and BolognaFiere, we have organized an event dedicated to organic viticulture as a production method to address climate impacts. During this event, we will present concrete examples of biodiversity monitoring and soil quality. These examples allow us to design an agronomic strategy to create a ‘vineyard system’ capable of responding to climatic shocks. This allows us to adopt innovative solutions based on agroecology that are capable of increasing the resilience of plants in their environment.”

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When I started this blog, back in May of 2011, I did so after a career in health information and specifically as editor in chief of DNA.com, working on cancer genetics with hot shot scientists from blue chip institutions. A company founded to search for new genetic tests, it was the brainchild of Jim Clark, an A List venture capital maverick. DNA Sciences was funded and created to marry the Human Genome Project and the internet. The first day I arrived, the company was on the front page of the New York Times. High profile. 

Clark had earlier started WebMD (as well as Netscape), so I became the editor of all things genetic health on WebMD as well as DNA.com, where we had a deep bench of amazing scientists on staff as well as colleagues from many prestigious institutions. For example, DNA discoverer James Watson was on the board. No pressure, Pam, LOL. 

In my work there, I wrote cheatsheets for doctors, worked with the American Medical Associations genetics leaders, and launched online radio shows with celebrated experts. 

Experts told me, "Genetics aren't the main engine of cancer; non-genetic factors, including the environment, are."

So when that editorial position ended (in the mayhem so typical of Silicon Valley ventures), I started to look around for what was next. 

A trip to Napa with a friend who lived in Calistoga at the time led to interest in wine. 

Morning coffee with cancer research friends from Commonweal let to my discovery of the Pesticide Use Report, which transfixed me. It was like a secret X-Ray into the soul of wine country, a soul that was pretty dark at that time. Regenerative ag was not yet a thing. And Roundup was not yet in the vocabulary of wine writers.

I remember meeting many WSET types, who reminded me of my art history classes in college. Learn about 50-100 adjectives, and repeat. I never met anyone who had heard of glyphosate or who read the Pesticide Use Report (PUR). (I recommend revising the WSET courses and MW and MS tests to remedy that gap.)

Back then I was enamored of Huey Johnson, a "green plans" environmental leader, and when I learned his former staffer was working on making the wine industry more sustainable, I wanted to know more. 

I went on a tour at a winery owned by a Napa Green president, where I was told of bird boxes and other green initiatives. 

Imagine my disappointment when I looked that winery up on the PUR and saw it used bird and bee neurotoxins. I had help from a wonderful scientist, Susan Kegley (who was chief scientist for Pesticide Action Network at the time), who generously identified the chemicals of concern in Napa and Sonoma and further afield. She even took me to a high level PUR meeting in Sacramento where power users conferred with the PUR database guardians to improve features. 

I spent countless hours on OMRI, learning which of the lovely chemical products were approved for organic use and which were not. 

I am grateful for teachers like Susan. 

Another person who was a great help to me was Volker Eisele, proclaimed as the "lion of land preservation," and featured in James Conaway's Napa books. 

I was delighted to see Jack Davies in the first of Conaway's trilogy (link to second book here). Davies was my father's roommate at Harvard Business School way back when. 

I learned more about deeper environmental history roots and the history of the ag preserve. 

It seemed odd to me that people in the wine industry looked upon organic viticulture as a surefire way to lose money. The more I looked into it, I dropped my "Debbie Downer" phase (so many pesticides!) and saw other wineries doing great work, winning above average awards and scores and succeeding in their businesses. It was a curious gap in perceptions. 

As I dug into what was happening in the wine industry, I felt there needed to be a newsy site to track the names of people doing good work under organic certification and to give voice to these wineries who didn't seem to have any association or organization. (They still don't in the U.S.) It's been quite an education–and involved a lot of wine education and wine drinking and new friends and colleagues. It also coincides with the pleasure of tracking improvements in the industry. As well as the greater impacts of climate change. 

When I think back on 12 years of writing in this blog, I am amazed at the distance we've come. The world is indeed changing. The wheel is turning. That's a good thing...and something to celebrate. 

Thanks for all the clicks.

And for all those wineries doing great work promoting soil health and employee health – A Great Big Thanks. 

May it continue.

Napa Powerhouses V. Sattui and Castello di Amorosa Both Go Organic on Their 350 Acres of Estate Vines

 

After 43 years of business in Napa, Dario Sattui and Tom Davies, winery president, made their move to organics on all 350 acres of estate vines. They grow 26 varieties in four counties. 

Everything is sold direct to consumer, and they're proud to announce to all their customers that they've gone organic.

They got climate change religion, too, after hearing a U.C. Berkeley business school professor explain carbon to them and now offer their employees money to carpool to work. Among other things. 

Read the article in the current issue of Grape and Wine magazine.

The Bordeaux Club's Classy Gents in New Academie du Vin Book: Could These Old School Influencers Become the Next Masterpiece Theater PBS Series?

The Sanctum Sanctorium of the Classy Gents

As the wine loving historian Andrew Roberts (not a club member) writes in his introduction, "Imagine a fictional claret society, in which six distinguished Englishmen meet thricely in black tie at their stately homes, 18th century London clubs or Oxbridge master's lodges, in order to drink, discuss and rate the greatest wines ever produced."

Now, thanks to Neil McKendrick, Hugh Johnson and the Academie du Vin Library, you can visit the inner sanctum sanctorium of seven of wine's most highly esteemed Classy Gents in a new book The Bordeaux Club: The Seventy Year Story of Great Wines and the Friends Who Shared Them.

Meeting thrice a year in luxurious settings–Hugh Johnson's garden, where they sip Champagne by his apple orchard, at Oxford's prestigious halls, or in wine merchant's splendors–they sample the best of what the post World War II era had to offer, spanning the years from 1949-2019 when close to the last of their breed had died out.  

 

Roberts tells us "...each member competes subtly to serve better food and wine than his five fellows." 

He also says, "Associations and societies such as the Bordeaux Club are the very acme of civilization." Hyperbole? Perhaps. (It says something that only Bordeaux is in scope, for the club, an historical fact that shows how much the world of wine has changed.)

While these stories offer their own unique pleasures, they also shed light on the history of Napa and the direction our local wine industry–spanning from low wine to high wine culture–chose to go. 

Napa-Bordeaux Connection

Napa went from jug wine coop for Gallo's Hearty Burgundy to wealthy wine enclave and boomtown, a la a mini-Medoc. The reason is connected to these influencers of the post War era. I call them the Classy Gents and you'll recognize them at once. 

They're not Robert Mondavi, raised in an Italian immigrant family in Lodi, seeing the prices for Bordeaux wines. But after seeing Bordeaux's economic success, it's no wonder he led the Napa region to commercial and wine success by aping, mimicking and in some cases surpassing (or at least partnering with) the favorite wine of Classy Gents–Bordeaux First Growths–when he launched Opus One, a co-brand with a First Growth–Lafite. 

Due in part to England's global wine trade and its long ties to Bordeaux in history (as well as geographic proximity), Bordeaux–and the grape varieties it grows–have been elevated to top dog in world wine prices (until recent decades) as well as dominant grape variety status. Cabernet is a bet Napa made–and won.

The English authors, merchants, upper class and businessmen so aligned with Bordeaux–and the prices it commanded–indirectly led to Napa's reinvention of itself as a satellite of Bordeaux, catering to marketing for both affluent lifestyles and elitist wine for the wealthy. (Proximity to wealthy San Francisco and Silicon Valley helped).

It also affected everything in California from the fine wine market–including our internationally celebrated Ridge Vineyard–to the cheapest wine grape vineyards. A fifth of California's vineyards are planted to Cabernet. So the book is highly relevant to our local scene. 

Napa could not command the tasting fees and wine prices it currently does were it not for the Classy Gents and their Bordeaux precedent. 

In 2022, Napa's wine growers produced close to a billion dollars worth of grapes, with Cabernet leading in price per ton at $8,819. French wine professors leading Napa tours for their business school students are astounded by Harlan's Promontory prices–$1,200 for a 2018.

And today you can find Napa wines for sale–Inglenook, Favia, Promontory–at the prestigious La Place de Bordeaux alongside LaTour, et al. 

An Intimate Peek

But enough about class and economics. Let's get to the story and the deliciously rendered hedonism, please.

The volume is a hefty, condensed brick of a book (2.4 pounds, 383 pages) featuring some of wine's most eminent personalities–Hugh Johnson, the notorious historian John Plumb, Michael Broadbent, Simon Berry (yes, of THE Berry Brothers), and Steven Spurrier (of the Tasting of Paris fame, the 1976 contest that brought Napa wines to the world stage). It is rich in content. 

Author and historian Neil McKendrick, once a student of Plumb's, is the club member who took notes for the club which now form the basic backbone of this book–that historical archive will please Bordeaux collectors–along with biosketches of the more illustrious and newsworthy members. Menus of their meals are included along with photos that make their world come to life. 

McKendrick is a good writer, starting off the chapter of the history of the club with, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a wine in possession of a good reputation must be in need of a club." 

Furthermore he writes, wine collectors have wine cellars full of treasures to be shared. A club must be fun, too, he says.

He writes, "It greatly helps if they (the club members) are colorful, distinguished and interesting characters–and no one can doubt that the Bordeaux Club members were an arrestingly (in some cases alarmingly) colorful crew.They make for very good copy."

I agree, and thanks to McKendrick, the book is very good copy indeed. There are no technical notes on the wines, with the emphasis on a well rounded picture of the people, places and pleasures. 

In my mind, it seems likely that some U.K. production company might see this club as the perfect subject for a new Masterpiece TV series, don't you think? It's got all the right stuff.

Thanks to McKendrick, now almost 90, for a shining a light on the pleasures of wine among friends and for sharing it more broadly with us. 

Slow Wine USA Guide Book Party Featured in Somm Journal!

Thanks SOMM Journal for this fabulous coverage of our book launch party in December.

Read the whole article about the book launch party here. 

New Porto Protocol Video Launches - International in Scope

Of all the international sustainability groups that I have come across, the one I admire most is Porto Protocol, which, in my mind, is kind of like Wikipedia for winegrowers and climate change. It's more of a neighbor to neighbor approach and does not require participants to pay a membership fee. It's focused more on a peer to peer dynamic. 

It has frequent webinars with practicing experts from around the world, comparing notes on its You Tube channel. 

It's now come out with a new 41 min. video (just the thing to watch on nights when California is being drenched yet again with another atmospheric river) which you can watch here.

Biodiversity Winners Honored at Millésime Bio's Vitis Bio Competition

The organic wine magazine VitisBio and Millésime launched a biodiversity competition for organic wineries. 

The group wrote, "To participate, winegrowers must be certified organic, exhibitors at the Millésime Bio show on January 29, 30 and 31, 2024 and justify, through a complete form, their actions on their estate for the benefit of biodiversity. 

They are thus questioned about their approaches in favor of grassy areas (inter-rows, headlands, embankments, fallows, etc.), hedges and wooded areas, other habitats such as ponds, low walls, scree slopes, hollow trees, shelters and shelters installed for wildlife. 

Another point investigated, their choices linked to the diversity at the estate: size of the plot, various grape varieties, productions other than vines, animals in the vineyard, but also the limitation of phytosanitary products…"

116 applications were submitted.

The jury was made up of the Vitisbio editorial team, managers of Millésime Bio, two wine merchants from the Federation of Independent Wine Merchants and biodiversity experts from the LPO and the Hérault Chamber of Agriculture.

Around 30 nominees were selected.

Prizes were awarded to:

🥇Gold Medals: Vigne de Cocagne, Exéa Family, Domaine Carriere Pradal

 🥈 Silver medals: Lanye-Barrac Vitifarm, Domaine De Campaucels, Château La Peyruche

 🥉 Bronze medals: Domaine De Roquenégade, Chateau De Fosse Seche, Domaine Le Loup Bleu