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Thursday, April 25, 2024

Wine Critic Miguel Hudin calls Slow Wine Guide, "An ethos of sanity in what is an insane world"


We at Slow Wine Guide USA are celebrating over some incredible praise from wine writer and critic Miquel Hudin

He writes, "...the massive meat of the guide...is profiles of wineries, the people, vineyards, and of course the wines. There’s really too much to get into as one can imagine that 400 profiles takes up a rather large chunk of space. But this is a great set of data with clear writing and will be really useful for wine drinkers in the US or even professionals looking for a ready reference of wineries that they’d like to stock that hold an ethos of sanity in what is an insane world."

Thank you to all of our field contributors who make the guide the incredible resource that it is.

You can see sample pages and purchase guides at slowwineusa.com. (Makes a great gift, too - stock up!)

Monday, April 22, 2024

Happy Earth Day–Let's Scale!: Organic is Grow-Grow-Growing in Lodi

Lodi for all its historic charm has never been a hot bed of organic wine grape growing...and more's the pity. 

A few brave souls, Tegan Passalaqua of Sandlands and Morgan Peterson of Bedrock, are the fine wine guys who are growing organically there, along with Markus Bokisch who has 84 acres of organic vines. (He sold a few recently). The Lucas Winery continues to plug along with three acres of historic vines certified organic since 2009.

Now Vino Farms, the powerhouse company that oversees 17,000 acres of vines, is stepping into the organic world with more than 320 acres certified organic and biodynamic. And 400 more are on the way. WOO-EEE. 


Craig Ledbetter sent this list of organic and/or biodynamic vineyards that Vino Farms farms under organic certification today:


Ranch 1 – The Bench – 54.5 acres certified – 150+/- in transition

Ranch 7 Rivers Edge – 11.2 acres certified

Ranch 8 – Simmerhonrn – 17 acres certified

Ranch 9 Vista Luna – 139 acres certified

Ranch 15 – Hidden Oaks – 100 acres certified.

 

"We have started transitioning roughly 400 more acres that will be certified in 2025 and 2026." he said.

 

Happy Earth Day–Let's Scale!




Want to read more about the Ledbetter's path?

Catchup with these articles I wrote for WineBusiness here.


Monday, April 15, 2024

Slow Food's Terra Madre of the Americas May 18-19 (and Trade Tasting on 20th) Launches in Sacramento with Slow Wine USA Masterclasses!


You may have heard of the granddaddy of all food events, the Slow Food movement's Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, which takes place every other year in Turin, Italy, bringing together the global food and wine movement. But it's a long way to go.

This year, the same Italian team, along with local coordinators, is launching the inaugural Terra Madre of the Americas in conjunction with Visit Sacramento during the weekend of May 18-19. The mammoth event will feature food marketplaces, networking, music and flavors and foods from North and South America. 

SlowWine USA editors and co-directors Deborah Parker Wong and Pam Strayer (yours truly) will be presenting three wine masterclasses, open to the public. 

A grand tasting with Slow Wine wineries pouring takes place on Sunday, as well ($75, 12-5 pm). 

(A special trade event is also scheduled for Monday.)

Get your masterclass and/or Sunday tasting tickets here!

You can also buy copies of the Slow Wine Guide 2024 to find more Slow Wine wineries and award-winning wines. 

MASTERCLASSES

Here are the details on each masterclass: 

Saturday, May 18

• 1-2 pm: Everyday Wines (priced $30 and under)

Focuses on affordable wines of the Sierra Foothills and Lodi ($30 and under) from artisan, boutique producers including Avivo, Andis, Donkey and Goat,  Terah, and others. Tasting includes a sparkling Mourvèdre from El Dorado County, two Sangiovese wines from the same certified biodynamic Lodi site (made in different styles), and more wines. Discover your next favorite wine.

Price: $50 

Sunday, May 19

• 1-2 pm: Slow Wine Goes Local

Taste top wines from the Sierra Foothills, Lodi and surrounding areas. 

Price: $50 


• 3-4 pm: The Wines of Shake Ridge Ranch with Anne Kraemer and Friends

California’s best winemakers and emerging vintners alike come to Sutter Creek to get great grapes. Since 2005, winemakers–from Napa’s top tiers to fledgling natural vintners–have coveted the 14 varieties legendary vineyardist Anne Kraemer meticulously grows in Amador County in the Sierra foothills from Barbera, Grenache and Syrah to Tempranillo and Zinfandel. See why in this sampling of terroir-driven wines with Kraemer and selected winemakers.

Price: $50 

Get your masterclass and/or Sunday tasting tickets here!

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Spring is Here and So Are the Roundup Documentaries: "Into the Weeds" Documentary Launches on Amazon Prime and Apple TV


A Canadian documentary filmmaker's in depth look at the first major court case on the herbicide Roundup is now available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime or on Apple TV.

Into the Weeds is a CBC produced film and is an authoritative documentary chronicling the Roundup trials and community responses to glyphosate based herbicides from public health toxicology experts, entomologists, victims and the legal teams behind the court cases. 

It's not just great science and legal reporting–it's a compelling, engaging film. Read more here.

100 percent of Rotten Tomatoes viewers rated it "Fresh"

And more:

Wednesday, April 3, 2024

How a Salad Bar Disaster Changed the Course of U.S. Wine History

Since Pix.com is no more, I'm bringing back an important article I wrote for them (which launched to high praise). The history of the no sulfite weirdness in the U.S. goes back aways. And it was a real detective story finding the facts...took me a whole year plus a chance encounter on a bus in St. Chinian with an American importer who knew where many of the bones were buried. 

Unveil the truths in the fog of history here.

----


Confusion over organic wine sulfites has plagued the industry since the early 1980s.

A pitched battle between anti-sulfite purists, many in the food sector, and the mainstream U.S. wine industry led to laws about organic wine that have been confusing for decades.

The result is the U.S. has wine laws specifying three different sulfite standards, whereas the E.U. only has one.

It’s a situation that has caused confusion for consumers and held back the cause of organic wines. And it was all thanks to the salad bar. The salad bar?

Salad wars

By 1985, salad bars were so popular that even Burger King introduced one, complete with a now famous TV commercial featuring model Elle MacPherson. The video juxtaposed her “perfect 10” body with close-ups of broccoli, tomatoes, and lettuce.

But salad bars had a secret problem. Lettuce wilts or turns brown. To prevent that, restaurants put lettuce in sulfite solutions ― but some didn’t measure carefully.

Sulfites can affect people with asthma. People with a rare genetic defect called multiple sulfatase deficiency can have reactions. Soon there were 500 reports of sulfite reactions, some mild, others severe. Authorities reported that 13 people died from salad bar sulfite solutions.

But the dose makes the difference, according to wine chemistry expert Andy Waterhouse, director of the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science at University of California, Davis.

“There are reports of severe and life-threatening reactions when sulfites were added at erroneously and enormously high levels,” he wrote about the salad bar sulfites scare, adding that the amounts in salad bar sulfites were as much as 100 times higher than recommended.

In 1986, the outcry over the deaths led the Food and Drug Administration to ban sulfite solutions on raw fruits and vegetables and to require sulfite labeling on foods with greater or equal to 10 parts per million of sulfites.

The next year, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the federal agency that regulates wine, chose to follow the FDA’s lead and declared that any wine with greater or equal to 10 parts per million of sulfites had to put sulfites on the label.

The decision was made without evidence-based, peer-reviewed published medical studies showing wine sulfites were a health hazard.

California’s Wine Institute, at the time representing 500 wineries, initially opposed the sulfite labeling requirement, writing, “There has never been a health problem with the sulfiting of wine.” But it later agreed that labeling could help some asthmatics, writing, “While warning labels are certainly not warranted, informational labeling could assist some hyper-allergenic asthmatics.”

More recent research suggests that red wine headaches and asthmatic’s allergic reactions come from histamines, tannins, and alcohol and not from sulfites.

Instant impact

Before 1987, a number of wineries had been making wine from organic grapes and, in the absence of organic wine regulations, calling it organic wine. Like winemakers around the world, most organic wineries used small amounts of sulfites to preserve the wine.

But when the TTB’s new sulfite labeling requirements came out, consumers who thought organic wines were additive free were dismayed to see new labeling that said, “contains sulfites.”

“It just didn’t sound very organic, even though it could have been from organic sources,” says Paul Chartrand, who imports organically grown wines from France. “Those of us who were selling organic wine started to get a lot of flack from consumers.”

To some organic winemakers, it appeared that the only way to sell organic wine was to make wine with less than 10 ppm of added sulfite, to avoid the label “contains sulfites.”

The wine wars

In 1990, the federal government’s decision to create the first organic food and wine standards provoked intense public debate. In its first draft, the Department of Agriculture allowed GMOs, factory farming, irradiation, and more. It allowed organic wine to contain up to 100 ppm of sulfites.

More than 130,000 people protested the food standards, in “one of the largest public responses in the history of federal rulemaking,” according to Organic Watch’s Roger Blobaum, a farmer and chronicler of the organic movement.

Along with the food responses, there was discussion about wine, too. There were the pragmatists who said organic wine should be able to contain low amounts of added sulfites, like their European counterparts today. And there were the purists who thought adding sulfites of more than 10 ppm would only happen over their dead bodies.

Among their leaders was Phil LaRocca, an organic chef and TV organic cooking show host turned organic grape grower who sold his grapes to Frey Vineyards, then a no added sulfite organic wine producer. He vowed that no chemicals, including sulfites, should be in wine labeled organic.

“When I made that statement — that we’re not going to put any chemicals in the wine — I had no idea at that time that the whole wine industry would hate my guts,” he told Pix.

Born of Sicilian stock and raised in San Francisco’s Italian North Beach neighborhood, he knew how to go toe to toe with an opponent. There were two women on the National Organic Standards Board at the time he was writing the rule, “and I went to them and I said, ‘if they allow sulfites, which are not organic, in wine, you could have milk with a preservative in it.’ I won them over, so I had all these women’s groups supporting the no sulfites in wines.”

Chartrand says the claims were exaggerated. “People said, ‘if we let sulfites in organic wine, it’s going to open up a whole lot of things. It could even spread to food. You can’t make any concessions.’ Even some of the wine producers making wine without added sulfites sort of played into that. They really riled people up.”

Sulfite and anti-alcohol opponents showed up in full force.

The pro-temperance Center for Science in the Public Interest, backed by funding from the anti-substance abuse Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, piled on. Experienced at lobbying on issues related to alcoholic beverages, they saw organic wine sulfite complications as yet another way to deter consumers from alcohol.

“They appeared in almost every meeting,” says Chartrand. “They knew how it worked, they knew how to testify, they knew how to get consumers behind them for the issues they believed in, they have a big mailing list, and they were an influence.”

Testifying in the USDA hearings in favor of the 100-ppm sulfite cap ― supported by most wineries ― vintner Brian Fitzpatrick warned, “Consequences of failure to use sulfur dioxide are inferior products with a very high (>20%) rate of returns.”

But the purists won, to the detriment of some wines ― after the no added sulfite wines hit the market, giant retailers like BevMo would not carry them after consumers returned spoiled wines.

The government opened new hearings in 2012. A coalition led by organic importer Paolo Bonetti of Organic Vintners lobbied to revise the law to define 100 ppm wines as organic wines.

The University of California’s respected wine chemistry expert Waterhouse testified in favor of the 100 ppm standard. Their opponents, backed by the Organic Consumers Association, gathered 6,000 signatures in a petition supporting the no added sulfite standard.

But, again, the purists beat the pragmatists.

The powerful potato lobby

As the Santa Rosa wine lab Gravity Winehouse writes, wine sulfite laws seem strange in comparison to sulfite labeling for, say, French fries.

On their blog, the lab writes, “To this day, the French fries at your favorite fast-food restaurant, with sulfur levels around 1,900 ppm, can be cooked and served to consumers without declaration. Yet, wines with nearly one-twentieth the amount of sulfiting agent must declare the additive.”

Says Chartrand, “Many processed organic food manufacturing groups succeeded in allowing their required synthetic substances because their industries were unified and organized.”

But the wine industry, unlike their counterparts in potato growing, took little interest in the organic wine sulfite issues. One big company, Brown-Forman, which then owned Fetzer and Bonterra, an organic brand with 100 ppm wines, got behind the 100 ppm standard. Eventually, that became the “Made with Organic Grapes” popular in the U.S. marketplace today.

Experts believe the confusing sulfite standards have dramatically slowed the growth of organic wine in the U.S. In Europe’s three biggest wine-producing countries ― France, Italy, and Spain― organic wine grape acreage represents 18% of vineyard land, versus an estimated 3% in the U.S. That means U.S. vineyards can legally apply pesticides to 97% of vines, compared to 82% in the top three European wine regions.

Organic in the EU

In France, organic wine made with sulfites is the fastest-growing market segment. Like organic food, consumers in France pay a premium — in this case about 26% more — for organic wine .

Eyeing those profits, CIVB reports that 300 Bordeaux producers are planning to become certified organic.

With just one standard, things are much simpler in the EU, compared to the three in the U.S.: “Organic Wine” with a 10-ppm sulfite cap; “Made with Organic Grapes” with a 100-ppm sulfite cap; and “Ingredients: Organic Grapes” with a 350-ppm cap, aligned with the overall wine industry standard.

U.S. organic wine labeling laws present headaches for foreign, certified organic producers who want to sell certified organically grown wines in America with organic labeling.

“They harmonized organic standards between the EU and the U.S.,” Waterhouse said, “so that it would be easier to trade organic products back and forth. But the one exception was sulfites and wine.”

Until that changes, wine sellers will have to keep answering questions about sulfites in wine, explaining why producers do or do not make wine with sulfites, and why sulfite labels are on wine bottles.

Organically-grown wine is now growing fast

Today wine lovers are increasingly choosing organically-grown wines, with or without sulfites. Even in tony Napa, 83 wineries now have estates with certified organic vineyards — about 11% of county vines.

Those who love and appreciate organically grown wines often have to go the extra mile to seek them out, but organically-grown wines are finding favor.

As for the salad bar? No sulfite solutions allowed.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Napa Filmmaker's Herbicide Documentary, Children of the Vine, Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

On March 4, Brian Lilla's film Children of the Vine launched on Amazon Prime Video, bringing it to wider audiences. The platform has 200 million global subscribers.

(The film is also available on Apple TV but only outside the U.S.)

Costs to rent it on Amazon are $1.99. Purchase is $4.99.

Originally released in 2022, the documentary premiered at the Sonoma International Film Festival

"It began at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas and has since spread to 15 states in the United States, as well as to South Africa," the Press Democrat (in Sonoma) said. 

Lilla circulated the film in grassroots campaigns around the globe. 

For more about the film, see these posts:

                                                                       Link to this post 


Link to this post

NOTE: Napa vintners Dario Sattui and Tom Davies credited seeing the film as underlying their decision to convert their 350 acres of estate vineyards for V. Sattui and Castello di Amorosa wineries to organic farming and certification, a move their vineyard crew fully supports and applauds. 

Monday, April 1, 2024

Slow Wine USA's Organic and Biodynamic Contingent at the Annual Slow Wine Tour in San Francisco

One need not be organic or biodynamic to be included in Slow Wine USA's annual guide, but it's always a pleasure to showcase the producers who are certified (since this blog is about organics) on the annual tour.

NOTE: The Terra Madre of the Americas event in Sacramento coming May 18-19 for consumers with a masterclass Saturday May 18th will feature U.S. Slow Wine wineries. There will be a trade tasting for wineries pouring at the event on May 20 and two masterclasses for trade as well. Stay tuned for details.

With pleasure, here are the U.S. wineries with certified vines who poured at last week's prestigious event at the Metreon where U.S. Slow Wine wineries poured alongside their Italian peers who were concluding a five city tour in the U.S.

Jason Drew of Drew Wines with Jackson Family wine
educator Gillian Handelman


Winemaker Darrin Low from Domaine Anderson with the
single vineyard designate from Dach Vineyard

Cary Q with her new Cinsault from Fennaughty Vineyard.
She sources from some certified organic vineyards, including Bokisch in Lodi.

Marilyn Harris from Paradigm in Napa pouring the latest vintage
Napa Cab from their certified organic estate in Oakville 

Ridgely Evers from DaVero and Avivo shares his 
biodynamic wines from Sonoma, Mendocino and for his
Avivo label, Lodi's first biodynamic vineyard

Lovely wines from Troon (certified biodynamic)
in southern Oregon