The Green Vine

Winemakers often say, “Wine is made in the vineyard.” But when it comes to getting wine into your glass, it’s all about the winery. And if you are concerned about the purity of your food—and wine is food—knowing more about how a winery works will help you make more informed choices.

In a nutshell, grapes are brought into the winery at harvest, sorted and pressed, and are left to ferment (and, for reds, to sit on the skins to develop color). This process can take from days to weeks. Once fermentation is over, the wine is “racked” into a barrel, for reds and barrel-raised whites like Chardonnay, or a tank, for many whites. After a certain period of time (up to two years or more for reds or as little as a few days for unoaked whites), the wine is filtered and bottled.

Seems like a simple process, right? But in reality it isn’t simple at all. In fact, there is an endless number of choices a winemaker makes, all of which can affect the wine and how sustainable it is. Throughout the winemaking, myriad things can go wrong (“stuck” fermentation, overly high alcohol, low acidity, high tannins, microbial or yeast problems), and the winemaker has to decide how to handle any of these issues, whether conventionally, organically, or biodynamically. In addition to having to solve problems, she also faces decisions about the process of creating the kind of wine she desires. From a light, fresh, unoaked Pinot Gris to a sur lie, barrel-fermented Chardonnay to a Beaujolais Nouveau with aromas of bubblegum and strawberry to a deep, rich Bordeaux-style blend aged in French oak barrels for 36 months, the choices are endless. To achieve the desired end requires numerous choices as to the means.

Much of winemaking is chemistry, and for centuries winemakers have used naturally occurring products to aid in the traditional winemaking process. For instance, albumen, or egg white, can be used (about three to four whites per 25-gallon barrel) to “fine” wine, or help remove cloudiness, as it draws all the little bits of grape skin and pulp to it. Isinglass (a collagen from the dried swim bladders of fishes) or milk protein (casein) can also be added to wine to fine it. Bentonite, an incredibly absorbent weathered volcanic ash clay is also used to absorb excess proteins from wine. Wheat paste is sometimes used to seal oak barrels. These may not be substances, however, that you want to put into your body, depending on your sensitivities or your mindset. People with gluten intolerance or egg allergies, as well as vegans or people with a desire for pure food, may consume wine without knowing that it contains these substances, as there is no law that requires wineries to disclose them on the label.

However, in an article called “The Natural Wine Movement,” published on foodtourist.com, Sue Dyson and Roger McShane trace a rise in “manipulated” wines over the past few decades: “Stainless steel started to replace wooden barrels, chemicals became the norm for controlling weeds and disease, additives became the norm rather than the exception, technology such as reverse osmosis machines and roto-fermenters became the tools of winemakers and commercial yeasts started to stamp their indelible flavors on wines.”

The “natural wine” movement, as it exists in France as a “beyond organic” philosophy, focuses on keeping wine pure. Certified Organic, Demeter Certified Biodynamic, LIVE (Low Input Viticulture and Enology), and other certifications also eschew chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

From the consumer’s perspective, this may seem pretty easy to do—wine is just grape juice and yeast, right? Well, yes and no. Just like inputs (fertilizers) in the vineyard, there are all sorts of additives used in the winery after the grapes have been brought in and fermentation has begun. A whole host of chemicals, both synthetic and natural, are used to start and stop certain processes, to add acidity and tannins or soften them, reduce alcohol, fix flaws, and so on. In her excellent book Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally, wine writer Alice Feiring lists at least 80 US-approved additives for wine, for juice, and “for the treatment of distilling material,” as used in port and other fortified wines. And as Feiring says, “These are just the ‘approved’ ones.”

Beyond the natural items, which include yeasts, of course, soy flour, and oak particles, other approved, chemically produced additives include potassium metabisulfite, which produces sulfites and helps prevent oxidation and refermentation. Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PvPP) is used in white wine to keep it from turning brown through oxidation and in rosé to lighten the color. Divergan F (another PvPP) keeps whites and rosés from turning cloudy when cold.

WHAT’S IN MY WINE?

The more you know about how natural or manipulated the winemaking process is, the more understanding you’ll have of the kinds of flavors to expect from your wine. The main thing is to be as well informed as possible about what you are buying. Here are a few good questions to ask of your winemaker or purveyor:

• Is this wine made with commercial yeast, or is it fermented without any added yeast? Natural yeast is sometimes unpredictable and commercial yeasts are often used to create certain tastes and aromas.

• Has this wine undergone malolactic fermentation? This heating process is applied to almost all reds and some whites (mostly Chardonnay); it softens acids, adding a buttery or creamy texture and flavor.

• What level of sulfites (naturally occurring or commercial) have been added to this wine? Some say that sulfites act like salt—adding a little brings out flavor—as well as keep the wine from spoiling during transit. But too much can make the wine lose its fruit and complexity. If a wine is certified biodynamic, organic, or LIVE, permissible levels of sulfites are strictly laid out.

• Are there any other flavor-changing additives or processes used in this wine? Oak chips, ascorbic acid, tannin enhancers and reducers, as well as processes like reverse osmosis for alcohol reduction, are used to change a wine’s flavor.

I’m not saying that these ways in which wine can be manipulated are necessarily good or bad. But they all affect the wine, and you may want to know about it, especially if you want to pair food with wine on the basis of their most natural elements, flavors, and complexity.

Perhaps the quintessential “Frankenwine” tool isn’t an additive at all, but a process. The “spinning cone” is a centrifuge that, to put it simply, extracts all flavor compounds from wine, then some of the alcohol. The flavor components are then mixed back in. This process is called “flavor management” and is used mostly when wines are so ripe that the sugars create overly high alcohol levels. The ability to remove some of the alcohol allows winemakers to use the ripest fruit possible, creating big, fruity wines without the high levels of alcohol that would naturally occur.

When the natural wine movement in France and, increasingly, abroad began to take hold, this was part of what winemakers were resisting: not just pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers in the field, but flavor management and manipulation of wine that compromised not only the integrity of the product but the taste as well. In the 1970s and ’80s, French winemaker and research chemist Jules Chauvet led the “vin naturel” movement, which rejected the use of any chemical additives in wine, as well as commercial yeasts. According to French natural winemaker Eric Texier in a discussion on winedisorder.com, Chauvet felt that commercial yeasts distort the expression of terroir. He favored letting the naturally occurring yeasts in the grapes create an “aromatic fermentation” that adds flavor to the wine. Rather than forcing wine to be a certain flavor profile, which may involve overripening grapes to develop rich fruit flavors many people (and critics) love, and then using certain yeasts to add specific flavors followed by spinning the excess alcohol from the wine, the natural winemaker tries to guide the wine to be what it wants to be, hoping that a good growing environment and minimal manipulation—not even adding commercial yeast—will allow the fruit and the land to express their true nature.

If this sounds idealistic, it is. But as with the Slow Food movement—which began in 1986 as journalist Carlo Petrini’s reaction to a McDonald’s restaurant being built on Rome’s Spanish Steps—the natural wine movement in France began as a reaction to overly manipulated wines. Both movements soon took the form of philosophies all their own, with the goals of reviving and protecting tradition, culture, and good taste.

So far, we’ve barely gotten out of the tank and barrel. But a winery is much more than that. Most wineries, behind the Italian columns or rustic wood-finished tasting rooms, are industrial buildings meant for work. They have to be heated and cooled, for example, just like any other workplace. If a tank or its environment gets too hot in the summer, strange things can happen to the delicate process of fermentation and aging. Most wineries require a fair amount of energy for climate control, which uses natural resources and costs money.

If special certification programs such as USDA Certified Organic or Demeter Certified Biodynamic are helping wineries improve their vineyard health and eliminate toxic chemicals, certification programs such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) are addressing issues in the winery of construction, water and energy use, chemical products, and more. Using a 100-point system, LEED rates buildings in the categories Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, and Indoor Environmental Quality, with extra points for Innovation in Design and Regional Priority. Even many wineries that aren’t involved in this program are finding ways that work for them to lower their energy use.

Regional organizations such as the Oregon Wine Board and the Oregon Environmental Council are also working to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. These two organizations have created the Carbon Neutral Challenge, with a goal of making Oregon wineries carbon neutral, through first assessing their energy use and then helping them reduce it, and finally incorporating carbon offsets to reach the goal of carbon neutrality.

Again, for a growing number of winegrowers, nature is smartest. For centuries, wineries and cellars have been built underground, because most cellars maintain a constant temperature of 55°F or so. That saves a lot of energy in warmer climates and helps avoid fluctuating temperatures, which are one of the biggest enemies of wine. Many wineries are learning from history and building underground barrel rooms. For instance, winemaker Keith Pilgrim of Terra Blanca Winery on Washington State’s Red Mountain repurposed several huge metal arches from a federal building project and used them in his “cut and cover” cellar, first digging into the side of a hill, then erecting the arches over the space and covering them back up with soil. His capacious barrel room stays cool without air conditioning.

THE TASTE CONTROVERSY

In the early phase of the organic movement, organic wine did not have a reputation for outstanding quality or flavor. Many wineries left the words “organically grown grapes” off the label so as not to be relegated to the organic section of the wine shop. Now, though, many winemakers are transitioning to organics and biodynamics precisely because of taste. In 2004, Fortune magazine reported on a group of 10 top sommeliers and wine critics who compared 10 pairs of wines in similar price ranges and from vineyards in the same areas. Of each pair, one wine was conventionally farmed and the other biodynamic. Of the 10 pairs, 9 of the winners were biodynamic wines, notable for the purity of their aromatics and the freshness of their flavors.

But it has become clear that just because a wine can be labeled “organically grown” doesn’t mean sustainable practices carry over to the winery. There can still be a lot of manipulation with additives and processes that change the nature of this “natural” wine. That is why there are so many different levels and types of organic and other certifications (we’ll go into the specifics later). The main thing for consumers is to keep asking questions of wine shop owners, winemakers, and winegrowers. The consumer must keep the conversation going.

In 2002, Sokol Blosser winery, in Willamette Valley, Oregon, was the first Silver LEED–certified, underground, naturally cooled barrel cellar in the United States, when there were only 37 other LEED buildings in the country. In 2005, Stoller Vineyard gained the Gold LEED certification for its solar-supported, multilevel, gravity-flow winery built into a hillside. Gold LEED–certified Hall Winery in Napa Valley has more than 35,000 square feet of solar panels on top of its barrel rooms. If all this sounds time-consuming and incredibly expensive, it is, but that hasn’t kept many wineries from installing solar panels, as well as creating gravity-flow systems to move the wine through the process, rather than pumping it.

Many wineries are going solar, especially in California (and more and more in Eastern Washington). The solar panels aren’t cheap, but even for a small winery, they often pay for themselves in the form of lower power bills within 10 years of their installation. Many small wineries have a few solar panels to power equipment and run air conditioning or heating units, but a lot of larger ones are going solar big-time. One such megawinery is Constellation Brands, which owns Black Box, Ravenswood, Robert Mondavi Private Selections, and many more brands around the world. Constellation has installed 17,000 solar panels in four wineries in California, for an energy savings equivalent to 9 million miles not driven annually or 225 million miles not driven during the next 25 years. This saves tons of money over the years, of course, resulting in what you might call a wine-win situation.

Each grape is really a little solar power plant in itself, and traditionally, grape growers have “powered” their compost piles with pomace (skin, seeds, stems, and pulp left over from wine production), as well as using it to produce grappa, brandy, eau de vie, and other distilled liquors. Several companies in California, Oregon, and Washington are also using the seeds to produce delicious grapeseed oils. Beyond these uses, the millions of tons of grape pomace from wine production may also be finding a place in the world of biofuel: In Canada, Constellation Brands’ Jackson-Triggs and Inniskillin wineries have partnered locally with Vandermeer Greenhouses to use leftover grape skins for energy production to power homes and businesses in the Niagara region of eastern Canada. And a company in New York, Seneca BioEnergy, is beginning to process pomace into grapeseed oil, biodiesel, and soil amendments.

Once the wine is made, it has to get to our glass. Again, choices ensue—from bag to bottle to box. The norm for the past 150 years has been the bottle, in sizes from the diminutive piccolo, or split (187 milliliters, about a twentieth of a gallon), to the grand Melchizedek (30 liters, nearly 8 gallons) and two dozen sizes in between, with the 750 milliliter “standard” (about a fifth of a gallon) as the norm. Before that, the container of choice might have been a barrel in a café, a leather bag, or an amphora, but time marches on, and now we have a billionbottle-a-year disposal problem, not to mention all the cardboard boxes that make those bottles easy to ship. A glass wine bottle weighs about a pound, 40 percent of the gross weight of a bottle of wine. So lower-weight bottles can make a big difference: Adelsheim Vineyards in Oregon, for instance, uses bottles that weigh 3 ounces less than bottles it used in the past. That adds up, and each truckload of wine now weighs 2,600 pounds less than in previous years, meaning more wine can fit on one truck and less fuel is used in the shipping process.

PUT A CORK IN IT

Cork is one of the most sustainable materials around, since cork trees can live for up to 300 years and the bark is harvested every 9 to 12 years. There are more than 6.6 million acres of Mediterranean cork forest across Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, Tunisia, and France, with a level of biodiversity second only to that of the Amazonian rainforest. As an argument against screwcaps, the cork industry has noted, “In comparison to a natural cork, 24 times more greenhouse gases are released and over 10 times more energy is used when making one screw cap.” But there are 13 billion natural corks produced each year, and the industry is threatened by the use of other closures. If the cork industry dies, those forests are in danger of being eradicated, as well as the plants and endangered species, such as Iberian lynx, Iberian imperial eagle, and Barbary deer, that live in them. Thousands of workers are supported by the cork harvesting industry as well—many families have worked harvesting cork for generations.

Cork forests are drawing the attention of several different organizations that work to encourage sustainable harvesting practices. One company, ReCORK by Amorim (www.recork.org), gathers used corks through wineries to keep the carbon footprint low on shipping and recycles them into beautiful shoes made by the footwear company SOLE.

Another organization, Cork ReHarvest, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that collects and recycles corks, as well as creating the “Real Cork Inside” assurance program, which displays a little cork acorn and the words “Real Cork Inside” on bottles, so people can tell that the closure is cork and not plastic before buying. In response to the problem of “corked” bottles of wine, or corks tainted with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), Cork ReHarvest says that although the industry initially responded slowly, now there is a much lower chance of getting a tainted cork; it claims 1 percent of corks are tainted. Corks, unlike plastic stoppers or screwcaps, are renewable and recyclable, and the cork industry supports thousands of jobs in harvesting, production, and recycling. You can find additional information from the Cork Forest Conservation Alliance (www.corkforest.org).

Trying to find out how many glass bottles we use each year is like trying to find, well, a wine bottle in a Portlandia landfill. In 2011, in the United States we drank 291 million cases of wine. That translates to 3.5 billion bottles, give or take. We recycle millions of tons of bottles each year. But the sad truth is, unless you live in a community where aggressive recycling is the norm, many millions of tons of glass bottles are made, shipped empty, filled with wine, shipped again using fuel and creating greenhouse gases, stored on shelves in controlled-climate shops, purchased, driven home, drunk, and discarded into a landfill. According to a 2009 EPA report, only 18.1 percent of wine and liquor bottles are recovered (of 1.7 million tons generated). Beer drinkers do better than that: Beer bottles are recycled at a 39 percent rate out of 6 million tons generated. That, frankly, is still pretty bad. But we can do better, wine drinkers!

Many people are working on this problem. Glass recycling actually has gone down in the past decade, partially because we are drinking more wine from containers other than glass. Bag-in-a-box, lighter Eco-Glass bottles, refillable containers, jugs, wine kegs, plastic PET bottles (recyclable, made from polyethylene terephthalate), and other types of packaging have become much more accepted, even in the past decade. The fastest-growing new packaging is actually one of the oldest: Tetra Pak is a Swedish company that started making its “aseptic” milk cartons in the 1950s to help milk stay fresh. The most famous wines to be put into Tetra Prisma aseptic cartons on a large scale are probably Boisset’s French Rabbit and Constellation’s Vendange, in 2005. Using a Tetra Prisma carton, which weighs 40 grams, means 92 percent less packaging for the same wine, 80 percent less greenhouse gas, 40 to 50 percent lower transportation cost, and 54 percent less energy consumption than that of a glass bottle throughout the entire life cycle.

So why don’t we drink all of our wine out of a Tetra Pak? Say it with me: Romance! Most winemakers—and wine drinkers—would say that drinking wine from an airtight box is about as romantic as drinking wine from a football helmet. But a planet full of garbage isn’t that romantic either. In a few hundred years, ideas about romance and beauty will probably shift anyway. And when it comes down to it, the romance actually comes from swirling the wine in your glass and experiencing its aromas and flavors, in good company.

One company has embraced the “romance of the Tetra Pak” with vigor. Yellow+Blue (get it, Green?) is the brainchild of former Kermit Lynch wine representative Matthew Cain, who struck out on his own to fill a niche he felt was being ignored by the industry. He imports great organic wines and sells them in his Y+B Tetra Pak boxes. His website points out, “When it comes down to it, there is no difference between packaging wine in a Tetra Pak and putting wine in a bottle. It’s true. No magic potion or formula that makes bottled wine better. No secret rituals in the vineyard or winery. No difference at all.”

People talk about aging wines with the traditional bottle-andcork method as being better. It would be interesting to use various kinds of packaging and closures—bag-in-a-box, Vino-Lok glass cork, Stelvin closure (screwcap), Tetra Prisma Aseptic pouch, aluminum can, and traditional—to store the same wine, and see which of them make for better aging and longer life. A 25-year-old Y+B? Bring it on!