The great organic wine paradox

Sometimes the food and wine worlds can move as far apart as Mercury and Pluto. Take organics, for example. Sales of organic food have increased by 60 per cent a year in the UK over the past three years while non-organic alternatives quietly stagnate; if a manufacturer can possibly get the O word onto his or her product, it will soon bellow out of the packaging.

And in wine? There are many winegrowers, strangely enough, who are actively opposed to organics, while those who do cultivate their vineyards organically often go to great lengths to conceal the fact. What's going on?

The first thing to remember is that organic wine is not an ingredient but a finished, processed product. Until now, those who have grown grapes organically have not always been the best winemakers; "organic wine" has often meant inept wine. The ironic consequence is that good or great winemakers are afraid that admitting their organic credentials may in some way damage or diminish their reputation. In any case, some of the very greatest domains of all (like Lafon, Leflaive and Leroy in Burgundy) regard their own labels as the final guarantee of total quality and commitment.

Whether this involves organic cultivation is the producer's business alone; no O word can ever rival the producer's name, their lofty logic runs, in lure and lustre.

The second aspect of this odd situation derives from the fact that the vine is a kind of starveling among crops, getting by on almost no fertilisation and relatively small applications of herbicide, fungicide and pesticide. Conventional wine growers resent the implication that they are toxic wastrels, while only the organic crowd are green and pure.

They have therefore come up with an alternative banner to march under, often called in French la lutte raisonnée or viticulture raisonnée (literally "the reasoned struggle" or "reasoned viticulture"). This means using the synthetic products outlawed by organic strictures, but only, they say, in minimum quantities and when strictly necessary.

The end result, as so often in wine, is confusion. Consumers are faced with organic wine which might not taste nice, great wine which might or might not be organic, and non-organic wine which claims to be as environmentally friendly as organic. It's a mess, and is one reason why a restaurant like Notting Grill can only find half-adozen avowedly organic wines.

There are reasons to distrust the "reasoned struggle" brigade, since they generally operative in an entirely unsupervised manner. I have seen "reasonable" vineyards in Bordeaux trashed with herbicide, and grapes arrive at a "reasonable" cellar in the Rhòne dusted with an alarmingly irrational burden of chemicals on their skins. There is also something unbecoming about the arrogant approach which says that organics is important enough to practice - but not to proclaim.

Those great winemakers (like Guy Bossard of Domaine de l'Ecu in Muscadet or Nicolas Joly of Coulèe de Serrant in Savenniëres) who do both deserve our support.