Saturday's Organic Lesson

When someone says organic to me I think two things: expensive and bug ridden. Saturday morning we met up with Michael Honig at the Honig Winery and began a lesson in Organic Winemaking. Apparently, the use of organic methods (ie. no chemicals or synthetic fertilizers) allows the earth to, over time, build nutrients that stay in the soil, not leaching out with watering or rain. Think of synthetic fertilization as being like giving your kid a coke and a moonpie: there is a fast buzz of activity, but the long term outcome is crash and burn, requiring more artificial stimulus. By plowing organic matter back into the soil, the grapes actually ripen and mature earlier. Rather than having to wait for the grape to gain taste by longevity, the organic grower can harvest earlier, before all the sugars have been created in the grape. There are three "benefits" of this, depending on your point of view. First, the grape fully matures and can be picked while other producers wait for their grapes, making it easier to access pickers and other farm workers. Second, the final blend ends up with a lower alcohol because of lower harvest Brix, or sugar content. Organic wines are on average one to one-and-a half per cent lower in final alcohol content than their competition. As we pillage the earth of more and more of it's natural nutrients, it requires longer maturation to get flavor, and we end up with the high alcohol, hot wines that are on the market today. Finally, pesticides and inorganics cost more, so we actually save money in the long term production.
Encouraging natural insect and rodent enemies, like owls and bluebirds, is one of the organic methods employed by Honig. This day we were allowed to view the "banding" of one of the local owls by a local professional naturist from a group called Habitat for Hooters. She places nesting area at various intervals in the vineyard, depending on the amount of rodent activity, and tracks the growth of the local owl population. By encouraging flock movement, she has moved owls farther north into Napa than they typically have gone, protecting more vineyards and reducing the need for rodent poisons. The bands allow her to track movement and calculate survival rates of new chicks.
Next door at Frog's Leap Winery (Ribbit), we learned from slightly off-beat owner John Williams (brother of VERY off-beat comedian Robin Williams) about biodynamic growing. Taking organics to the next step, biodynamics requires you to use only those organic properties available on your own property. Keeping everything that you grow, seeds, stems, prunings etc., keep costs even lower, and remove your reliance on outside sources of organics, leaving them where they are intended.
Interestingly, neither of these wineries market their wines as organic. The stigma attached to the organic movement and the quality of their wines have driven them to market their quality, and let the taste speak for itself.