Organic Shrinkage

Whole Foods Market, the American-owned Kensington organic temple, has lost £10m in its first year. Does this point to an underlying malaise in the controversial and seemingly unstoppable organic food revolution? Say what you will about the economic slump/recession/catastrophe, but it seems to be engendering some much-needed consumer perspective. The principles of pesticide-free 'natural' food are unimpeachable. But what irks the organic movement's detractors is the culture of snobbishness and elitism that has grown up around it, resulting in what AA Gill calls "the sort of exploitative, chic pricing that is generally reserved for celebrity perfume". Whole Foods' company motto is "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet". The way the organic bandwagon has learnt to serve up its food with moral value is clever marketing, but is frankly bananas (see picture).

The vagueness of organic certification is also a sticking point. The Soil Association is the most respected organics body in the UK, but its blessing is not required in order to sell products as organic. In wine, stories are rife of organic vines growing right next door to non-organic vineyards and being polluted by their pesticides which freely waft over in the air and soak through in the soil. Biodynamics, sometimes branded as 'organic plus', has even less regulation.

Maybe a tightening of consumers' wallets will bring organics back into perspective and keep the focus on quality rather than smoke, mirrors and marketing.

Info Mine - Biodynamic Wine

The Wine Mine Blagging Toolkit - 5 wine nuggets with which to impress your friends...

1. So what's all this about biodynamic wine then? It's a bit presumptious of me to think it can be covered in 5 paragraphs, but I'll give it a go. The theoretical roots of biodynamic agriculture lie in eight lectures given in 1924 by Austrian philosopher/scientist Rudolf Steiner. The lectures were entitled Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture and drew on Steiner's lifetime mission to reconcile the spiritual and physical worlds.

2. In practice, biodynamic viticulture is not that dissimilar to organic - think of it as "organic +". The most important difference is the biodynamic preparations used instead of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. For example, cow manure fermented in a cow horn, stinging nettle tea and oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal.

3. Each biodynamic producer seems to follow a slightly customised system which, while anchored to the wide Steiner principles, tends to vary in the particulars from winegrower to winegrower. Something they all agree on is the importance of soil health and the central role of compost in achieving this. Pinning the vineyard's annual cycle to planetary movements appears less common.

Rudolf Steiner

4. The international organisation Demeter (www.demeter.net) is the principal certifying body. To become certified you first need to have organic certification (from the Soil Association or other equivalent body). You must also have used the full gamut of biodynamic preparations (sprays and compost) for two years. Keeping animals (chickens, sheep) among the vines is recommended, although not mandatory. Some biodynamic producers, such as Michel Chapoutier, have complained that the Demeter certification process is not rigorous enough.

5. Lastly, it is sometimes said that biodynamics is cultish and anti-scientific. The fact that it has been invested in and is practiced by large, profitable producers such as Chapoutier in the Rhone Valley, Pontet Canet in Bordeaux, Matetic in Chile and Milton and Seresin in New Zealand suggests there must be something to it. Limited proper research is so far available, although, a 21 year comparison of traditional and organic/biodynamic farming was published in 2002 in the scientific journal Science. It concluded that although biodynamic yields were lower, it outperformed traditional agriculture on counts such as biodiversity, resource utilisation and soil microbes.

Sources: wineanorak.com, Demeter, quaffersoffers.co.uk

French 2008 Harvest Begins

The first French grapes of the year were picked yesterday in Rousillon, marking the start of the 2008 northern hemisphere harvest. Domaine Cazes, 2km north of Perpignan, is the largest organic and biodynamic producer in France. It began picking for its white vin de pays, according to the local wine body, the Conseil Interprofessionel des Vins du Roussillon. It is about a week earlier than last year's harvest.

The 2008 French wine harvest is expected to be even smaller than last year. Viniflhor, the French agricultural body, has predicted a 12% drop in wine volumes on the five-year average.

London in the Organic Age

I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the factors affecting London wine merchants in the context of today's market.

Let's (briefly) start with economic factors. The words "credit crunch" are never out of the media at the moment. What practical effect, if any, has this Phrase of Doom had on the London on- and off-trades? The press would have us believe that no one is eating out these days, painting a bleak picture of families huddled behind closed curtains, washing their dinners of bread and cheese down with nothing so extravagant as wine. At least from where I am sitting, this is not borne out at all. At the merest hint of sun, the restaurant and cafe tables in the central London street where I work are filled to capacity with lunchtime covers from the nearby offices.


which is the true picture?



On the other hand, the strength of the euro against the pound does appear to be having an impact. We saw record price rises in French, Spanish and Italian wines this year (on the back of a particularly punitive budget, which is another story). The effect of this on the shop floor is that customers who would instinctively have headed for the old world sections are now venturing towards the likes of Chile, Argentina and South Africa.

The increasing health-consciousness of the UK means that people are drinking significantly less than in yesteryear (as Giles Coren's recent programme on the gastronomic debauchery of the 1970s showed brilliantly). However, we are also becoming more selective; the increasing education of the wine-drinking masses is being translated into pennies and pounds as decreased volume consumption but an increased average spend per bottle. Out with generic oaked Aussie Chardonnay, in with the boutique wineries of Otago and Priorat.

Which brings me neatly onto the organic wine phenomenon. Although the wine variant of this lags considerably behind the Whole Foods revolution, it has already given rise to some interesting anomalies. Witness the new Hoxton "eco" restaurant Watermark which says it will give preference to organic wine - fair enough - but that it will not consider any non-European wines on "carbon footprint" grounds, a frankly risible attempt to jump on the fuzzy green bandwagon. If Watermark et al actually looked at the detail of wine shipping, they would find that sourcing wine from a landlocked part of Europe such as Rioja entails a lot of to-ing and fro-ing by lorries, which have much less capacity and therefore pollute far more than one (large) sea cargo vessel from say Nelson (coastal New Zealand), which in many cases can deliver almost to the front door of a bonded warehouse in east London.

So in a nutshell, notwithstanding a mild battering by duty rises and exchange rates, the London wine trade in 2008 is struggling on, reluctantly passing on price rises to the consumer and doing its best to be proactive and keep up with the increasing sophistication of the public (even when such sophistication does occasionally sacrifice common sense in the interests of trend-setting).