Nedbank Organic Wine Awards 2010
Nedbank Organic Wine Awards 2010
As French philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne once said, “Let us permit nature to have her way; she understands her business better than we do.” It seems there are quite a few good reasons why red, white and even pink wine should also be green.
Winemakers often attribute the success of their award-winning wines to the wonderful fruit in their vineyards. “It’s what nature gave us,” they oh-so-humbly say. But by and large this cliché no longer rings true. Although wine is generally held to be one of the more ‘natural’ beverages around, the sad fact is that conventional winemaking doesn’t simply involve growing grapes, picking them, pressing them, fermenting the juice, maturing the wine and finally bottling it. Oh no. In the vineyard alone, growers have all sorts of challenges – poor soils, weeds, bugs, diseases – and these they typically overcome by using such marvels of modern science as chemical fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides.
Unfortunately, grapes are thin-skinned fruits – and even if the chemicals do stay on the surface, well, you never hear about grapes being washed before they are pressed (not even when red wine producers boast about leaving the juice on the skins for a long time to maximise extraction!).
Even if we’re talking ‘negligible’ amounts, we almost certainly ingest some residue of chemicals when we drink conventional wine – chemicals that have been linked to Parkinson’s disease, several cancers and innumerable other health issues in vineyard workers; chemicals that also permeate the soil to impact on the environment as a whole (surely rendering ‘terroir’ a meaningless concept?); chemicals that almost inevitably result in unbalanced wines which then require further ‘spoofulation’ in the cellar.
Wine lovers, for so many reasons, should be in favour of a greener approach to viticulture. But while ‘organic’ has long been almost a synonym for ‘high quality’ when it comes to produce, the same has not necessarily been true of wine. It seems producers leaping onto the green bandwagon were often more concerned about the health and save-the-planet marketing potential of organic wines than they were about quality (at least in the early days).
The flip-side was that some of the world’s greatest producers were quietly getting on with making wines regarded to this day as the very, very best ... in an organic or even biodynamic way, as it turned out. But what does ‘biodynamic’ actually mean? For that matter, what does ‘organic’ mean? And are these approaches ‘sustainable’, particularly in South Africa where socio-economic issues are at least as pressing as environmental ones?
To help consumers understand these different shades of green, as well as to acknowledge how far organic wines have come in terms of quality, Wine magazine launched the Nedbank Green Wine Awards in 2009. This year the three winners perfectly illustrate what the sustainable, organic and biodynamic approaches to winegrowing are all about. (Be sure to consult the Nedbank Green Wine Awards booklet packaged with this issue for more details on the category and winners.)
ORGANIC WINE: A MODERN TREND?
It was only after World War II that synthetic chemicals were introduced into food production. Before that, for time immemorial, everything was grown ‘organically’ – using composting, other crops and even animals to make the land more fertile. Given that farms were mostly self-sufficient, and farmers more reliant on faith than science, even biodynamic farming can simply be regarded as a throwback to traditional, pre-industrialisation farming methods.
OVER THE MOON
SA’s only certified biodynamic wine farm, Reyneke Wines in Stellenbosch, produced both the winning white and red in this year’s Nedbank Green Wine Awards (namely the Woolworths Reyneke Chenin Blanc 2009 – Best Wine Overall – and the Reyneke Reserve Red 2007). The Reyneke Reserve White 2009 also achieved a 4 Star rating. Owner Johan Reyneke and winemaker Rudiger Gretschel explain how they did it (or, rather, didn’t).
Johan Reyneke is delighted but not surprised to learn that his wines have done well in the Nedbank Green Wine Awards. “It was sort of a moral imperative for me to start farming biodynamically,” he says. “But down the line we have seen changes taking place in our vineyards, in our grapes, in our wines, and eventually on judges’ scoresheets.”
When asked how the wines were ‘made’, he seems almost amused. “Conventional winemakers take a total control approach, breaking everything down into variables that can be quantified and artificially manipulated. Biodynamic winemakers accept that there are millions of years of natural evolution in place and that it will be hard to improve on this. The plants, animals and insects that have survived on our land have really proved themselves, so why not rely on them to help us achieve balance in the vineyard, naturally, rather than in the cellar, artificially?”
Johan is no stranger to making wine by numbers: “In my conventional farming days, I would pick the grapes and immediately add sulphur, then yeast – Vin 11, 12 or 13, depending on whatever style was fashionable – and then I’d add tartaric acid to improve the pH, enzymes to boost extraction because the grapes were abnormally large from being fed with fertiliser and water, and so on. In the end, my wines were 20 things chucked together then propped up with sulphur to prevent them from falling apart.”
Today, says Johan, his wines have only two ingredients: grapes and time. “Wild yeast does the job perfectly and there’s no need to add tartaric acid because the pH in my soil has completely normalised, improving the pH in my grapes. There’s also no need to add enzymes because the berries have a higher skin-to-flesh ratio. My wines are naturally balanced and integrated, and above all they are wines from this property’s soils, not from superphosphate fertiliser!”
As many organic/biodynamic winegrowers point out, it is impossible to talk about terroir in soils constantly changed using chemicals; in wines that have been manipulated all the way from vine to bottle. “But when soil comes alive again, it becomes very expressive in the wine,” believes Johan.
This is an important point, given that the Woolworths’ Chenin comes from the same vineyard as the standard Reyneke Chenin, and that the Reserve Red blend comes from the same Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards as Reyneke’s Cornerstone blend. “Grapes grown conventionally tend to grow very homogeneously because they are fed with nitrogen and superphosphates and so on,” explains Johan. “Grapes grown biodynamically aren’t fed at all; they have to live off the soil – and on our farm we have eight different soil types that don’t confi gure exactly with our vineyards. The vines express this diversity in their growth patterns – some are extremely vigorous; some really struggle. At first we lamented this fact but over time we realised that we simply had to respect the vines in the different soil pockets by harvesting them separately, vinifying them separately and ending up with completely different styles of wine to bottle or blend.”
The grapes picked earlier have delicate, primary flavours and freshness; the grapes picked at a later stage are riper, with more structure, lending themselves to oaking. “But there is no recipe; we just take the fruit of the season and help it go where we think it is going. It’s not very technical!”
Johan gives full credit to winegrowers Chris and Andrea Mullineux for the work they did at Reyneke right up to and including the 2009 harvest. But it turns out that their replacement, Rudiger Gretschel, made (i.e. “guided, in a minimalistic way”) not only the 2009 whites which so impressed the judges, but also the 2007 red – in his spare time while still working at acclaimed Franschhoek cellar Boekenhoutskloof. (Reyneke and Boekenhoutskloof are stablemates in specialist wine wholesaler Vinimark’s product range.) It seems Rudiger started helping out at Reyneke over weekends in 2005, and soon fell in love with the farm and the philosophy. “For me, organic and especially biodynamic wines are the future,” he says. “In the next 15 to 20 years, I don’t think there will be a single premium wine in the world that isn’t organic or biodynamic.”
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: FOOD SUGGESTIONS
“Reyneke’s wines are extremely versatile food matches because they are balanced and elegant, rather than made in a blockbuster style which overpowers food,” says winemaker Rudiger Gretschel. “For the Chenin Blanc, I suggest Thai or Cape Malay dishes where you have spicy aromatics blended with sweeter ingredients – think chilli and coconut milk or chicken curry with coriander or lemongrass. Bobotie is also an excellent partner. As for the Reserve Red, a well-aged rib-eye steak with frites – though you can’t beat a cassoulet from the south of France!”
BIODYNAMICS: BACK TO BASICS
Biodynamic agriculture takes organic farming to another level. There is a shift from sustainability to self-sufficiency (farmers don’t buy in manure, they have their own cows, chickens, etc) and there is also a shift from remedying symptoms to identifying an underlying cause (where even organic farmers remove weeds, biodynamic farmers ‘respect’ them for what they indicate about the condition of the soil).
Biodynamic farmers believe that the degree of life in soil has a direct bearing on the health of crops, which in turn brings health to those who consume the produce – the ‘you are what you eat’ principle. As Johan Reyneke puts it: “You can’t nuke plants and expect them to be wholesome in either a nutritional or spiritual sense for people.”
To boost soil life and improve fruit quality, farmers use a range of herbal, mineral and organic ‘preps’ that are applied according to seasons, lunar cycles and planetary alignments in seemingly weird ways. But studies (and tastings) seem to indicate that they are effective in terms of wine quality, even if the underlying reasons are not yet understood.
NOTE: For some more technical information about the less-is-more way in which the winning wines were made, and for a list of retailers and restaurants stocking Reyneke’s wines, see www.winemag.co.za
Reyneke Wines, Polkadraai Road (M12), Stellenbosch. Tel 021 881 3451, www.reynekewines.co.za
REACHING FOR THE STARS
Named Best Natural Sweet in this year’s Nedbank Green Wine Awards, the Heaven on Earth straw wine represents just one sip of the cup of plenty at Namaqualand producer Stellar Organic Winery.
Terroir is a French word which essentially translates as the ‘sense of place’ that you get in some wines, where just one sip is redolent of the land, its geography, its history, and sometimes even its architecture and people. It doesn’t happen often, needless to say, and increasingly rarely on land farmed conventionally (i.e. chemically) where natural biodiversity is lost, and in cellars where wines are manipulated into styles that are fashionable or favoured by influential wine critics.
But Heaven on Earth is truly a specialist regional product. Although made in much the same way as the traditional vins de paille or straw wines of France, this wine is made from organic Hanepoot (Muscat d’Alexandrie) grapes, which thrive in the hot, dry conditions of the Olifants River Valley, and these are picked at normal ripeness (to preserve natural acidity) then dried out on a bed of organic straw and Rooibos – the ‘red bush’ tea that grows here and nowhere else.
The distinctive Rooibos fragrance infuses the raisined grapes, which are then crushed, de-stemmed and left to soak in their own sugary juices. The aromatic syrup is then very slowly fermented until the yeast cannot convert any more of the sugar into alcohol (in this case a wine with 11.5% ABV and a resounding 162g/l of residual sugar).
It’s a special wine from a special place, built on the philosophy of the four Rossouw brothers who co-own it: to do as little harm as possible to their environment and people. The first organic producer in the world to have been Fairtrade-accredited, Stellar is arguably the most progressive wine company in South Africa, both from an empowerment point of view (no tokenism here; employees own 26% of the cellar and 50% of the Stellar Agri grape-farming operation) and as an organic heavyweight in a country where the prevailing view is still that organic winemaking doesn’t work economically.
It has grown from producing just 13 500 bottles in 2003 to over two million bottles, representing some 40 brands. And that excludes the ‘bread and butter’ bulk wine produced to fund this remarkable growth.
Today Stellar is the number one organic wine brand in the UK.and the largest producer of no-sulphur-added wines in the world – and there are even bigger and better things to come following the purchase of an old KWV processing facility for the bulk wines. “Until now we’ve had to contain ourselves,” reveals brand and marketing director Lee Griffin. “We’re really excited that the Trawal cellar can now focus exclusively on bottled stock.” (Locally, Stellar wines are available at Tops at Spar and Wellness Warehouse.)
The current Heaven On Earth vintage was made by previous winemaker Dudley Wilson and Berty Jones, who arrived as a handyman to help build the winery in 2001, and is now the cellarmaster – yet another example of what a remarkable place this is. “Stellar has heart,” says Lee. “Everyone who comes here feels it.”
HEAVEN ON ICE CREAM:
FOOD SUGGESTIONS
Heaven on Earth can be served on ice as a summer aperitif or, for even more refreshment, splashed into a ute and topped up with dry sparkling wine. As a dessert wine, it can either be served chilled or poured over ice cream. It also partners well with rich cheeses.
‘ORGANIC’ VERSUS ‘MADE FROM ORGANICALLY GROWN GRAPES’
Both terms indicate that the wine has been grown in an environmentally sound and chemical-free manner, but only in the United States does ‘organic’ certification strictly rule out the use of certain additives in the cellar, most notably sulphur dioxide (a commonly used antioxidant/ preservative). Because consumers are increasingly sulphur intolerant (whether they experience headaches and/or respiratory problems or simply don’t like the idea of chemical additives), Stellar developed already existing technology to produce nosulphur- added wines. It is now the largest producer of these wines in the world.
Stellar Organic Winery, N7 Main Road, Trawal. Tel 027 216 1310, www.stellarorganics.com
FIRST do no HARM
One of SA’s top wine producers, Graham Beck Wines (GBW) has won the Best Environmental Practices award for its integrated approach to wine production at both its Robertson and Franschhoek properties.
We South Africans are very proud to claim that our winelands have the most beautiful viticultural backdrop on the planet. We’re also rather smug that about 90% of wine production occurs in the Cape Floral Kingdom, the smallest yet richest plant kingdom on earth – a remarkable biodiversity that surely means that we can produce a diverse and unique range of wine styles.
But the shameful reality is that only 9% of our renosterveld and lowland fynbos remain. By blanketing the landscape beneath vineyards, previous generations of wine farmers have played a major role in wiping out entire ecosystems – including the natural predators of vineyard pests like the mealy bug, harbinger of the dreaded leafroll virus. Is it any wonder that South Africa still has some of the worst virus-affected vineyards in the world, despite extensive replanting in recent years?
Happily most wine-growers now realise that their farming activities have to be environmentally friendly if they are to be sustainable over time. “The solutions of one generation should not become the problems of the next,” is what the late Graham Beck said in 2001 when he contracted environmentalist Mossie Basson to stabilise large-scale soil erosion at his Robertson property, the result of land mismanagement under previous ownership. By 2002, 47% of the dongas had been stabilised and re-seeded with indigenous plant species – and Mossie was there to stay, having compiled and begun implementing an environmental management plan. “Not a fixed rule book but a paradigm shift,” is how he describes it. “For whatever action has to be taken, we must answer a simple question: are we happy that it’s the best environmental action?”
As well as clearing alien species and restoring natural vegetation, his ‘land care’ approach now incorporates all aspects of wine production – starting with the soil. “Our philosophy is to farm a living system and our belief is that this system has its foundation in the soil fauna and flora. While we are not organic or biodynamic, we are holistic in our approach and use principles from both belief systems coupled with scientifi c knowledge to achieve the best possible results.”
State-of-the-art weather stations are able to make 10-day forecasts, automatically adjusting drip irrigation to help conserve water and allowing for disease and pest control to be proactive and targeted. No fan of chemicals, Mossie reveals that pre-war methods like cover crops and composting have reduced the use of herbicides and pesticides by about 73%. “And our vineyards are looking better than ever!”
If the baboons think so too, the approach is not to shoot them (as frequently advised). “We have a worker on a bike with a whistle, a flag and a two-way radio. He chases the baboons out, and when they chase back he uses the radio to call for back-up and inevitably we harvest that block the next day – it seems baboons can also taste for physiological ripeness!” Likewise, when eland came down to eat the new buds this spring, a hot chilli sauce was sprayed on the fi rst three rows. “That convinced them the vine buds were not palatable...”
Those are some of the “fun” parts of sustainability, as Mossie puts it. But a lot boils down to “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s”, from meticulous monitoring of electricity, gas, diesel and petrol usage to proving legal compliance (in the hands of quality control manager Brunhilde Luyt). And arguably the biggest issue of all (partly a legacy of the past) is waste management...
In Franschhoek, treated waste water from the labourers’ cottages and bottling/ admin building is used to irrigate the vineyards and gardens, while in Robertson a soak-away system allows for even the industrial waste water to be treated and used. “It is cleaning in excess of three million litres of water per month and the quality is better than what we extract from the Breede River!”
Recycling has seen GBW’s contribution to the waste stream decrease by an average of 6.7% every year, and this year work began on clearing huge sections of old, inherited rubbish dumps on the Robertson property. “Within a month we were able to remove and recycle 4.9 tonnes of old wire and metal and 454kg of polyurethane piping. All other waste was moved to the legal waste disposal sites (27 tonnes) and all organic waste is now in line to be composted over time.”
Mossie also came up with the idea of letting neighbours dump their waste on the property for a lower price than they were paying at the municipal dump. “It’s much cheaper for them plus it pays my running costs. That’s the way I like to make a plan.”
But he likes it even better when his staff makes a plan. “For example, when we were renovating the guesthouse to be more environmentally friendly, I was shocked to discover how much the cleaning materials cost. I decided to buy them in bulk and immediately halved the costs, and then the cleaning ladies came to me with a suggestion – to decant some of them into smaller containers to sell to the rest of the staff. It works out cheaper for them, and the result is that we’re now cleaning the guesthouse for free! Plus everyone is now using soap that won’t impact on the environment...”
From planting trees to introducing lighter-weight wine bottles, it’s all part of Mossie’s plan. But it’s clear that what he enjoys most is seeing biodiversity become a practical reality, not only for staff planting traditional medicinal herbs in their gardens, but also for landowners who previously saw their land only as wingerd en bossies (vineyard and bushes). And the next step is to educate the younger generation, through school camps where children are introduced to activities like bird-watching, plant identification, star gazing and survival in the wild. “If you dump global warming on people, they just shut down. But if you make conservation fun, it becomes a way of life.”
THE GRAHAM BECK PRIVATE NATURE RESERVE... AND BEYOND
Robertson
Graham and Rhona Beck realised right from the start that their land, on the slopes of the Rooiberg inselberg (island mountain), was well worth conserving with its four vegetation types: Breede Quartzite Fynbos, Breede Shale Renosterveld, Breede Sand Fynbos and Robertson (Succulent) Karoo.
By May 2006, they had set aside almost half of their property for conservation, a 1 885ha site that has since grown to 2 203ha. In addition to hosting some 1 500 plant species, 115 of which are endemic, indigenous animals like springbok, rhebok and eland have been reintroduced – and even the critically endangered riverine rabbit has been spotted on Mossie Basson’s game drives. Meanwhile, together with 22 neighbouring landholders, they formed the Rooiberg–Breede River Conservancy in August 2007, resulting in the voluntary conservation of over 13 500ha, comprising 12 different vegetation types (the prevailing ecosystem being the rare and very valuable Succulent Karoo). Now boasting 28 members, the conservancy is constantly expanding: “We’ll have 20 000ha by mid-2011,” expects Mossie.
Franschhoek
There are almost 100ha of vulnerable Boland Granite Fynbos on the property, and the intention is to clear 158ha of alien species infestation around these plants (with over 100ha having been cleared to date). As a result, the property is on track to become a member of the Biodiversity & Wine Initiative, the partnership between the wine industry and conservation sector in which the Robertson property attained champion status in 2006.
See www.bwi.co.za for a full list of BWI members and for more information on sustainable wine production.
Graham Beck Wines, Robertson 023 626 1214, Franschhoek 021 874 1258, www.grahambeckwines.co.za
