Biodynamic, organic, sustainable, renewable, regenerative, permaculture, agroforestry. What do they all mean?
In the fifty years that I have been involved with winegrowing and winemaking a lot of things have changed. Whilst some things have got simpler, a lot of labelling and a lot of wine descriptions have got more complicated and more obscure, especially around claims that ‘our wines are greener than yours’, or ‘our vineyard is better for the environment than the vineyard next door’. This month I wanted to try and unlock what some of these claims really mean.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), not an organisation that often features in a wine magazine, has recently decided that enough is enough and taken upon itself to question the use of the terms ‘regenerative’ and ‘sustainable’. It says that these terms are being over-used (aka ‘greenwashing’) and unless farmers and growers can show that they are following the five major practices that the ASA deems cover the terms, then ‘advertisers must take care to avoid overclaiming when communicating their regenerative farming initiatives’. The five practices are:
- Limiting soil disturbance
- Maintaining year-round soil cover
- Promoting biodiversity and crop rotations
- Keeping living roots in the soil
- Integrating livestock and arable systems
The ASA goes on to warn against claims, such as ‘“regenerative”, “nature-friendly” or “sustainable” within a food production context and they can only be used when they are supported by a very high level of substantiation. Of course in vineyards, not all of these practices are possible or desirable. If weedkillers are off the menu, then undervine hoeing is the most practical weed control method, which rather puts paid to the first two practices, although maintaining a year-round sward of tasty weed and grasses which cover 75% of your vineyard area is better than nothing. Diversity is fine in the row, but not much good at weed suppression.
Biodynamic and organic
A lot of ordinary wine drinkers really struggle with labels that say ‘organic’ and ‘biodynamic’, many believing that it means ‘not sprayed’, ‘lower in sulphur dioxide’ and ‘better for the environment’ – all of which may, or may not, be true. The first two descriptions – biodynamic and organic – are the oldest and the best known and they do at least have a legally enforceable suite of rules and regulations to follow. It is just over 100 years since Rudolph Steiner gave the series of lectures for which he is now famous, setting out his vision of self-sustaining agriculture. Demeter, the worldwide organisation that overseas this method of agriculture, was founded in 1928. Organic agriculture first saw light of day in Britain during World War II as a way of producing food at a time when German U-boats were doing their best to starve Great Britain into submission, and supplies of fertilisers and other inputs were scarce. The Soil Association, the organisation that certifies and controls much of organic farming in GB (but not the only one), was founded in 1946.
As for the other terms – sustainable, renewable, regenerative, permaculture – what do they mean? For consumers, I suspect few have any real grasp of their meaning, apart from suggesting that the fields are full of contented cows/sheep/vines/turnips (delete as necessary), grazing or growing in sunlit pastures, tended by happy peasants. These terms may also imply that the food or drink being produced is more wholesome, more nutritious, and safer than products not described in these emotive terms.
Sustainable
If consumers struggle with some of these terms, what about the producers? In the context of vineyards, the terms biodynamic and organic are well understood. They mean registering your land with one of the relevant organisations, waiting the ‘in-conversion’ time for your land to clean itself up, and then farming it in the way proscribed by the regulations. What could be easier? The upsides of this way of farming, apart from just feeling better about your farming practices, are that hopefully your products will be attractive to consumers looking for them and to re-sellers looking to stock and sell them. I also assume that there has to be a financial imperative to adopting this way of farming, given that yields are lower, often by a very significant amount, and especially in regions with ample rainfall i.e. Great Britain.
Most serious studies of biodynamic and organic farming show that the costs in running vineyards are pretty similar to those of conventional agriculture. Whilst you might not be using expensive pesticides, you will spend as much money using non-chemical sprays because the frequency is greater (typically twice as frequent), and their effectiveness is lower. You will also spend more on canopy management and weed control. On the yield side, all comparisons say that yields in organic and biodynamic vineyards are lower, with at least 20% lower being mentioned by some growers but figures of anywhere between 50% and 100% by others. In a wet season like 2024 (at least in northern Europe) some organic and biodynamic growers experienced total yield loss with disease-prone varieties.
Now here is a riddle. If one vineyard yields six tonnes per hectare and another yields four tonnes per hectare and assuming that (apart from picking) their costs are identical, which is the most sustainable? That’s a tricky question to answer, especially if the first one is farmed conventionally and the second one biodynamically or organically. Logic would say that the higher yielding vineyard is producing more for less, thus making for more sustainability. Can the fact that organic and biodynamic growers are not using conventional agrochemicals (but are still probably using copper and sulphur, so not entirely chemical free) count for anything in the sustainability equation? As I said, a tricky question.
I have looked at many agricultural sustainability schemes over the years and its always surprised me that if you are growing normal crops, as the Soil Association outlines in its current ‘Standards for GB Farming and Growing’, growers should be: ‘selecting varieties with a natural resistance to pests and diseases’. Likewise, LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), another GB-based sustainability scheme, also states that ‘choosing to grow pest resistant varieties… can enable you to grow a crop that will be more tolerant to pest damage’. However, take a look at the SWGB sustainability scheme ‘rule book’ and on the section on how to ‘Minimise and optimise pesticide inputs’ (Page 19) the use of vine varieties with natural resistance to diseases (i.e. hybrid and PIWI) are not mentioned. I wonder why? If you really wanted to do what it says on the tin, there is actually a natural way of doing this. SWGB of course are not alone in this. None of the grape/wine specific sustainability schemes I have studied (New Zealand, Oregon, Lodi Rules) goes anywhere near this tricky subject.
Real sustainability
Of course, if vine growers and wine producers really wanted to be as sustainable as possible, they could – for instance – only grow vines in climates where land and labour are cheap; where water was abundant and free and apply it in a way that is least wasteful; grow varieties such as modern hybrids (often called PIWI in Europe) that do not require any fungicides and insecticides and are much higher yielding than conventional viniferas giving as low a cost of production as possible; cultivate and manage vineyards with a minimum of inputs and make machine harvesting compulsory; in the winery produce your wine as environmentally as possible, and make CO2 capture mandatory. Ensure that all packaging, including bottles, are as light as can be and use re-usable bottles where ever possible. Before you think this is an impossible crazy notion, look at what the Pugibet family are doing at Domaine La Colombette near Beziers. They have what they call their “20-20” vineyard: 20 hours of work a year in the vineyard and a yield of 20 tonnes per hectare. These incredibly low-input wines sell for €40 for six bottles or €6.67 per bottle. And they are profitable! Winegrowing is a business, and businesses stand or fall by their profits or losses. Pumping money made in one industry or profession into an enterprise that is not paying its way, however green its credentials, doesn’t make it sustainable in the long-term.
Animals in the vineyard
In recent years, bolstering your environmental credentials by putting photos of animals in your vineyard, usually sheep, on your website or social media pages seems to be an easy tick in the box of ‘things that we are doing that makes us greener.’ Having grazed my own sheep (I had a breeding flock of 150 Kent ewes when I farmed) in my vineyard in the 1980s, I can speak from experience.
Sheep love to escape to greener pastures, so good fencing is an absolute necessity. Also, despite what many people seem to think, you cannot just let the sheep into your fields and forget them. There are regulations about looking after sheep that must be followed. They need ‘lookering’ i.e. they must be looked at and counted at least once a day by someone ‘who has attended a lookering course’ to make sure they (the sheep) are all still standing, appear to be well, and not suffering in any way. They need access to fresh water, and if you are using them as winter mowers, they will need supplementary feeding if you want them to keep in good condition and produce good lambs or fatten them for sale (depending on whether they are ewes or lambs).
Sheep also get a wide range of maladies – foot-rot and fly-strike being the most common – and they also need dipping, injecting, drenching and generally tending to.
If you are near a footpath or public right of way, beware of the concerned passer-by who rings the RSPCA to say that there’s a sheep suffering from X, Y or Z in your fields as your usually-not-very-friendly inspector will be knocking on your door.
Additionally if you are using them as summer mowers and even as deleafers (which they will do if penned up tightly enough) you need two sets of electric fencing in order to move them from one part of the vineyard to the other. You also need to make sure that they are moved out of the way when spraying, even if it is just copper and sulphur. It is my experience that the benefits of having sheep in the vineyard are soon outweighed by the costs of looking after them and the relatively small amount of manure they leave behind is worth very little.
As for other types of animals, I cannot comment as I do not have the experience, but sheep do enough damage to vines, posts and wires and anything bigger would do more. I guess that if you grew your vines on a high-wire system – GDC, Sylvoz, Tendone – then the sheep could pass underneath the wires, but you still need reliable fencing if you are to avoid the telephone call that starts ‘your b***** sheep are out again.’
Natural resistance in vines
Another often claimed benefit of ‘alternative’ systems of viticulture is that vines can be conditioned, trained even, to produce natural resistance to attack by fungal infections and insects. You will also often read that insect problems can be kept at bay by increasing the number of predators in the vineyard. This is done by making sure that you have lots of flowering plants in the vineyard to attract insects (usually described as ‘pollinators’ which of course with a self-pollinating plant like the grapevine is an irrelevance) which will attack the marauding insects that are making life difficult. Again, I have never seen any trials to show that this is possible or effective.
Renewable, regenerative, permaculture, agroforestry
As for these other terms, none of which appear to have any universally accepted meaning, it seems to me that you can make of them what you will. I once visited an early ‘regenerative’ vineyard in Great Britain and was surprised to see that it had been using glyphosate. I questioned the ‘no till’ owner who freely admitted that he had used it and that ‘black grass was a terrible problem without it’ (he was also a large-scale arable farmer).
After that introduction to renewable agriculture I rather gave up trying to work out what it meant. The other day I spent an hour listening to some winegrowers who were incorporating trees into their vineyards. An ecologist from the very famous Bordeaux producer Châteaux Cheval Blanc told with great pride how they were growing trees alongside their vines ‘to improve the fertility of the soil’ (as it says on their website). So far, so good, but from my perspective all they were doing was planting windbreaks to divide up their vineyards, something we’ve been doing in Great Britain in hop gardens orchards and vineyards for many decades if not centuries!
And finally
I take my metaphorical hat (and gloves) off to those that adopt these alternative styles of managing their vineyards especially in a climate like ours. I wish them every success, but it cannot be easy. The challenges of a cool climate, often with frequent growing season rainfall, and especially with a weather-sensitive plant like the grapevine, are hard enough to face even with the armoury of sprays that we are legally allowed to employ, as many will know from the 2023 harvest. Sustainability means many things to many people, but one thing is certain: if the business leg of the three-legged sustainability stool gives way, the stool collapses.
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