Where on earth are the organic vineyards?

Like other certified organic agricultural products, organic grapes need to be grown without artificial pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or chemical fertilizers; if this is not so, then they cannot be certified. Last week, I noted that both organic and biodynamic wines are often assessed as tasting better than conventionally made wines. It has also been noted that Organic grape-growing can be more profitable than the conventional products. So, we would expect that there is an increasing number of organic (and biodynamic) vineyards around the world.

But where are they? Are they principally in certain places, or do all wine-making regions have them? After all, maybe it is the high-quality vineyards that are most worth the extra effort that might be required for organic procedures. Location is not an easy thing to determine, but plenty of data have appeared recently to suggest that certain places are doing better than others. I summarize some of that information here.

We could start with a graph of the Certified organic vineyard area worldwide (from AAWE), showing the change from 2004-2019. The inexorable increase is pretty obvious.

Much of this increase has been within the European Union, the Old World of the wine industry. All of its big production countries have been involved, as shown in this next table (from AAWE) of the areas devoted to organic vineyards in 2018. Most of the countries had devoted about 1/8th of their vineyard area to organically grown grapes, although Germany was lagging at the time.

These percentages will have, of course, increased with the increase in area since 2018. For example, the latest figures for Italy (2021) show 19% of the national total has been certified. This is apparently the highest country percentage of organically certified cultivation in the world.

If we focus on the distribution within this well-known wine-producing country, the next graph (from AAWE) shows the organic area within the different provinces of Italy in 2018. Note that Sicily has twice as much area as Puglia, followed by Tuscany, with the others lagging badly. I suspect that Sicily's success is simply a by-product of the fact that the Industrial Revolution passed the island by; and World War II didn't help, either. My experience there is that many of the wine-production techniques were still old-fashioned even before Organic Vineyards became popular, and so the organic certification must have been relatively painless.

This leads me to ask whether the perceived quality of the wines varies among these different locations. The data I have at hand was covered in my previous post, in which I presented quality scores for 1,682 organic wines from the JamesSuckling.com web site. The average scores from each of the countries are shown in the next table. With an average score of 92.1 across the whole collection, you can see that both Germany and the USA performed very well (although there were not many wines from the latter country).

The average wine-quality scores for the different countries sampled

Country Argentina Australia Austria Chile China France Germany Greece Hungary Israel Italy (most)   Tuscany New Zealand Portugal Slovenia Spain United States Uruguay

No. wines 100 9 169 54 8 316 332 2 5 5 229 331 23 7 1 63 27 1

Av. score 91.4 92.1 91.4 91.2 90.8 91.9 93.7   92.6 93.4 91.3 91.8 92.8 91.7   91.7 93.1

It is worth pointing out that the countries with lots of wines tasted were not necessarily sampled evenly. Most obviously, within Italy, the region of Tuscany accounted for 60% of the Italian wines, and 20% of the total wines. Similarly, 40% of the French wines came from the Alsace region, 60% of the Austrian wines came from the Danube region, and 40% of the German wines came from the Rheingau region. This does not necessarily reflect the relative abundance of the vineyards.

Interestingly, the quality scores of the German wines were very consistently high across all regions. The Appendix at the bottom of this post shows the average scores for each region that had at least four wines tasted. All of the German wine-making regions averaged well above the survey average (range: 92.7—94.9).

Several countries are showing active interest in increasing the quality of their organically produced wines. For example, Chile is forming an organic grape-growers association. Sadly, this highlights some of the problems involved, particularly if organic wines are to be produced in an artisanal manner (To automate, or not to automate? The big question facing Chile’s winemakers).
 
As a final topic, we could look at which counties show a preference for consuming organic wines. The next graph (from AAWE) shows the proportional consumption of organic wine in 2017. It is no surprise that Germany is out front, given the quality of its organic wines. The presence of countries such as Sweden and Japan in the top six indicates that importing consumers have also been educated in the benefits of organic production.

Most interesting, however, is the absence of Italy from the top-listed countries. Indeed, organic wines seem to be very low on the priority list for Italian consumers. The final graph (from AAWE) shows the market share of organically produced goods for various products in Italy in 2020. Some products do commendably well, but wine is not one of them, with organic wines at a measly 1.4% of their market. Even the overall average share (of 4%) is sadly very low.

Clearly, we have a long way to go, getting the world to value organic production. However, with the effects of Climate Change becoming more and more obvious, year by year, the perceived value of organically produced food-stuffs can only increase.

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Appendix. The average wine-quality scores for the different regions sampled.

Country Argentina Argentina Argentina Australia Australia Australia Austria Austria Austria Austria Austria Austria Chile Chile Chile Chile Chile Chile Chile China China France France France France France France France France France France France France France Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Germany Greece Hungary Hungary Israel Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy Italy New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand Portugal Portugal Portugal Slovenia Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain United States United States Uruguay

Region Argentina Mendoza Patagonia South Australia Victoria Western Australia Austria Burgenland Danube Eisenberg Leithaberg Steiermark Aconcagua Chile Colchagua Limarí Region del Sur Valle Central Valle de Maule Ningxia Xinjiang Alsace Beaujolais Bordeaux Burgundy Champagne France Jura Languedoc Languedoc-Roussillon Loire Valley Provence Rhone Valley South France Franken Germany Mittelrhein Mosel Nahe Pfalz Rheingau Rheinhessen Saale-Unstrut Württemberg Santorini Transdanubia Villány Judean Hills Abruzzo Basilicata Emilia-Romagna Italy Marche Molise Northeast Piedmont Puglia Sicily Tuscany Umbria Veneto Central Otago Hawkes Bay Marlborough Nelson Waipara Valley Bairrada Beiras Douro Slovenia Andalucia Castilla y León Castilla-La Mancha Cataluña España La Rioja Murcia Spain Valencia California Oregon Colonia

No. wines 4 89 7 5 3 1 7 11 105 6 9 31 19 7 2 1 2 22 1 4 4 119 39 88 11 1 8 3 5 5 9 12 13 3 40 1 2 41 27 34 110 62 2 13 2 2 3 5 12 4 10 4 5 1 12 76 4 46 331 12 43 9 2 4 4 4 2 1 4 1 1 15 13 9 4 9 6 2 4 24 3 1

Av. score 90.5 91.4 91.9 92.0     91.1 90.7 91.4 92.3 91.1 91.6 91.1 91.3       91.0   90.3 91.3 92.3 91.9 91.5 91.1   91.8   91.0 90.0 92.4 90.5 92.6   93.1     94.0 94.9 93.9 94.2 92.7   93.1       93.4 91.4 91.5 89.1 89.3 92.0   90.8 91.8 91.0 90.5 91.8 91.8 92.0 94.1   92.3 92.5 93.3     91.8     92.8 90.5 90.6 90.8 94.4 90.0   91.0 93.2