Monday, August 16, 2021

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.



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
 
 

2 comments:

  1. Thank you David - comprehensive info. One small comment : Sulphur and Copper are used as fungicides - and have been ever since they were found to be effective against Mildew.
    In Europe one frequently sees Organically labelled wines priced lower than other conventional offerings. This possibly detracts from the quality proposition.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, S and Cu have always been controversial as part of "natural" wines. However, they are essential in many vineyard climates. Wines with Organic labelling certainly vary in price; but if they taste good, then that simply makes many of them good value for money.

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