When it comes to organic wine, the High Street is divided. You will find nothing in Asda, the odd bottle in Sainsbury’s and Tesco and rather more in Waitrose, though not the 57 bottles they claimed to stock two years ago. This suggests a somewhat ambivalent and class-ridden attitude within supermarkets.
There’s that old Catherine Tate sketch of a sports day at a posh London primary school with mums running screaming for their 4x4s because the egg in the egg and spoon race was discovered to be non-organic. Such mums are easy to mock, but the organic producers in Italy I spoke to recently seemed very straightforward. They were neither righteous nor full of flower power.
Stefano Girelli. of Santa Tresa, believes being organic is common sense in his corner of south east Sicily. “If you don’t use pesticides you really get the influence of terroir,” he told me. In other words it helps improve his wines and make them a better expression of where they are from. “We shouldn’t be selling wines because they’re organic, but because they’re good value,” he says.
Organic wines benefit from lower yields though this adds to the cost, as does the increased labour involved. “If you’re farming conventionally you can do one treatment every 15 days and then go to the beach,” says Girelli. “While if you’re organic you have to go into the vineyards every day.” But once you’ve factored in everything else from the transport and glass to the retailer margin and tax, he reckons the impact on the shelf price is almost negligible.
“We are not totally organic, but most of the practices in the vineyards are, and we only use a bit of pesticide when we need it,” says Andrea Lonardi, of Bertani, a big producer near Verona. “We learnt that the less chemicals you use, the less the vines actually need them.”
John Beveridge of Vintage Roots, a specialist organic importer founded in 1986, says producers tend to be small scale, which is another reason you don’t find them in the supermarkets. While the firm’s sales went flat during the 2008 recession, they are now back in healthy growth.
Organic producers are usually far more frugal about adding sulphites
– the preservative used in virtually all wine. Their limits are half that of non-organic wines and Vintage Roots have a good list of ‘low sulphur’ bottles. (www.vintageroots.co.uk)
Picks of the week
Terre di Faiano Primitivo 2014 £8.99, on offer £6.99, Waitrose (14%)
An organic primitivo from Puglia, packed with dense bramble flavours, a touch of smoke and sweet spice.
Tannu Organic 2014 £8.50 Oddbins (14%)
A simple, fresh, black cherry-flavoured expression of Sicily’s top native red grape, nero d’avola.
Quarante Sarne 2012 £14.50 Wood Winters (13.5%)
This Sicilian blend of nero d’avola and perricone is lean, savoury and complex with a suitably earthy finish (being organic)
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