It’s been a strange summer and, by the time you read this, and with no big weather changes, harvest will be closer to ending than starting. Veraison, the beginning of the ripening period, is well underway as I write this in August, but it doesn’t appear very uniform, so that could be problematic. Also, the yields are all over the board, so it’s hard to compare year to year. What we don’t need is another bountiful crop with wine storage already being used.
Furious bottling is occurring, trying to make room for this year’s crop. Bottling lines are very expensive toys that are hard to justify in a small operation. To solve that problem, portable bottling lines are set up in a 40+ foot trailer that arrives at your door ready to go. Have the wine ready to be bottled (filtered and such), as well as corks (or preferably screw tops), labels, bottles and cardboard ready. Hook up the hose from the winery to the trailer, stand back, and (on the other end) out pop cases of wines. Only problem is, gee whiz, there aren’t enough around to meet the demand. (Sounds like a song I remember out of the ’60s and, yes, I can remember that far back.)
I talked to a couple mobile bottlers in mid-July and the earliest booking dates were in November. And, don’t forget the inevitable breakdowns that are inherent in bottling lines. Labelers are notorious for breaking down and there are hundreds of other moving parts subject to failure. These are the kinds of things that keep winemakers on the edge. They add, subtract and change a few hundred things when making wine but bottling lines generally don’t respect a winemaker any more than anyone else.
When it comes to organic wine, your faith in Mother Nature is stretched to the maximum. A recent case in the Lodi area is pitting a conventional grower against his organic farming neighbor, and this case could have major implications for the future, especially along the North Coast. There’s already a statute about how abandoned property must be cleaned up if it poses a disease or insect problem. The enforcement has been tested and succeeded several times in this county. But when the neighbor hasn’t abandoned the property, although it may look like it, it creates a whole new issue. Most of you know that I’m not organically oriented but am an advocate of sustainable farming practices, which allows for some tolerance in what practices you can use when organic problems become economic issues. Simply put, when a bug or disease threatens my economical livelihood, I’m going to get the big guns out. At this stage of history in the wine business, “organic” on labels really isn’t a sales point. There’s a very good reason for this, however. The original “organic wines” were terrible—not because they were organic, they were just poorly made. I could name a few that fit that category a few years ago and can still name a few today. A bad non-organic wine is simply that, but when you might be even a little skeptical of organic and it’s bad, we tend to blame the organic aspect.
Organic is certainly catching on with a lot of products, especially among those who can afford it. There’s no question that yields are less and expenses are up with organic products. You might not be aware of the BS that goes along with it also. In some areas of organic production, marketing itself plays a big role. But it’ll never catch up to the greatest con job in history: the bottled water industry. The big black carbon footprint left by that industry will probably never be matched again, but it does show the “average” IQ might be a lot less than the benchmark 100 we assume. I’m not against drinking water, but with tap water being free, why waste good money buying it? Maybe we should market wine with the idea that for every three bottles of water you drink, you could balance it out with a big glass of wine. A win-win situation where we sell wine and you get to drink water. (Do you really believe that water in a bottle is cleaner and healthier than water from a normal tap? Or do you really believe that bottled water comes from some secret private stock that only a select few know about? If so, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona for sale. (Thank you, George Strait, for the line.)
Now that I’ve already mentioned organic farming and the follies of bottled water, the day wouldn’t be complete without getting into the GMO debate. Care to guess my thoughts? The days for GMO in the wine industry are nearing on a couple of fronts. The one that may hit the general public is the development of new varieties. Things like storage ability, skin thickness, acidity, texture of the pulp, color and so on are currently happening. Just look at the new table grapes now available when, less than 20 years ago, you couldn’t sell a seedless table grape unless it was a Thompson Seedless. The same is occurring in wine varieties, but it’s a real uphill battle to get the public to buy anything other than the tried-and-true, familiar varieties.
With GMOs, we’re only trying to be Mother Nature’s little helper and speed things up a bit. There are a few people who are afraid of anything new, but in the years ahead, when it becomes a matter of life or death, literally, such as cancer treatment, one’s mind might change. If we didn’t have constant change in our society, we’d likely be a third-world country—and there are too many of those already. I look forward to the day when we can raise our grapes without any outside inputs for fertilization, pest and disease control. Organic farming will only come true with the use of GMO technology. (Having close relatives involved in GMO technology research even brightens my spirits when they talk about the strides being made with cancer research.)
I’m not sure what happened to me today with becoming Professor Philosophy. Am I getting old and senile? Maybe 20 years from now, the harvest we’ll be celebrating will be all organic fruit and “natural” wine (whatever that is). Have a good one!
