Organic is another word the like Green used to indicate something about a product, but now is used just to market food and drink. meaningless term these days.

The problem isn't organic or biodynamic, which actually do mean something. The issue is when a movement is co-opted by bigAG - and the bigger problem is the inclusion of "sustainable" wines; that definition is so protean that it has become absolutely meaningless (and usually a cover for chemical farming). To wit I include the following:

from the New York Times on December 16, 2007

Excerpt from “Our Decrepit Food Factories”
By MICHAEL POLLAN

“The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown."

Wineries can have a negative impact on the environment. Each passage by a tractor creates massive pollution. One could be very meticulous and produce a natural wine of the purest quality while flooding the environment with CO2 emissions. There needs to be a measure of a winery's total impact on the environment independent of what's in the bottle.

That being said, putting "Green" on the label and not being organic is deceptive.

I'm in the minority on this. I think the definitions of "organic" and "biodynamic" are seriously flawed. Not clear at all to me that you can keep pumping non-biodegradable copper into your soil without ruining your mycorrhizal ecosystem.

Personally, I think we need to design more selective, biodegradable antifungals, which is well within the capacity of modern medicinal chemistry but may not be justified by the comparatively small market. But it's really something that could be done. Copper is forever, and we could do better with modern technology if we were willing to adapt it.

Yes SFJoe, organic is a joke, and biodynamic is rapidly becoming one. To wit the use of copper. There ARE better solutions out there, but the BD people will not accept them because "Steiner didn't say so." Steiner's Ag Lectures are the bible, and the BD folks are fundamentalists.

I haven't used any copper on my vineyard, ever, for the very reason you mention. And I haven't used sulfur in two years, opting instead to use herbs and mineral sprays which keep my vines (and all my plants in the garden, too) very healthy and pretty much disease free.

Also depressing is the fact that a local winery here just stopped using organic methods (after 5 years) and started spraying chemicals. They still proudly proclaim themselves "sustainable", thus rendering the word (and all logic) to meaninglessness.

Alice, this is headed nowhere. It's a mass of bullshit and smirking self-contradictions.

I've plugged the piss out of your soon-to-be-published book, but, honestly, I am terribly skeptical about terms like "sustainable" and "organic" and especially "biodynamic". (Nick Joly's book is incomprehensible BS! It's like being in some sort of BD looney bin!)

I still love and admire you, but...huh??

I have a hard time with the non-farming community getting together and totally dismissing "Organic" as bullshit. It seems very trendy and contrarian to do so. While I can only speak of the vegetable production side of things, as an organic grower I think the current organic certification standards are actually reasonably good (and for perspective I generally stand firmly in the far/fringe left of such politics). What IS bullshit is the cooption of the standard by the Fed and its subsequent lobby from organic agribiz to dumb it down.
Don't get me started about headlines in Time, NY times and just about everywhere else blaring "forget organic, buy Local"...talk about nonsensical cooption of a market for "natural" agricultural products and wine.

Brian

Watching business makes me sad.
Yet nature needs to be protected against man's works. This can be done with certification. The organic labels are lacking but we can hope that labelling becomes more stringent. This has been the trend with electrical appliances and chemical "goods" -- over decades. We can help by criticizing what's done (as in this post) rather than dismissing the whole thing.
This impact issue is separate from that of taste -- for which we have our palates, critics, some retailers and the AOC system.

I have to disagree with one or two of your comments, Alice, especially "GREEN is a pretty color but when it comes to wine, it means nothing."

Anything that promotes green living is for the good, if offered up in good faith. Mr. Tunnel thinks that having a transitional category isn't exactly fair... perhaps if he remembered his own initial impluses towards responsible farming and considered that inclusion of such a category might help others to move along this curve, he would look more kindly upon the decision to include transitional forms of farming?

I think it important to understand that natural wine growing and green wine growing are two separate issues. In practice they do overlap to some degree, and the impetus for both often flows from the same wellspring.
But they are distinct. One can make extremely natural wine, yet do it in a fashion that is very harmful to the environment. Similarly, one can make wine that you would consider exceedingly industrial, yet do it in a way that has a negligible impact on the environment.

I find both "natural wine growing" and "green wine growing" to be extremely worthy goals. Yet, if forced to prioritize, I'd say it is more important to be "green" than to be "natural" (a rather odd sentence, that). The issue of natural wine growing seems to be more a question of aesthetics and philosophical stance than anything else. Not to imply that it's not important... I've spent most of my adult life working towards that end. But whether or not a given producer is natural doesn't really affect us all that much. We can simply make the choice not to support the work of someone who operates in such a way.

But green... whether or not our neighbors are green should be a matter of concern to all.