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Green Wine: Getting Techie
Biodynamic agriculture
It sounds more magical than material at first, but when you look a little deeper, biodynamic farming makes a lot of sense: it's organic gone one step further. Winemakers maintaining their lands via biodynamic processes take into account the Earth's rhythms when planting, spraying, harvesting, and making the wine; for example, they'll remove sediment from the wine during a descending moon to take advantage of the gravitational pull for a cleaner product and stronger scent. They also attempt to make each farm self-sustainable and balanced by, for example, letting natural predators take care of insects instead of using pesticide.
Sulfites
Sulfites have gotten a bad rap in the last few years; they're blamed for causing headaches—and sometime severe reactions—in the approximately 1 percent of the population that's allergic to them, but they're also a naturally-occurring food preservative that shows up in everything from eggs to dried apricots to—yep—grapes. But they've also, for centuries, been added in small quantities to wine to help it keep its color and flavor. The legal limit for sulfites in wine is 350 ppm (parts per million) though most clock in at under 150 ppm; wines without added sulfites often have 5-15 ppm.
USDA Organic certification
Wines with sulfites levels of more than 10 ppm are required to be labeled "contains sulfites," while wines with any added sulfites—no matter the quantity—can be qualified only as "made from organic grapes" or "made from organically grown grapes." Preventing the addition of sulfites has some winemakers worried that the uneven quality of wines without preservatives will hurt the industry by giving consumers a skewed idea of how good organic wine can taste; the Organic Wine Company points out that even with 100 ppm of sulfite, wine made with organic processes and grapes is still 99.9 percent organic.
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