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Why biological wine?    
Wine is social, cultural, even noble, but more than anything it should be satisfying. Frankly, too much bad wine is being drunk today. The consumer is not necessarily at fault here, as Holland is currently inundated by bulk supermarket wines that are not only environmentally unfriendly, containing ridulous amounts of sulphur dioxide and trace elements of pesticides, they are distasteful. Such wines are usually transported in bulk by ship or truck to Amsterdam, where they are stored in massive steel tanks in facilities such as Wijnterminal Roders, located on the Cruquiusweg. This facility alone stores seven to eight million litres of bulk wine per year, which is bottled and labelled here without the customer even knowing it!
I’m going to make a big statement here, but I feel there is hardly a supermarket wine in Holland that is worth drinking. In France, it is a very different story. Supermarkets there cater to a critical public that is obviously used to drinking good wine. But why would I in Holland subject myself to drinking a pesticide-ridden bottle of factory-yeast produced wine containing 100 to 150 mgs per liter of sulphur dioxide, which by the way is the norm for an average bottle of supermarket wine? Why would I do that?
Well, it might not be my fault. For one thing, I might not know any better. A supermarket seems like a logical place to buy wine, since it’s where I buy food. In this way, wine is reduced to being another commodity, like milk or toilet paper. Convenience over quality is the rule here. The ancient alchemical tradition of transforming grapes into a sublime, Bacchanalian elixir which has been a part of our civilization since recorded history frankly deserves better.
Undoubtedly, people choose to drink these bulk wines because of the convenience factor, but also because they are cheap. They think that going to the wineshop means paying more money, and they are generally correct. The fact is, it is extremely difficult as a consumer to find a good, drinkable wine for less than €5. But compared to a supermarket wine, what a difference that extra euro or two makes! Our wines begin at €5,50 and move up in price to the world-famous Chateau Margaux at €430, but we have purposely chosen biological and bio-dynamical wines as our lower and mid-priced wines as much as possible, for a good reason: it doesn’t cost much more to produce a wine in the traditional way, but the rewards for doing so are many. Wine, let us remember, is a living thing, a complex interaction between a living organism (yeast) and the sugars present in wholesome fruit. A wine’s life does not end in the bottle; indeed, it is alive in your very glass, anxious to share the aroma and subtle nuances and flavours it has accumulated through natural chemical processes over the years.
On the whole, biological wines are produced using natural fertilizers, no pesticides and contain either no sulphur dioxide or a maximum of only 20mg/l of this often necessary ingredient to prevent oxydation. In all cases, natural yeast from the actual vineyard is used to induce fermentation. This is possible, because since the vineyard is not sprayed with pesticides, a natural yeast flora abounds. It should be noted that factory yeast, which is most often used in commercial winemaking these days, is more reliable but is in fact the enemy of “terroir” wines, as the yeast seems to take the terroir right out of the wine. Bio-dynamical wines go even further than biological wines, and I will discuss this Rudolf Steiner based principle and how it’s being adapted to winemaking at a future date.
Strangely, it was not long ago, maybe only ten years, that biological winemaking was still in its “infancy,” and many of the first vintages, usually available in natural food shops, were pretty awful. Fortunately, it did not take winemakers long to rediscover the traditional way of making wine, the way their grandfathers made it. There has been an amazing improvement in quality, and it can safely be said that the bio-wine industry is a major success story, having created a very large market for itself. There are numerous professional organizations to certify biological wines, some of these are recognizable also in the food industry: EKO, Ecocert, Demeter, AB (Agriculture Biologique), and the most strict certification of them all: Nature et Progrès (for wines containing 0-9 mgs/l of sulphuric dioxide). All the biological wines in our selection carry one or more of these various certificates: the certificate is placed next to the wine in our online selection. That is your guarantee of a good, natural bottle of wine.
Of course, not all our wines have this certificate, and this is particularly true of more expensive wines. Why is this? The fact is, the more expensive wines are often “established” wines coming from the more famous regions, and are subject to very strict controls regarding, for example, the yield per harvest. So there already exists within the wine classifications of these well know and respected regions, a system to promote superior quality. A simpler explanation might be that these domaines have already established their reputations, and their owners see no reason to change anything. In any case, it should be obvious that a wine does not need to have a bio-certificate in order to be good.
Finally, in defence of supermarkets and big liquour store chains, it is not completely their fault that they offer mostly bad, commercially produced wines. It’s simply that being big means buying big. Each individual franchise wants to have the same assortment, this means buying in huge quantities of wine, mostly from big international concerns like Norton, Gallo, J.P. Chenet etc. Huge estates like these cannot produce biological wine, nor can they give their vines the kind of care and attention a small wine grower/maker can.
By the same token, it is the small wine merchant who is able to devote his attention to seeking out these quality wines, whether they be biological, bio-dynamic or just plain excellent. We hope you will enjoy, and...
Santé!
Dwayne Perreault
wineontime.nl
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