What sustainable wine means.

That definition comes from a United Nations conference on sustainable development, several decades ago. The term has since been used quite loosely, and abused by wineries and marketers alike. Many producers are working out how to enhance the quality and volume of their wine while being more conscious of their impact on their immediate and global environments. For some that means reducing the use of certain chemicals. For others it means making daily operations greener — cutting the waste stream, moving to renewable energy.

Sustainability presumes that resources are finite and should be used conservatively and wisely, with a view to the long-term priorities and consequences of the ways in which they are used. In the simplest terms, it is about our children and our grandchildren, and the world we will leave them.

Typically we think of it as avoiding the depletion of natural resources and protecting the natural environment. But it is more than protecting the land: it extends to preserving culture, traditional cuisine, landscapes and community. We also need to protect social and economic resources — natural capital and human capital.

Most people believe wine is a natural product that comes simply from grapes grown with sunshine, soil, water and human attention; then crushed, fermented and bottled. They picture a bucolic scene — a small vineyard nestled in a picturesque hillside, the farmer and his family close to nature and living in harmony with the seasons.

In fact wine growing is big business, and conventional farming can be tough on the environment and on workers. Wine is a major global industry, subject to the same cost constraints, desired profit margins and investor expectations as any other. Size alone tells you nothing: small estates and large ones alike decide whether sustainability is integrated into how they farm and run the business.

Each method below is distinct in the vineyard and the cellar, and none of them covers everything. Organic and biodynamic rules are thorough about chemicals but, as a rule, say nothing of air quality, water, emissions, packaging or social equity. Regional sustainability programmes cover more ground, but could be more rigorous about workers and about carbon.

A conventional vineyard is a monoculture: one crop, the vine, with almost every other living thing that might compete with it removed. Pesticides, herbicides and fungicides do that work, and grapes are among the most heavily sprayed of all farm crops. Spray drift has made neighbours, schoolchildren and vineyard workers ill, and residues have been found in the wine itself.

Most wine is also mass-produced, and made to taste the same every year — consistency is what keeps a brand's customers, as it keeps a fast-food chain's. Getting there from grapes that change with every vintage takes additives: sulphur dioxide to preserve, colouring such as Mega Purple, the antimicrobial Velcorin, tartaric acid to correct acidity, oak chips in place of barrels. Fining agents — gelatin, egg white, isinglass from fish bladders — clear the wine, which matters if you are vegan.

None of this has to appear on the label. In the United States a bottle need only say that it contains sulphites, and not how much.

Not every conventional wine is industrial, though. The additives are mostly used in large-volume production and rarely by artisan producers: a classic Bordeaux is sprayed in the vineyard but seldom manipulated in the cellar, and it is allowed to taste of its year. And many conventional growers now use some sustainable and biodynamic practices, because they can be cheaper, safer for the people who work the vines and often more effective.

The movement began in the late 1980s in the Loire Valley, among a few winemakers tired of industrialised, homogenised wine who wanted to make it the way it was made before modern agriculture. It has gone from fringe to fashionable since. There are natural wine bars and shops, and the Raw Wine fairs that Isabelle Legeron MW began in London in 2011 now travel to Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Montréal.

What we call natural wines are made with the least possible use of chemicals, additives and overly technological procedures. Nothing is added or taken away in the cellar: no cultured yeast, no oak chips or barrels for flavour, no fining, no filtering, and at most a little sulphur at bottling. The grapes are usually picked by hand and fermented with the yeasts that live on them.

That is the difference from organic and biodynamic wine. Their rules govern what happens in the vineyard; natural wine governs the cellar too. Biodynamic certification, for example, allows a commercial yeast to start fermentation, where natural winemakers hold that everything a wine needs must come from the vineyard alone.

No authority defines natural wine in general, but associations of natural producers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain publish their own codes of practice. France has also legislated a voluntary Vin Méthode Nature label, for wines from certified organic, hand-picked grapes fermented with native yeast. Most natural producers have rejected it.

In Vines and Values Sandra is candid that most natural wines do not suit her taste. At their best they are alive and individual; at their worst, unbalanced. Many are funky — the barnyard note of the Brettanomyces yeast — and sour, like cider or kombucha. They are often cloudy, because they are not filtered: if you prefer a clearer glass, let the bottle settle before you pour.

Pesticides and chemical fungicides available to the conventional farmer are prohibited to the organic one. The organic grower concentrates not on reacting to pests but on growing a healthy vine able to withstand them and feed itself naturally. First and foremost that means developing healthy soil and a balanced ecosystem within the vineyard, with cultivation practices that minimise soil erosion, crop rotation among them.

Beneficial insects, cover crops, natural fertilisers and companion planting — echinacea to draw in natural predators, for instance — are common. Weed management is integrative: a cycle of growth, mowing and composting in which the biomass becomes the fertiliser instead of a chemical spray.

For a wine to carry the organic seal on its packaging, its ingredients must be approved by a government body. In the United States that is the Department of Agriculture; in Europe the EU approves each country's certification rules. There are important distinctions between the two, but in each case it is a government that determines what may be labelled organic.

Organic grapes do not by themselves make an organic wine: the winery has to follow the rules as well. That is why many producers choose “made with organic grapes”, which lets them farm organically and still add a little sulphur dioxide in the cellar to keep the wine stable.

Certifying takes up to three years, and converting a conventional vineyard can take longer while chemical residues leave the soil. Nearly a tenth of Europe's vineyards are now certified organic, most of them in Spain, Italy and France. Some growers farm organically and never certify, because of the cost or a dislike of being told how to run their farm — so a bottle can be made to organic principles without carrying the seal.

Many people remember the organic wines of the late 1980s and early 1990s as nearly undrinkable. That reputation is one today's organic wines do not deserve: producers have long since learned how to make them well.

Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) was established in 2020 by the Regenerative Organic Alliance — farmers, agricultural experts and business leaders, Patagonia's founder Yvon Chouinard among them. It builds on organic certification and adds three pillars: soil health, animal welfare and social fairness, including living wages and safe working conditions.

The word matters. “Sustainable” can imply keeping things as they are; regenerative farming sets out to make them better — healthier soil, cleaner water, more wildlife, more resilience to drought and flood, and more carbon drawn out of the air and stored in the ground. The idea is not new: Indigenous farmers worked with natural systems this way long before industrial agriculture.

When Vines and Values went to press, only a handful of wineries held the certification. Tablas Creek in Paso Robles was the world's first ROC vineyard; Bonterra in Mendocino County, Troon Vineyard in Oregon, Grgich Hills Estate and Neal Family Vineyards in Napa, and Medlock Ames in Sonoma followed; and Domaine Bousquet in Argentina was the first outside the United States. Many more farm regeneratively without the seal, largely in response to climate change.

Like organic farming, certified biodynamic farming avoids chemical fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fungicides. Biodynamic — often described as life-energising — farming strives to maintain and even return life to the soil, and to the farm as a living system.

It goes back to a series of lectures the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner gave in 1924 to farmers alarmed by failing seed, crops and animals. His ideal farm was a diverse, self-sustaining ecosystem of plants and animals. Some of its practices sound like wizardry, and sceptics call it quackery; admirers call it organics on steroids. Timing the work by the moon is not so far from the Farmer's Almanac earlier generations farmed by.

Where organic farming focuses on refraining from adding certain things to the vine and the soil, a core principle of biodynamics is adding preparation elements to it: fertilising with natural products according to a lunar cycle. The preparations are made from herbs — yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian — along with mineral substances and animal manures, and are used in field sprays and compost applications that revitalise the soil and aid photosynthesis.

There is much ado about the two most iconic preparations, both made using cow's horns. The horns are packed with dung, buried over the winter and excavated in the spring; the constant underground temperature lets the dung ferment and colonies of microbes flourish. What comes out smells of rich earth and looks like beautiful soil. It is then stirred vigorously into water and applied to the soil in homeopathic quantities. The horn must come from a cow, not a bull, for the dense manure her four stomachs produce. The second, horn silica, is ground quartz, sprayed on the vines to help them use the light.

Some estates are careful to call themselves farms rather than vineyards. At Seresin in Marlborough, horses pull the ploughs, sheep graze between the rows and pigs run among the vines, beside orchards and vegetable gardens tended as carefully as the grapes.

Sandra was won over interviewing Jean-Michel Comme at Château Pontet-Canet in Pauillac for her MBA thesis: he described the treatments as prevention, not medicine. At Reyneke in South Africa she could plunge a hand into moist, crumbly soil, beside a conventional neighbour's that was compacted and lifeless. Well-made biodynamic wines, she writes, have “vibrancy and minerality about them, as if the soil is alive and the wine is alive too.” Look for the orange Demeter logo, named for the Greek goddess of the harvest, or Biodyvin's, a group founded in 1995 whose growers are mostly in France.

Organic and biodynamic production methods do not work in every region, least of all very humid ones prone to mildew. Some growers also use biodynamic or organic practices without pursuing the certifications at all.

Sustainable viticulture emphasises cover crops, careful canopy management — trellising and pruning — and composting. Chemical spraying is permitted, but chemical use is minimised, the most dangerous chemicals are banned outright, and every spraying event is documented and recorded. Sustainable producers believe theirs is the more realistic and economically driven approach: the market demands both quality and volume, and a vineyard is a business undertaking that must be commercially viable.

It began with grape growers in Lodi, California, and in New Zealand, who wrote codes of conduct that became standards, commitments to keep improving and independent audits — and then persuaded the wineries buying their grapes to follow. Programmes now run in New Zealand, Chile, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, British Columbia and Ontario, Champagne, and in California, Oregon, Washington and New York.

They differ with local conditions, but the proof in every case is the certification, granted after an independent audit. Most programmes let a certified winery put a seal on the label or the neck of the bottle. Look for that seal, rather than the word “sustainable”.