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Conventional cellar management uses numerous additives and physical processes to be able to "adapt the taste of wine to the requirements of the market". Since March 2012, the implementing regulation EU 203/2012 regulates additives and processes for the production of organic wine in the cellar. This means that "organic wine" may call itself such from 2012.

However, the regulation threatens to make the "organic" in wine a waste paper and thus challenges the serious organic winegrowers and associations. True, it prohibits physical desulphurisation and the addition of sorbic acid, a controversial stabiliser against secondary fermentation by yeasts that are still present, and it prescribes sulphites, i.e. sulphur dioxide, as a preservative in smaller doses than in conventional wines. But from the long list of chemical additives permitted for winemaking, it allows L-ascorbic and citric acid as stabilisers, flavour-altering additives such as tannins and oak chips, gum arabic, acidification and deacidification, various processing aids, activated charcoal, pure-breeding yeasts, enzymes and fining agents. Must heating up to 70 degrees and concentration by reverse osmosis are permitted as physical processes "for verification", and even the controversial copper citrate for the removal of hump is allowed to be used.

The EU organic label may also be used for wine from 2012. (Source: EU Commission)

The grey area of cellar management in organic wine, which has been blatantly exploited by bottlers up to now, is being replaced by an industry-friendly EU regulation that now legally allows large wineries and bottlers to use processes and additives originating from the conventional wine industry for cheaply produced organic wines, such as those that fill the shelves of organic shops and supermarkets. Now the serious organic associations are really challenged.

The industrialisation of organic wine, which has been rampant for years, has been met with an exciting counter-reaction worldwide, independently of each other. While the pioneers of the organic movement busied themselves diligently with their vineyards, inspired by what they were doing, without developing their sensory skills and adapting their technically secure but unambitious-tasting wines in the cellar to their visionary quality work in the vineyard, a new, highly motivated generation of organic winemakers was growing up. At that time, many winemakers worldwide had to admit to themselves that their wines suffered from an infantile taste image due to their orientation towards Parker's point criteria; they had degenerated into caricatures at the highest technical level, exhausted in cellar technique, but boring and uniform in style. In search of a way out, they rediscovered the roots of what they did, their vines. In the cellar they were masters of their trade, sensory they were experienced like few others, now they set out to use the vineyard for more individuality in their wines. Almost inevitably, this led many to organic, often also biodynamic cultivation.

Organic does not guarantee taste quality

Organic wine is manual labour. (Photo: Ecovin)

Does organic wine taste better than conventional wine? The question is wrong in this form. It would be better to ask under which conditions it tastes better. The annoying cheap bottles from the organic market, the relevant organic wine mail order or the supermarket are no different in taste and quality from their conventionally produced counterparts. Ideological biodynamics is not a whit better. Its success is based on the secret power that organic products seem to exert on the insecure consumer.

But if organic wine is produced in the vineyard and in the cellar with a sense of entitlement and conviction, it tastes different from conventionally produced wine. Whether it also tastes better is a question of perception and standards, of personal wine experience, of chemical and microbiological composition, of personal will and sensory ability.

Committed organic winegrowers follow an ethos. They have become organic winemakers out of conviction. They are concerned with a different, honest, natural wine quality. It is not for nothing that the Demeter association only allows 14 additives in foodstuffs, true to the principle: "An additive or adjuvant must not mislead consumers in the sense of pretending that the product is of a higher quality."

That is why a committed organic winegrower approaches the vineyard and cellar differently than his conventional colleague. He knows his vines and keeps a close eye on their development throughout the wine year. He does not separate vineyard and cellar, for him the grapes represent finished wine: if they are healthy and tasty, he knows what the wine will taste like. The average conventional winegrower, on the other hand, is a grape grower. He only knows his vines from the tractor. He does not know when his grapes are ripe in terms of taste, let alone how his wine will taste. Compliant servant of the agricultural industry.

Chemicals in the vineyard are common practice in conventional cultivation.

Organic is no guarantee of taste quality. It is not nature that makes the wine, it is man who turns grapes into wine. That is why a conventionally working winegrower who knows his vines and acts gently in the cellar can have the "better" tasting wine in the cellar compared to the well-behaved organic winegrower. Only the experienced organic winegrower who uncompromisingly implements in the cellar what he has managed to wring out of nature in the vineyard will bring a more exciting, more lively and therefore more interesting-tasting wine into the glass than his non-organic colleague.

The difference? The organic winegrower works for the natural balance of his vines. That is why he works the soil; if it is healthy and alive, the vine is doing well. The experienced vintner recognises this by the colour, thickness and position of the leaves. He can adjust the structure and moisture content of the topsoil via mulching and cover crop. If iron or magnesium deficiencies stress his vines, he takes natural countermeasures. Because his vines and grapes are healthy, he does not have to spray them with fungicides that interfere with their natural fermentation in the cellar.

That is why organic wines produced in a sophisticated way taste different from conventionally produced wines. They avoid tasteless clichés, make the vintage palpable and make the location and origin resound. They are not spectacularly loud, but focus on freshness and finesse instead of impact. They boldly dare the imperfection of nature, are unobtrusively potent in power and extract and therefore convey playfulness and drinking pleasure. You have to listen to them. But if you understand their language, they not only taste different, they taste better.

All organic wines tasted this year in the wine guide

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