Liquid assets: At many wineries, every day is Earth Day

In the wine world, it's actually fairly easy being green. What's hard is labeling your product to reflect those practices.

An alphabet soup of federal bureaucracies has prevented winemakers from keeping pace with other food purveyors in labeling their products "organic." The result is a lose-lose scenario: Vintners using all manner of eco-friendly practices get little or no credit on labels, and consumers who want to embrace organic wines have few tasty options.

About 30 percent of Oregon's vineyard acreage is certified organic, biodynamic or "salmon safe," but just try finding an Oregon wine with "organic" stamped on the bottle.

The culprit: sulfites. The USDA's National Organic Standards Board steadfastly retains a policy that to be labeled organic, a wine cannot have any added sulfites, only naturally occurring ones, and a total level of less than 20 parts per million. Even the normally stringent European Union doesn't enact such strictures.

The intent is primarily to protect the two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans with sulfite allergies. But because sulfites prevent oxidation and help control bacteria, wines without them are unstable, often do not travel well and have massive bottle variation.

"I worry that the window for public acceptance of organic wine is closing," said Jason Haas, general manager of California winery Tablas Creek. "The result is that most of the producers who farm organically or biodynamically don't say so, or are prohibited from saying so, on the label. And most of the producers who make organically labeled wines aren't making great wine.

"So you have to know your producers and do your homework, but it's worth doing, since the rewards of responsible farming can be dramatic in the bottle."

"I think that is a result of producers, retailers and restaurateurs making known how many wines produced from organically grown grapes are available."

As with most matters viniferous, the best course is to trust one's palate. Amid all the hubbub over "natural wines" and biodynamics (which might involve burying dung-filled cow horns in the vineyard), each of us should go with what tastes good -- and real.

Wines that seem "manufactured" (I actually prefer "spoofulated") might well have been manipulated in the winery to cover up the effects wrought by chemical insecticides in the vineyards.

(I was visiting a small sustainable-oriented Napa winery two years ago when the wind whooshed in bug-killing spray from its enormous neighbor. Even the best intentions. ... )

So it's up to each of us to decide what tastes pure or "honest" and of course what level of importance we place on such priorities. That's what grape growers and winemakers have done. "Sustainability," both in the vineyard and at the winery (solar power, rainwater collection, etc.) is a widespread watchword in Wine Country.

For Oregon winemaker Ken Wright, regulations are not the main reason to eschew pursuit of a designation. It's more about geology. "Organic farming doesn't produce the best nutrition," said Wright, a Wisconsin native who injects a raft of micro-organisms, most but not all of them organic, into his soil. "What we really should be demanding [rather than organic] is better nutrition.

"When plants don't get what they need nutritionally, they struggle. Those kinds of plants are always the first to get diseases, to get insects. Nature is not kind to weak things."

Besides healthy plants, the main goal for most vintners is to be stewards of the land.

"We're all in the vineyard," said Jay Somers, owner and winemaker at Oregon's J. Christopher winery. "Our family, the kids and dogs are in that vineyard, so we want to take care of the land. Our friends and our workers are there. It needs to be a safe place to be."