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."
Consumers have noticed. Mitch Zavada, wine buyer at South Lyndale Liquors, said that while sales of certified organic wines "are flat or possibly down ... we are absolutely selling more wines made from organically grown grapes than in the past.