The Goode Guide to Wine by Jamie Goode

Author:Jamie Goode
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520342460
Publisher: University of California Press

.29.

Don’t expect others to pick up your tab

The wine business—and especially vineyards—must be sustainable. You can’t expect the next generation to pick up your tab.

WHEN I WAS at university, we used to go out a lot. This was a campus university, and so we’d often head out to the student union bar: it was cheap, and we knew a lot of folks there. One of our regular crew was a guy whom I shall call Bob. Now, none of us had a lot of disposable income—we were students, after all—but we’d come with enough money to tide us through the evening. All except for Bob. He’d come out with a pound—enough to buy one drink. What do you do? Well, he’s a mate, so you take turns paying for his drinks. Pulling off this sort of stunt once or twice is OK: we all fall on hard times. But do it consistently, and you’re going to get noticed. It’s unreasonable behavior. Don’t expect others to pick up your tab.

I think this is a good guide in life generally, not just when we’re drinking at bars. It’s particularly true when it comes to the environment. Vines need a lot of spraying to protect them from disease and from insect pests. And they need nutrition. The cheapest way of doing this is to buy a bunch of chemical solutions and then spray. And to buy the strongest, most effective chemicals, so you can apply them less frequently. The mindset here is based on a firmly vine-centric view: this is the crop plant, and the vineyard is merely the medium in which the vine is grown. For a long while, viticulturists idealized the tidy vineyard, with neat rows of vines growing out of weed-free, bare soil.

But now we have a new view of the vineyard, seeing it instead as an agro-ecosystem, in which the vine is but one living entity. The soils, too, are alive, contributing to a healthy, balanced ecosystem that is self-correcting and less vulnerable to pests and diseases, and that produces grapes that make more interesting wines.

Most significantly, the chemically1 farmed vineyard is not sustainable. And this is the deal breaker. Just as you can’t go to a bar and expect your mates to pay for you each time, neither can we expect the next generation to pick up our tab. If we are custodians of a piece of land, how can we hand it on to our children in a worse state? That’s what we have been doing with this planet, and it has to stop.

At the moment, truly sustainable viticulture—one where farming vines doesn’t diminish the quality of soils and water—is seen as a nice luxury, something that’s desirable if we can afford it. Or it is used as a marketing tool. Instead, we need to view it as the bare minimum. Once we are farming sustainably, we can start thinking about how to do even more, in order to hand the land down in a better state than when we took it on—and in the process, make better wine through better farming.

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