ORGANIC WINE IS GOING MAINSTREAM
Mission Hill will make shift during the next five years
At the Northern Lands wine and food festival in Edmonton earlier this month, Mission Hill general manager and chief winemaker Darryl Brooker casually mentioned that the landmark B.C. winery is committed to transitioning its 500 hectares of Okanagan vineyards to certified organic.
When I spoke with Brooker this week he confirmed the plan, but there won’t be a formal announcement until the winery works through the logistics.
“We have one organic vineyard (certified) on the Golden Mile (Bench) that we make a wine from already, but we just hired a specialist in organic viticulture from New Zealand who will be converting all of our northern vineyards immediately,” Brooker said.
The company will then turn its attention to the south end of the valley, with Brooker expecting all Mission Hill vineyards to be certified organic within five years.
Almost directly across the lake at organic central, the folks at Summerhill Pyramid Winery are beside themselves with glee.
“I see this as being gamechanging. When a winery like Summerhill is organic, other wineries can just say ‘oh well, those guys are eccentric,’ but Mission Hill is not eccentric. To me they are an almost perfect exemplar of normal, modern Western values. When a winery like Mission Hill commits to organic, it sets the bar for all other wineries, especially those in British Columbia,” Summerhill CEO Ezra Cipes said.
“The organic program is sometimes dismissed and criticized by small wineries. They don’t want to bother with an ISO level certification that demands complete transparency, auditability, and trace-backs that go as deep as having the name and contact information of the transport truck driver that picked up the grapes from the organic vineyard.”
Organic certification is an expense that some businesses may not be able to afford — Summerhill pays about $5,000 a year. When Mission Hill goes
organic, Cipes suggests this will get worse.
“The organic certification will be even more deeply criticized as small wineries feel more pressure to get certified. Other unjustifiable, phoney reasons for not certifying will likely gain traction. There are already lots of jerky, nonsensical criticisms of organic out there.”
It reminds me of the countless growers worldwide who proudly suggest that they are organic, just not certified.
In the end it’s always about money and fear of losing the crop to some nasty disease, but they never have any reservations about applying chemicals to the environment to save their crop.
But there may be a solution for all: Certified Naturally Grown.
CNG farmers don’t use any synthetic herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, or genetically modified organisms.
CNG livestock are raised mostly on pasture and with space for freedom of movement. Feed must be grown without synthetic inputs or genetically modified seeds.
“The agricultural practices of a CNG farm mirror exactly those of an organic farm. The difference is in the auditability/ paperwork/trace-back standard. At CNG the system relies on peer review.
Existing organic or CNG farmers conduct inspections and
file inspection reports for their neighbours,” said Cipes.
Critically, the fees are minimal. (Summerhill Vineyard donated $200 to the non-profit organization that administers the certification as an annual fee.)
Cipes wants to get the word out about the grassroots, smallfarmer friendly eco-certification given what it can do at this especially important time, as organic goes mainstream.
“It protects those who make the special effort to gain organic certification from sour-grapes criticism, taking all of the legitimate excuses away while giving small farmers selling regionally, and who don’t need organic certification, an easy avenue to tell
the story of their healthy viticulture practices,” said Cipes.
“It fosters a peer-to-peer network of farmers to share best practices.”
Summerhill received its CNG certificate this week. Next week, Cipes will visit Robyn and Mike Nierychlo, owners of Emandare Vineyard on Vancouver Island, to inspect their vineyard for CNG status.
One by one, this industry is growing up.