Look through our list and you will find plenty of wines with a butterfly () symbol against them.

These are wines where we are convinced that the producer is either committed to growing grapes through sustainable means, follows biodynamic methods of working or is ‘accredited’ organic. We would like to stock more accredited organic wines but the demands of becoming certified have put many people off and, as well as having to work within these hoops, our growers have to run their own businesses. Many wines too are frankly not good enough.

Organic wines are easier to make in hotter, drier climates such as Spain, South America and Australia where the moist conditions that favour fungal and other attacks do not prevail. For most producers in wetter climes, growing good grapes without any recourse to chemicals is an extremely difficult or impossibly dangerous risk to take. Biodynamic growers follow the methods espoused by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s concerning working with the phases of the moon and using only organic preparations. He never lectured about grape-growing or winemaking! Lutte raisonnée growers use local weather stations to predict conditions when it is best to spray, thereby reducing dramatically the amounts of chemicals they use. There are still so many conundrums. One pragmatic young burgundy grower left us with this thought recently. Is it better to do ten treatments of copper sulphate thereby adding to the heavy metals in the soil, or one treatment of something more effective?

James Tanner