Sustainable Solutions - Chapter 1

My initial intention in creating this blog was simply to write about wine, but as I delve deeper into sustainability studies, particularly in relation to our modern industrialized foodshed, I have often been struck by the fact that there is already a well-established model for modern, sustainable agriculture:

Winemaking.

Sometimes I amaze even myself at how easily I'm able to relate all of life's most important questions to wine.  Self-serving?  Definitely.  But I hope no less true for that.  

Forgive me for the length of this run-on post - but I have separated it into three short 'chapters'.  I had hoped this would make me appear less (insane) long-winded, but I'm realizing that may simply be inevitable.  So bear with me, if you will, and feel free to take it in the smaller parts I've so conveniently provided you with, a little at a time.

Winemaking as a Model for Sustainable Agriculture

It can’t be denied that, along with any other food product there are huge winemaking machines churning out thousands of gallons of cheap, poorly made wine choc-full of additives.  I know, I’ve drunk my share.  For shame….

And, yes, I do think of wine as primarily food – the fact that it’s fermented is just, well, a bonus – but that’s a topic for an entirely different post.

But generally speaking, people who enjoy wine enjoy it for its quality and variety.  Wine drinkers tend to seek out new, interesting wineries, paying attention to particular points of origin, often narrowing their search to a particular couple of acres of land somewhere in the world and making the names of especially excellent vineyards famous.  As a rule, we generally don’t pay the same attention to, say, where our spinach comes from.  We don’t see signage in the grocery store informing us that this bag of spinach came from the Napa Valley, let alone the Oakville district of the Napa Valley.  But walking the aisles of your average wine shop, this is exactly what you see.  Because as consumers, we have demanded it.  And the market responds, which is why there are so many successful small vineyards and wineries in the world – many of which sit on less than twenty acres of arable land.  What a realtor might call a ‘farmette’.  If only all small farms could be so profitable.

I’ve focused most of my own wine studies on the Rhone Valley of France, particularly on the Syrah varietal.  And yes, while it may be self-serving to view sustainability through that lens, really, what better model for future sustainability could there be than an agricultural tradition that has successfully sustained itself for more than 2000 years?  Viewed through the history of Syrah, a picture of how winemaking practices can offer viable solutions to our current agricultural problem becomes clear.

continued in chapter 2...