Thanks for stopping by and underscoring the point about generational perceptions. Your wines also retail at $12/liter, much lower than the ones in the above data set. Maybe that plays a role too.

@ Everyobody – Today I saw Doug Tunnell of Brick House, which he said had put some form of organic or Biodynamic certification on the label for the past 16 years. (Brick House is in the Willamette Valley, Oregon.) I asked him about the findings of this study rang true for him.

His reply: “I don’t see that.”

Many people that were drinking wine 15-20 years ago remember some of the first organic wines on the market, and several were indeed less than stellar. However, to think that this past reality in some way distorts the perception of the new generation of wine drinkers in 2010 is simply not accurate.

In our business, what we see is that the 21-35 year old customers are very interested in the fact that our wines are organic. Rather than seeing it as a negative or even a question mark, organic certification is one of the reasons they buy our wines.

We find the same situation with our packaging… Adult juice boxes as Tyler often calls them. Rather than a turnoff, we find that consumers are fully on board with alternative packaging for all of the right reasons.

They want a positive experience with a wine that delivers value and great taste. If it can offer these qualities and also be organic and less impactful on the planet, so much the better.

Drink Well, Do Good. That’s our philosophy.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1832514/for_california_vintners_its_not_easy_being_green/index.html

“Last year, Pacific Rim released a Riesling Made with Organic Grapes. The grapes are sourced from their Wallula Biodynamic Vineyard – the first and ONLY Demeter certified Biodynamic vineyard in Washington State. The wine was awarded the #3 TOP 100 BEST WINE BUY of 2009 from Wine Enthusiast. Subsequently, demand for the wine has exploded.”
——-
The front comment on their website:

“RIESLING MADE WITH ORGANIC GRAPES
99.2% of all components for our Riesling are organic. We even use native — not commercial — yeast to best present the natural character of our vineyard. We use no pesticides and every element within our sustainably-farmed vineyard is native to the vineyard.”
——–
Their wine ratings:
92 points Riesling Made with Organic Grapes
93 points Biodynamic Wallula Vineyard Riesling
92 points Solstice Vineyard Riesling
89 points Dry Riesling
89 points Sweet Riesling
90 points Framboise
89 points Vin de Glaciére Riesling

As you probably know, the winery is owned by Randall Grahm

The real issue here is quality, not sustainability.

A Harvard Bus. Review study found that 70% of consumers would prefer to buy a sustainably made product vs. one that is not. However, overwhelmingly, they will not do so if it means trading off quality for sustainability. Nor should they.

Any winery (or any other business) trying to slap a sustainable certification or claim on an inferior product is not going to benefit from people’s desire to spend their money on sustainably-made products. Our personal experience in this area has led us to this conclusion – if there are two products of equal quality (say, two bottles of wine rated 90), and one company makes their product sustainably, AND can simply communicate that fact, many people will choose the sustainably made product over the other. Some may even be willing to pay more.

In short, quality is still the first and over-riding variable. To do research that quantifies the impact of “eco-friendly” labeling, the researchers would need to compare the difference in all wines scoring an 84 (to use the example from the article above). If I read your blog correctly, the only thing the research shows is that people aren’t willing to pay $30+ dollars for wines rated 84, even if they are labeled “eco-sustainable.” This shouldn’t be used as an argument against making and marketing quality wines sustainably.

As Mark Twain once said (roughly), there are lies, damn lies, and statistics…

Add also the particularly American confusion over “organic” and “no sulfites,” and it’s not so hard to understand the reluctance to go green on the label.

It is in the best interest of winemakers and vinyards to ensure the sustainability of their own land and fruit, it doesn’t matter to me if they met some certification standard.

In my experience, wines that make a big deal about being organic tend to be bad wines using the organic label as their point of differentiation. I’m sure there are exceptions.

Dcpatton hit on something important. The problem is that organic winemakers are the ones who have the burden of certification, and all the headaches that go with it, in the first place.

In a perfect world, organic wine would just be what we mean when we say “wine.” After all, it’s how wine was made for centuries. But because we now add the “organic” prefix, a chemically-farmed laboratory-manipulated product is easier for a consumer to understand. It’s just “wine.” He’s also late for dinner, uncomfortable asking questions in wine stores, and will just take that bottle over there, thank you. Imagine a reverse situation, where customers have to stop to ask a salesperson “excuse me, what does ‘factory wine’ mean?”

Along with standards and certifications come all the arguments. The winemakers who add sulphites claim they are just as organic as the ones who don’t. Fantastic organic winemakers, who choose not to certify, point out all the manipulation you can do in the winery that make the label meaningless. People who love everything green, but know nothing about wine, see the label as quality assurance, while the all-knowing critic loves to point out you can grow your grapes as organic as Noah and still make a horrible wine.

All these converging viewpoints forced under one tiny umbrella comes across as a confusing mess. That’s why for some people organic wine awareness has been raised along with the green/local movement and for others it is ridiculed. We’re using one phrase to describe many different philosophies and practices. The “I had an organic wine once and it was bad” phrase is still a marketing nightmare for so many fantastic winemakers. Everyone has had bad wine, but you’re more likely to remember a bad organic wine because of all the attention the word brings with it in the first place.

That’s one reason many winemakers like to play both sides of the field. They certify, but don’t put it on the label. The quality assurance is there for the people in-the-know, but the headaches and questions from those who see it on a label and don’t understand it are not. It also prevents a winery’s biggest fear – being taken off their proper shelf in the store and stuck in some ad-hoc organic section behind the counter next to the kosher wines. There comes your price drop.

If conventional wineries were the ones who had to certify, and put on labels what they were up to, it would be a lot more fun. Winegrowers who farm with battery acid could lobby Washington that winemakers with oak chips aren’t conventional enough and demand a secondary label “Made From Roundup Grapes.” They could pay double fees to be certified overseas, because New Zealand doesn’t accept the U.S. standard for Slightly Severe Manipulation. I think that would be fairer that the current system, where winemakers have to pay to explain what they are “not” doing.