Winestein: Organic wine availability is growing

(TheTimesTribune) - Wines that strive to be easy on the environment have never been more readily available than on this upcoming Earth Day, April 22. The entire nation of Chile has made it a point to be the leading producer of organic wines. All sorts of groups and regions are promoting their own sustainability guidelines and seals. Biodynamic wines, a combination of organic theories (and some skeptics say witchcraft), are more numerous. The existence of these wines may suggest there is something inherently wrong with conventional agriculture, which I don't believe. For one thing, many of the sprays and fertilizers that worry people are eliminated by regulators over time. The benign ones that are left tend to be very expensive, and no grower wants to overuse them. Spraying less, like the sustainable folks do, or not spraying chemicals at all, as the organic and biodynamic growers advocate, can help sustain budgets, too. Also, organic folks still spray stuff that's not beneficial to the earth; their sprays are just naturally derived.

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