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“Littler consensus exists as to whether eco-certified wines are associated with worse, similar or better quality than their traditional counterparts,” said lead author Professor Magali Delmas, of the UCLA Institute of the Environment according to a Report in the Telegraph. “Our results indicated that the adoption of wine eco-certification has a significant and positive effect on wine ratings. They are also interesting because they contradict a general sentiment that eco-labelled wines are of lower quality.”
An organic wine, eco-certified in the US comes from vineyards which do not use pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilisers. They also have no added sulphites. The researchers reason that using organic practices with no pesticides allows microbes in the soil to flourish, enhancing the flavour of the fruit and giving a better representation of the ‘terroir’. Avoiding them also reduces yield (thus costing more money), which may improve quality because the vine needs to ripen a smaller amount of fruit, making the juice more concentrated.
To determine the quality of organic wines versus their non-organic counterparts the team studied 74,148 wines from 3,482 vineyards in California, for 1998-2004 vintages. They analysed the reviews by experts from the three respected US publications, who tasted them blind giving points on a 100-point scale: a score of 90 or more rating the wines superb with scores below 60 labelling them defective and undrinkable.
The researchers found that organic wines gained significantly higher scores which sometimes pushed them into even higher categories. The study, which was published in the Journal of Wine Economics, comes amid several recent reviews which suggest organic food is neither tastier nor more nutritious than traditionally farmed produce.
http://www.wine-economics.org
But the misperception mentioned in the beginning of the Article that organic wines are worse quality, ought to be removed by the study which is a good news for consumers, because they will get higher-quality wine at a lower price,” says Prof. Magali Delmas.
She hopes the research will inspire vintners to project their eco-certifications more boldly and encourage more wineries to take up environmental practices. A mere 1 percent of wines in the study were eco-certified, and two-thirds of Eco-certified California wineries do not even showcase the seals on their bottles because of the general customer sentiment that eco-labelled wines are of lower quality, Delmas said. Even though another study by her in 2014 showed that consumers won’t pay more for eco-wine and thus depressing the prices, many vineyards still take on the expense of getting certified, facing 10 to15 percent higher costs initially for 3-4 years.
The study also found the positive effect more for red wines than for whites, with eco-certified red wines gaining 5.6 extra points, compared to 1.3 points for white wines. While the increase for white wines wasn’t statistically significant, Delmas suspects that it mainly reflects the smaller sample size for white wines. She explains that while the study was not conclusive, it did indicate that white wines also saw a positive effect from eco-certification.
Her previous research has shown that improving quality was not the only motivation for winemakers to choose organic farming of vineyards. In case of family owned vineyards where the owners plan to pass the property on to their children, the key motivation was found to be a cleaner environment for future generations. |