Slow Wine: What Is It? Should I Care?

by: Dr. Elinor Garely – special to eTN and editor in chief, wines.travel |

Born in Bra, his skillset was proper when he and his colleagues formed the Friends of Barolo Association. The group produced a catalog of wines, including data sheets with a narration of each label that eventually became the Vini d’Italia guide.

Wine Enters Politics

In Italy, Petrini viewed the emerging American fast-food movement in horror.

He saw the decline threatening local food traditions, and the appreciation of “good food” was disappearing.  In retaliation, he started a counteroffensive in Italy (1986), pushing against opening a McDonald’s near the historic Spanish Steps in Rome.

In the same year (1986), 23 people died drinking wine adulterated with methyl alcohol (a chemical found in antifreeze). This poisoning rocked the Italian wine industry and forced the suspension of all wine exports until the wines could be certified as safe. The deaths directly resulted from consuming Italian wines with methyl, or wood, alcohol to raise the wines’ alcohol content to an average of 12 percent.

 The contamination was not found in quality Italian wines usually exported to the USA under labels marked as DOC (Denominazione de Origine Controllata), referencing Italian laws controlling quality wines from the vineyard through production and sale. The scandal was attached to cheap bulk wines sold to neighboring European countries for mixing with their local wines. The inexpensive, unpedigreed wines sold as vina di tavola for regional export and local consumption at bargain rates were so inexpensive that only adulterated wines could be profitable.

However, the horrific nature of the crime leeched through the entire Italian wine industry, and the episode smeared every wine product and producer. 

As a result of the poisoning, Denmark banned all Italian wine imports, following in the footsteps of West Germany and Belgium. Switzerland seized over 1 million gallons of suspect wine, and France seized 4.4 million gallons, announcing it would destroy at least 1.3 million gallons found to have been tainted. Government warnings were sent to consumers in Britain and Austria.

Everyone, everywhere, challenged the credibility of Italian wine, raising new awareness of the industry across all sectors.

Getting Over It

                When France and Germany identified and confiscated large quantities of tainted wine, the Italian Agriculture Ministry issued a decree that all Italian wines had to be certified by a government laboratory and carry a certification document before being exported.

This requirement further froze Italian wine exports, and the government admitted that out of 12,585 samples, 274 had been found to contain illegal quantities of methyl alcohol (NY Times, April 9, 1986).

In 1988, Arcigola Slow Food and Gambero Rosso published the first edition of the Vini d’Italia guide. This document was followed in 1992 with the first edition of Guida al Vino Quotidiano (Guide to Daily Wine), which included reviews of the best Italian wines from the value-for-money perspective.

It became a valuable aid for daily wine selections.

At the start of the 21st century (2004), the Wine Bank was developed to promote Italian wine heritage through training courses and protecting wines destined for aging. Three years later (2007), Vignerons d’Europe, in Montpelier, the Salon du Gout et des Saveurs d’Origine celebrated 100 years since the revolt of the Languedoc winegrowers.

The first edition of the Vinerons d’Europe united hundreds of European winemakers in a debate over the challenges created by an ever more globalized world, acknowledging the growing crisis facing the wine industry from the perspective of economic impact and the public face of Italian wines.

A Monumental Change. Slow Wine

Up to this point, wines were reviewed numerically. From Robert Parker and similar reviews, consumers learned to read the numbers, and the higher the Parker score, the more likely the purchase of that specific wine would be made.

In addition, current vineyard practices included using (abusing) fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides to combat pests, diseases, and mildew that impacted wine productivity.

However, synthetic herbicides wreak havoc on the environment and degrade the soil and land, making it unusable, causing water runoff, pollution, loss of soil productivity, and other environmental hazards. 

Enter the Slow Wine movement with grassroots, global wine emissaries who prioritize the conservation of natural resources through land stewardship. In 2011, the Slow Wine Guide was published, shifting the focus from the numeric value of wines to the macro environment that includes factual details of wineries, the producers, and production areas.

The Guide was applauded for being more than a list of significant players; it moved consumers’ attention from numbers/point scores to describing the winemaking style and agronomic techniques employed. 

In 2012 Slow Wine Tours were introduced and included visits to wineries in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. In the following years, wineries in Germany, Denmark, Japan, Canada, and Slovenia (2017). In 2018 California was visited, and 50 wineries were reviewed.

In 2019 Oregon was included, followed by Washington State. Most recently, the Slow Wine movement reviews wineries in China, including Ningxia, Xinyang, Shandong, Hebei, Gansu, Yunnan, Shanxi, Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Tibet.

Alliance

The Slow Wine Coalition was formed in 2021. It is an international network knitting together all segments of the wine industry. This new wine association started a revolution based on environmental sustainability, the defense of the landscape, and the socio-cultural growth of the countryside. The organization produced a Manifesto with a focus on good, clean, fair wine.

Importance of Slow Wine Movement: Road Map

It is a challenge to enter a wine shop, walk the wine aisles in a supermarket or peruse an online wine-seller website. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of wines from every part of the planet and a vast array of price points, reviews, and opinions. How is the consumer going to know how to make a wise decision? Is the consumer interested in color (red, white, or rose), fizz or flat, taste, price, country of origin, sustainability, and/or a myriad of other questions that impact the purchase and the taste experience. The Slow Wine Guide offers a roadmap to the wine buyer, clearly and concisely presenting farming practices, and advocating for wineries that follow the ideology (pesticide free). 

Slow Wine is based on the Slow Food movement; it is a state of mind and provides a framework for farming as a holistic endeavor. The group has the temerity to question post-industrialization agricultural techniques and reconsider what we ingest (food and wine) in terms of sustainability and the risks associated with pesticides.

The Movement is engaged in educating consumers about the perils associated with fast food as well as lobbying against pesticides and running seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties. The concept has spread to other industries including slow fashion that highlights and encourages fair wages and the environment, and slow travel that attempts to combat over-tourism. In the USA, the Slow Wine Guide is the nation’s only wine book that prioritizes land stewardship, with the objective of providing transparency to consumers.

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