King Estate: Changing Perceptions of Organic Wine

This article first appeared in the January/February 2013 edition of In Good Tilth, the magazine of Oregon Tilth. Because I live in the heart of Oregon's Pinot Noir country, and local growers tend to be progressive and very concerned with land stewardship, I often get to write about the environmental aspects of winemaking. I first wrote about organic winemaking in a story on eco-wines for the 2010/2011 edition of the Natural Choice Directory for the Willamette Valley. Local winemaker Steve Girard of Benton-Lane Winery was a key source for my feature on the Beyond Organic movement in the 2011/2012 edition of the Directory.
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In an era of increasing consumer consciousness of the health risks associated with conventional agriculture, organic products take pride of place in the marketplace, usually commanding a premium price–but not necessarily on the wine shelf. In fact, until a few years ago, many winemakers who embraced sustainable farming were uncomfortable advertising their organic bona fides for fear of turning off wine aficionados and being written off as winemaking lightweights with more interest in saving the planet than producing stellar vintages.

But that is changing, as vineyard managers discover the benefits of organic growing and vintners find a budding demand for wines grown with an eye towards sustainability. If organic is no longer a dirty word in the wine world, part of the credit must go to wineries such as King Estate, Oregon’s largest, which flew the organic flag before it was popular and is not afraid to push the message that taking care of the land is a responsibility, not an option.

In 1991, the King family founded King Estate in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range southwest of Eugene. The 1,033-acre estate, crowned by an elegant, European-inspired villa, encompasses 470 acres of vineyards and 30 acres of fruits, vegetables and flowers. A world-class Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris producer, the estate bottles 230,000 cases each year from estate-grown grapes and fruit from a handful of smaller Oregon vineyards.

With a background in Kansas wheat farming, the King family was familiar with chemically dependent conventional agriculture. But Ed King III, the winery’s co-founder, chief executive officer and guiding light, says he became convinced that the high-volume approach to farming sacrifices nutrition and quality in favor of cheap pricing. Influenced by the work of organics proponents like Fred Kirshenmann and Michael Pollan, and with the encouragement of now-deceased employee Brad Biegh, who had worked in chemical-free French vineyards, in the late 1990s, the estate took a deep breath, in King’s words, and transitioned to organic growing.

In 2002 Oregon Tilth Certified Organic (OTCO) certified King Estate’s entire property, including its orchards and vegetable gardens. Though the estate occasionally releases USDA-certified organic wines, most of its bottling contains a mix of estate-grown organic grapes and fruit from its suppliers, only one of which is certified organic.

According to industry insiders, King Estate went out on a limb by dedicating itself to organics. “For whatever reasons, there’s still a stigma around organic wines,” says OTCO Farm Inspector Andrew Black.

Some of the earliest organic wine producers did not have winemaking experience, which showed in early vintages, in part because the wines did not age well. USDA organic standards preclude the addition of sulfites, inorganic salts with antioxidant and preservative properties to wines bearing the organic label, though virtually all winemakers since the 16th century have relied on small doses of sulfites to keep wine fresh, and every wine has some level of the naturally occurring compounds.

While some fermenting wines gain enough sulfites as a byproduct of fermentation to age well, other do not. While the idea of organics became unfairly associated with funky, ill-aging “hippie wines,” all wines produced until 1945 were technically organic, as King Estate points out in its advertising. Many European wines still use grapes grown with organic methods and European Union organic labeling standards are more tolerant of sulfite additives. Savvy winemakers, like the crew at King Estate, treat each developing wine individually, adding the amount of sulfites necessary to create the best wine possible.

While King Estate places emphasis on organic farming, Assistant Winemaker Christopher Hudson says the company honors organic methods in its OTCO-certified winery as well as in the vineyard, using organic yeast nutrients and other fermentation additives and bottling organic-labeled wines whenever possible. Though organic growing is more labor-intensive and the vineyard manager occasionally has to cull some vine growth to stay ahead of grape mildew or other problems, Hudson says, the benefits of fermenting organic fruit are well worth the effort. “Compost additives tend to produce better flavors and aromas than chemical fertilizers,” he says, later adding “the health of the fermentation is much better in an organic ferment.”

“We found that time and experience has only confirmed the decision (to go organic),” says King.

While going organic may have benefited King Estate’s vinification, from a marketing perspective the winery faced an uphill climb, says Oregon Wine Board Director of Marketing and Education Dewey Weddington. Weddington, who handled the estate’s communication efforts for Funk/Levis & Associates of Eugene during the certification process, says the stigma associated with organic wine created pressure on the winery to bottle vintages that were far better than wine aficionados would expect for the region. “If you are going to go out and do something that challenges a market perception, you have to far exceed quality (expectations),” says Weddington. The high scores that King Estate selections receives from Wine Spectator and other wine experts helped demonstrate that organic grapes could make great wine.

“What I saw at King Estate and the potential for organics in the Oregon wine industry motivated me to focus on organic winemaking,” Weddington says, adding that the experience was a big part of his decision to work with Cooper Mountain Vineyards, another Oregon winery early in its support for organics, and then lead a push at SakeOne to develop an organic sake.

Former King Estates Marketing and Public Relations Manager Sasha Kady spelled out the winery’s communication goals for the wine website Good Grape in 2010: “The goal of the advertising isn’t just to sell more King Estate wine or increase brand awareness, but to increase awareness of the message itself. We want to encourage real change in the way people think about organics, water pollution, nature, wildlife conservation and other things that affect the environment.”

According to sustainability consultant Alexa Bach-McElrone, who works with small wineries and wine organizations in California, King Estate strives to communicate its core values by publicizing a range of sustainability efforts, from its Salmon Safe certification and the Raptor Program in support of the Cascade Raptor Center, to its participation in the Carbon Neutral Challenge and construction of the largest solar power system at a regional winery.

By publicizing their participation in programs with clear metrics for success and third party certification “They are willing to take more risks” than firms that simply use green catchphrases in their marketing, says Bach-McElrone, “They are really taking a comprehensive approach.”

When she started working in California six years ago, Bach-McElrone says few winemakers wanted to advertise organics. “Even then some of the companies in the wine industry I was working for wouldn’t use that language (though they used sustainable or organic techniques),” she says. “Just in the six years I’ve been here I’ve seen a great change not only in practices but in the willingness to communicate.”

While both wine drinkers and grape growers are starting to get the message about organics, says OTCO’s Black, there is still work to be done. He says that while consumers readily understand the health benefits of buying products free of chemical residues, it is important to extend that awareness to the positive-impact farming has on cropland, communities and the ecosystem as a whole. King Estate’s marketing efforts focus on raising that awareness, as their “We owe the future” tagline suggests.

“They are deeply committed to organic agriculture. I have a lot of respect for what King Estate is doing out there,” says Black. “Within the wine community there is still a lot of confusion about the significance of organic practices and why they are important to people and communities in general.”

In addition to growing organically “because we think it’s the right way to do things” for the environment, for employees and for the community, King says he wants his winery to serve as an industry role model. “We do it to model the behavior for other people,” he says. By setting a high standard for its own organically-certified grapes, Executive Vice President Steve Thomson says, King Estate hopes to encourage the vineyards it sources fruit from to farm more sustainably. King says that concerns over paperwork and fees may discourage some growers from seeking certification, while others worry about getting certified and reaping the negative publicity if they backslide and use chemical fungicides or other non-organic chemicals in an emergency situation.

Steven Hagen, whose Old School Vineyards sells to King Estate, says he started using organic methods in 2001 after noticing how conventional farming was damaging his land, but he has not attempted organic certification. He says that King Estate has been supportive of his efforts and he and Meliton Martinez, the estate’s vineyard manager, often share their in-the-vineyard experiences and bounce farming ideas off each other. In addition to helping small vineyards, Hagen and others say the sheer size of King Estate’s vineyard –the largest contiguously certified organic vineyard in the world–sets the tone for responsible wineries worldwide.

“I think to some extent people think of organics as small scale,” says Hagen, adding that many in the industry do not believe organic farming can work for large scale vineyards. “When somebody like King does it, it encourages people to take that leap. King Estate is a really great poster boy for the Oregon wine industry... It says a lot about the Oregon wine industry as a whole that one of our largest producers is an organic producer.”