Dear readers, welcome to 2010. The millennium is rounding off its first decade. Looking back, I see 10 years (or maybe eight, if you want to begin with 9/11/01) in which the artful lie was rewarded with money, power, and sex. From Dick Cheney to AIG, “Survivor,” Eliot Spitzer, and Tiger Woods, smooth talking and clever disinformation ruled.
I’m not naïve enough to think that artful dodging is over. It works too well, until it doesn’t. Those who carry on clandestine affairs will continue to do so, but they will have to adopt means other than their PDAs to communicate with their amours. (Carrier pigeons, perhaps? Or cherubim?)
Where environmental concerns take priority, doubletalk appears to be gaining, not disappearing. Store decorations have changed from the patriotic red, white, and blue of the past decade to earthy shades of brown and green. Greenwashing (the disingenuous representation of products and policies as environmentally friendly) has increased from a trickle to a tsunami. What seems to be globally, ecologically conscientious may actually obscure undesirable consequences.
Take, for example, the introduction of “Green Way” products in stores owned by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (the A&P, Waldbaum’s, Food Emporium, Pathmark, etc.). Last spring, this $9.5 billion company with 48,000 employees in eight states decided to jump on the organic bandwagon with its own brand of more than 200 products that are, according to the company’s website, “made without the use of harmful pesticides, chemicals or artificial fertilizers ... designed to provide shoppers with a breadth of food and grocery items that are high-quality, affordable and eco-friendly.”
Great, right? I applaud this noble effort. I like their olive oil, and their pasta. But now when I shop at my local Waldbaum’s in Mattituck, I can no longer find the organic products that are really superior, like Dartagnan chickens, or Seventh Generation soap. Come to find out, the Green Way chickens are produced by Perdue. Good on you, Perdue, to go organic, but your chickens don’t rival Dartagnan’s (or Murray’s, or Bell and Evans, which have also disappeared from Waldbaum’s).
In the wonderful world of wine, the “organic” producer has not been rewarded, via higher prices, by the consumer to compensate for higher costs of production. But this trend is beginning to change among a small segment of the population, and, as it does, greenwashing is setting in. At a fine vegetarian restaurant (not an oxymoron, really) in Manhattan recently, I noted that many of the wines on their list were “certified organic” or “biodynamic.” But some (including one from Long Island) were listed as “practicing organic” or “practicing biodynamic.” What does that mean? “Practicing,” as in “practicing the piano?” “Practicing medicine?” “Practicing sex?”
I don’t mean to detract from any efforts to grow grapes in an environmentally sensitive and sustainable way, but rather to ring the greenwashing alarm for this kind of ambiguous talk. Here on Long Island, no grape growers have succeeded at becoming certified “organic” or “biodynamic.” Many such efforts have been stymied (especially in a wet year like 2009) by conditions that foster a bit more biological life (i.e., fungi) than even the most dedicated proponent of biodiversity can tolerate. Also, the long, narrow shape of many farms here often means that vineyards using organic practices are too close to conventional farms to conform to parameters needed for certification.
In the face of these environmental challenges, Joe Macari Jr. and his family at Macari Vineyards in Mattituck deserve to be singled out for both their leadership in experimenting with difficult, expensive practices to improve their soils and their wines, and for their honesty about their successes and failures.
Joe Jr. did not begin as a farmer; he was brought up in Queens, where he worked in his father’s construction and real estate business before taking on a major planting (in 1995) of wine grapes on 200 acres of land in Mattituck, owned by his family, that had been slated for housing development. A wine lover who was a complete neophyte in the world of agriculture, Joe looked for advice both at home and abroad. From California, he hired biodynamics guru Alan York, from whom he learned to think of farming as a closed biological system of energy, connecting seasonal changes of light and darkness, in growth, decay, and renewal.
I’ll never forget visiting Joe a couple of years after he started a major composting operation to revitalize soils that had been depleted from decades of conventional farming. Digging into a tall mound of compost, Joe revealed a healthy squirm of worms. Positively exultant, he showed me the steers he was raising specifically for their manure, and the nettles he had planted to add life to the herbal “tea” he used instead of chemical fertilizers.
Joe has tried everything he could possibly have tried to make his vineyard biodynamic, yet he insists, “We’re conventional. We still need to spray to combat fungus. I’m not going to claim to be something I’m not.”
There is no greenwashing at Macari Vineyards. None. Yet Joe’s modesty and persistence in learning how to improve his farm and his wine, taking a globally connected view, and making his family a part of his life’s work, do have an effect on his wines. They show real purity, varietal expression, and vitality.
Can good guys win? I certainly hope that the coming decade rewards the Joe Macari Jr.s of the world.
More Posts from 
