Boring, but important

Is the way we talk about sustainability in wine actually helping?

When I was starting out writing, I submitted a speculative piece to a (now-defunct) US publication. The editor, who rejected it, gave me a piece of advice:

“This reads like a lecture….where’s the question you’re answering?”

This is the problem with talking about sustainability - there is no essential question to answer (or at least there shouldn’t be, lest you find yourself in the small section of the Venn Diagram where Climate Change Denier and reader of this Substack overlap). The ‘why’ is just so bleedin’ obvious that we're just left with the (less interesting) ‘how’.

Sustainability has become the opposite of an elephant in the room. Everyone can see it….and everyone is talking about it, seemingly on auto-pilot. In Champagne lately I’ve seen everything from commissioned composers writing pieces based around the insect noises found in their vineyards to endless sustainability-themed art installations, dinners and slogans.

It’s as though if we keep talking about the elephant enough, it might disappear, a bit like the Dementors in Harry Potter who just need a dash of the Patronus charm - effectively thinking very, very hard about positive thoughts - to make everything OK again. This relentless, banal chatter has an equal-and-opposite force, though. As with anything that becomes ritualised, what starts as sincere ends up, through repetition and obligation, feeling perfunctory. Lazy. Here’s a producer that has installed some insect hotels in one of its vineyards - tick. I saw the word “regenerative’ in a press release - tick. It's easier than talking about the wine, or the winemaking, or the viticulture itself.

A tilled vineyard in Bouzy

It’s a shame, in a way, because the noise drowns out the people actually engaged in the process of trying to get the elephant out of the room. Behind those art installations is often genuine progress, but that progress is by its nature messy, gritty, technical and difficult to engage consumers in without boring them. Producers know this - I was sat next to the Sustainability Director of Mumm/Perrier-Jouët for 90 minutes during a press event in Épernay recently, and left deeply impressed with her detailed, considered sincerity, very little of which seemed to be making it into the event's glitzy sustainability-themed orchestrations.

Put on your Green Fatigues

It's also a topic that, like AI, reminds us that we belong to a species with severe limitations - never an especially inspirational angle for engaging readers. Driverless cars are great because people try to eat burgers whilst piloting two tonnes of metal at forty miles per hour.