TERROIR
Photo: Esby / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
THE FEATURE
The Metal in the Organic Vineyard: Copper, and the Phase-Out That May Never Come
On the Olgaberg, a hill above Lake Constance, the summer of 2024 was spent spraying between showers. By August, Staatsweingut Meersburg's technical director, Otto Kopp, estimated that 80 percent of the crop on the estate's one organic vineyard had gone to downy mildew. Its two conventional sites had no such problem. The difference was the spray list: on an organic site in Europe, the fungicide against mildew is copper, and in a wet year the rain takes it off the leaf.
Copper is also a substance EU law has formally flagged for replacement, and the replacement keeps not arriving. The renewal file was still stuck at its admissibility check in 2025, so Brussels extended copper's approval to June 30, 2029. Meanwhile vineyard topsoil across the EU already holds nearly three times the copper of land overall. We follow the metal from leaf to soil, and to the alternative the Commission's own experts keep advising against.
THE DISPATCH
Latest from this week
Wine bottles stacked cork-out in a wire rack. Photo: Sheila C / Unsplash
Seven Masked Men, Two Trucks, 30,000 Bottles—Antinori Loses €5m of Solaia and Tignanello
On the night of October 3, at least seven masked men disabled the alarms at Marchesi Antinori's warehouse near Cortona, loaded about 30,000 bottles of 2023 Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso onto two trucks with the company's own forklifts, and drove off with wine worth an estimated €5 million. Antinori called it Italy's largest wine theft on record. It follows a July theft at Banfi, and Antinori has warned buyers to be wary of offers outside its official channels.
The U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear Ohio's appeal. Photo: Senate Democrats, CC BY 2.0
Supreme Court Turns Ohio Away—Its Ban on Out-of-State Wine Shops Shipping to Ohioans Stays Struck Down
On October 13 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Ohio's appeal in Block v. Canepa, leaving standing a Sixth Circuit ruling that struck down the state's ban on out-of-state wine shops shipping to Ohio consumers. It is not a nationwide ruling, and the door is not open yet: the district court must now choose the remedy "that adheres most closely to the intent of the Ohio legislature without violating the Constitution." How far Ohio opens is still to be decided.
THE PICK
RAVENTÓS I BLANC BLANC DE BLANCS 2024
In November 2012 the Raventós family walked out of the DO Cava. The following spring Pepe Raventós told Decanter that after 150 years, Cava had become "a solely volume-oriented DO with no geographical distinction in terms of climate and soils." His answer was a stricter regional name of the family's own, Conca del Riu Anoia, proposed with rules Cava did not ask for: organically certified vines at least ten years old, and lees aging raised from nine months to 18.
This bottle is the way into that argument, and it keeps both rules: Xarel·lo-led, certified organic, and rested 18 months on its lees before disgorgement. Its vines answer to the same EU organic rulebook as the Olgaberg in this week's Feature. Open it with oysters, or anything salty.
Until next Thursday,
Adrian, TERROIR