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| Between a shale rock and a hard-sell place |
| 05 April 2006 by Leonie Joubert |
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| The pressures of an increasingly competitive free market system demand that each wine producing country somehow comes up with a unique selling point – or USP – to set it apart on the global wine shelf. But when that USP is the very natural vegetation which is shaved away every time a vineyard is put into pristine ground, a new kind of tension emerges. Science writer Leonie Joubert reads some of the subtext at the Wine Diversity Conference on the first day of Cape Wine 2006.
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It was a bold move, by any measure: today the Cape wine industry came clean in front of international trade delegates and media by discretely admitting its complicity in the destruction of some of the most unique botanical diversity on the planet.
Agriculture, along with accelerating urban sprawl and the spread of alien and invasive species, is one of the three leading threats to a botanical kingdom that fits into an area no larger than Portugal. And after 350 years of formal agriculture in the Cape, nearly 50% of fynbos has been ploughed up, along with 96% of renosterveld.
These two vegetation types make up much of the rare plant communities which constitute the Cape Floral Kingdom, 70% of whose species occur nowhere else on the planet. By way of comparison, the Cape Peninsula alone has more species of flowering plants than the whole of the United Kingdom.
This smorgasbord of variety has finally been recognised by the wine industry as the one thing which sets it apart in the global trade.The same ancient soils, mishmash of topography caused by the uplifting of the Cape Fold Mountains and the relative stability of the regional climate over millions of years caught species up in isolated pockets here and there where they have been allowed to trundle off down their own evolutionary paths until they become distinctive from all other species in the community.
Today, 90% of wine produced in the Cape comes from vineyards grown inside this floral kingdom and 80% of the Cape Floral Kingdom occurs on privately owned land. Conservationists have leapt forward with an initiative to encourage farmers not to turn these remaining remnant patches of vegetation over to the plough.
The Biodiversity & Wine Initiative seeks to draw wine growers into a cooperative agreement where farmers will set aside land for conservation, adopt environmentally sound farming and cellar practices and subject themselves to independent audits. In return, the industry markets itself and its diversity on the strength of its commitment to conservation. And let’s be fair, two years after the BWI was launched at Cape Wine 2004, tremendous inroads have been made in conserving privately owned natural veld.
Corridors of fynbos are being set aside or even rehabilitated in order to allow communities of pollinating insects, birds and mammals to move between 'islands' of vegetation and keep the gene pool healthy. In three years time, every drop of export wine from the Cape will be subject to an audited certification process which will guarantee that it has been produced in an ecologically responsible fashion. The tension remains, however. Because if a winemaker wishes to increase his capacity, he will either have to shop for grapes on someone else’s farm, or he’ll have to extend the footprint of his own vineyards.
During a comparative tasting of Sauvignon Blancs from Elgin – an area which is regarded as the heartland of fynbos because it has such great diversity, but also one of the cool climate hotspots for this variety – the winemakers trotted (and sometimes stumbled) out name after name of rare species which are found on their properties. However, 550 hectares of vineyards already straddle this high altitude valley and another 100 hectares are planned to go into the ground within the next year. While these new plantings are going into former apple orchards, the extent of this development is an indication of the growth trend in the industry. And even though national legislation makes it extremely difficult to convert natural protected vegetation to agricultural land, it can still happen.
There was plenty of photographic evidence during the Elgin presentation to suggest that not all the new vineyards were planted in land that had previously been used for other forms of commercial crops. Some of the higher-altitude vineyards had clearly been put into pristine fynbos.
So the question which remains is this: in the give-and-take negotiations between an expanding wine industry and a conservation movement which is the counterpoint to development, how much compromise by conservationists is acceptable? It’s a rhetorical question - I don’t expect anyone to answer it now. But it would be nice to know that while the politically correct conservation jargon is spilling over into wine-speak daily, the industry is not losing itself in the spirit of self-congratulation. In the world of extinctions, every half hectare of biodiversity lost is an half hectare too much.
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