This is a very brief introduction to a vast subject, prepared from a speech given to Waitrose Wine Advisers at the London Wine Trade Fair on May 22nd 2008. It is divided into two sections, crudely called Macro and Micro.

Macro

12 billion years ago – in other words 12,000 times one million years ago – the Universe came into being.

4.54 billion years ago, two-thirds of the way through the life of the universe so far, our Earth was born. And for roughly quarter of its history it was lifeless, in part because of a toxic atmosphere. Four billion years ago, there was one hundred times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today, and as a consequence the temperature of the earth’s surface was close to boiling point, even though the sun was 25% less luminous than it now is.

Atmosphere, in other words, matters. The stuff we’re all inhaling now, the breathable atmosphere or modern atmosphere, began to form about 2.7 billion years ago.

It’s made of two gases, chiefly. Some 78% is nitrogen. Around 21% is oxygen. There’s also just under 1% of argon. What we call greenhouse gases are less than 0.05% of the atmosphere.

The molecular structure of these gases, though, gives them the ability to trap heat. That’s good news for us. Because of them, the average temperature on the earth’s surface today is 14°C. Without them, it would be -20°C.

Those levels are not constant, of course. They’ve risen and fallen thoughout the earth’s history, as has the percentage of oxygen in the breathable atmosphere.

710 million years ago, for example, the level of greenhouse gases was so low that ice sheets reached the equator. The blue planet was a white planet. Even during the last glaciation, a mere 20,000 years ago, one-third of the earth’s surface was iced up.

300 million years ago, by contrast, the atmosphere was so rich in oxygen that millipedes grew to two meters long, there were cockroaches bigger than your cat, and dragonflies with a wingspan of 1 metre.

The earth has experienced global warming many times, and to a far greater degree than we have at present. About 250 million years ago, the Siberian Trap volcanoes released billions of tons of CO2 and SO2 into the atmosphere, and later methane. Something similar happened during the Eocene hot period about 55 million years ago, possibly caused by a submarine explosion in the Norwegian sea or by meteorite impact in Siberia.

Let’s compare greenhouse gas levels now with some of those points in the past. During the most recent ice ages, CO2 in the atmosphere was about 160 ppm. In 1800, after humans had been playing with fire for a few thousand years and within the context of our present inter-glacial, it got up to 280 ppm. It was reported that the level had passed 380 ppm in March 2006 — for the first time in 30 million years. It’s now rising by around 2.4 ppm every year. James Lovelock predicts that it will reach 500 ppm in 40 years.

When the Siberian Traps exploded, though, CO2 levels quickly reached 2000 ppm or more, as they did in the Eocene hot period. On both occasions, the initial warming caused by CO2 in the atmosphere eventually caused methane release from the sea bed, intensifying the warming further. Average temperature levels rose by 10°C or more on both occasions.

Eventually, the earth recovered. Whatever we do to it, it will recover again. There’s no need to ‘save the planet’, as the slogan goes, since the planet will save itself.

That problem is that rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels bring about what are drily called extinction episodes. And the fossil record is unequivocal about these. When greenhouse gases rise as rapidly as they are at present, whether the cause be volcanoes and undersea explosions or jumbo jets and Chelsea tractors, food chains break … and things die. Especially larger life forms, like your and me. In essence, pumping carbon at our present rate will greatly hasten our own extinction. The proof is in the rocks. Following the Siberian Trap explosions, 95% of all life on earth ceased. We are, in fact, well into a catastrophic extinction episode right now, with between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife lost since 1970, according to the Zoological Society of London, and with a further one per cent of species being lost every year. Of known species, that is; given that we do not yet know all the species with which we share the planet, that number may be higher.

At this macro level, wine is just a small part of a very complicated equation, but the fight needs to be fought here as elsewhere. Vineyards draw down CO2, but fermentation produces it. Long-distance transport of a heavy liquid like wine is undesirable, especially when it has been bottled in high-energy and weighty glass containers [see ‘the glass villain’ section of previous blog entry]. The ethical British consumer should seek out recyclable Tetrapaks of Muscadet. We need to start calculating carbon footprints for wines, and producers need to endeavour to offset or, better still, reduce those with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality. Having the wine world fly annually to London for a Trade Fair is obviously a bad idea, as is any wine tourism other than the most local. A low-carbon life, alas, can seem a rather dour one, but when the alternative is extinction …

Micro

Wine is agriculture; human life depends on agriculture; and agriculture depends on soil. What is soil? According to David Montgomery, it “is the interface between the rock that makes up our planet and the plants and animals that live off sunlight and nutrients leached out of rocks.”

Soil is a combination of minerals, organic matter and microscopic life forms. The life of all land-dwelling creatures depends on soil — humans, naturally, included.

Soil is no more static than anything else in life. It is continually being produced and destroyed. At present, we are sliding rapidly into deficit. 24 billion tons of soil are lost annually worldwide. Yet this comes at a time when the human loading on that soil is soaring. At the time of the last Ice Age, there were 4 million humans on earth. By 1900, the earth’s human population was a little over 1 billion. It had risen to 3 billion by 1961, at which point humanity was using half the total resources the earth could sustainably provide. By 1986, the earth’s human population was 5 billion, and humanity was using all the resources the earth could sustainably provide. By 2001, there were 6 billion of us, and we were running a 20% sustainability deficit. The population is still rising, and the deficit is growing.

There is no more important component of that deficit than soil. If we squander our soil, we squander our future. It is as precious to us as the air we breathe.

Nothing about soil is more important than the life it contains since the soil is, quite literally, made by that life. There are more micro-organisms in a single pound of earth than there are humans on our over-burdened planet. No single creature is more important to you and I and every other human being than the earthworm. As Charles Darwin showed, earthworms both make soil – by digesting decaying vegetable matter and rock itself – and plough soil, by passing it through their bodies. The topsoil in fields left fallow for a couple of hundred years consists entirely of worm excrement mixed with rock fragments. In an acre of land, worms will bring up between ten and twenty tons of earth every year. “All the vegetable mould over the whole country,” wrote Darwin, “has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canal of worms.”

Now, viticulture is, statistically, a relatively small agricultural sector. Via fine wine, though, viticulture fights above its weight. A great bottle of Bordeaux or Burgundy is perhaps the most revered agricultural product in the world. No crop in any field is as widely photographed as the Chardonnay vines growing in Montrachet, or the Pinot vines growing in Romanee-Conti. So fine-wine viticulture is a symbolic locomotive for all agriculture. Wherever qualititive best practice is desired, farmers will look to wine-growers.

I have been wandering around vineyards since 1988, and nothing has given me more pleasure than to see the improvements in viticulture since then. A poorly tended, herbicide-drenched, heavily compacted vineyard makes me quite literally feel sick. It’s like looking at the aftermath of a car crash. You can see the sterility in the soil and the biological imbalances in the unhappy plants; you can hear the ominous silence. It is a much rarer sight now than it was in 1988 – thanks to growing environmental awareness among wine-growers. I am very happy about this. Even the conventional now try to be what’s called in France ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’, while the progressive vanguard have made huge advances via organics and biodynamics. There are all sorts of reasons why this is a good thing, including wine quality, but if I had to name one alone, it would be because vineyards cultivated organically or biodynamically have more micro-organisms and earthworms than those cultivated with a heavy reliance on chemical inputs. Green approaches to viticulture are good for the soil, and what’s good for the soil is good for the planet and for such human future as we may have left to us.

The wine is often better, the soil is always healthier – and where winegrowers lead, cereal farmers, fruit growers and forest owners will eventually follow. On its own, green wine won’t save humanity – but on its own, nothing will save humanity. What’s needed are a million tiny actions which take us in the right direction rather than encouraging us to carry on in the wrong direction. Green wine is one of those steps forward.

Further reading

Much of the detail in this speech is taken from three books, all of which I recommend strongly:

• The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery (hardback ISBN 0-713-99921-7, paperback ISBN 0-713-99930-6)
• The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (ISBN 0-713-99914-4)
• Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization by David R.Montgomery (ISBN 0-520-24870-8)