For seven years I worked buying and selling organic wines. It was a job I loved; the people I worked for were an inspiration; the winemakers were — mostly — delightful and I enjoyed the challenge of tackling people’s misconceptions and often ill-informed ideas about organic wines.

I was invariably greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm or snorting cynicism. Either way, it was never dull. I particularly remember a keenly contested argument with a gentleman who refused to back down when I told him that organic wines were not — as he fervently claimed — “rubbish made from carrots”.

What a distance we have come since then. The pioneering efforts of UK importers, Vintage Roots and Vinceremos cannot be ignored and I doubt whether in their early days (almost 30 years ago) they would have believed that organic wines would be as widely drunk and accepted as they are today.

Their efforts have been helped by the shift of some of the world’s largest wine companies towards certified organic winemaking which has enhanced the image of these once all-too-easily dismissed wines.

I remember very clearly the day that our first samples arrived from Argentina’s Familia Zuccardi. This was a company with some 40 years of winemaking history and one of Argentina’s biggest and most successful wine export companies.

Its wine brands were well-established and they had a decent presence in some of the UK’s best-known wine outlets.

Yet, there they were, selling their new range of wines to a comparatively humble organic wine merchant and I found the tables dramatically turned.

Rather than being excited, I was sceptical. Was this just some marketing ploy by a major player to increase sales? Were they truly committed to organic viticulture or were they simply towing a ride on the green bandwagon?

As was the norm, we tasted all the wines blind amongst a host of other offerings from South America and the wines showed fantastically well. We loved them.

Many estates claim to follow organic principles but choose not to have their vineyards certified. I can understand this. It is expensive to be certified and you have to be happy to be regularly inspected.

If the vineyard is struck by disease you cannot whip out a bottle of the quick-fix chemical solution and this can lead to substantial crop loses and devastation both in the vineyard and at the bank.

Zuccardi did the commercially sensible thing by starting their certification process on a comparatively small scale back in 1998. The bulk of their vineyards continued to be conventionally maintained.

This modest beginning has steadily grown and now a third of the vineyards are managed the green way, with natural fertilisers and manual weed control.

The Bonarda/Sangiovese blend that is included in this week’s case is one of my long-term favourites. It is fruit-forward (think black cherry and plum) and fresh and extremely versatile. Even better, there is not a sniff of carrot to be found . . .

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