What 1,200 Wines Taught Us About Responsible Farming
 
In the back of my mind there’s a space that frequently contemplates how to take the Fearrington Wine Program to another level, and one of the thoughts I’ve had for a while is what would it take to have every wine on the list be either organic, or biodynamic, or sustainably or regeneratively farmed or something of that ilk?
From where I sit as a wine director, it doesn’t feel like I can have a real effect on the world’s greater good, but supporting producers that strive to make healthy, responsible products is certainly one way wine professionals (and consumers) can carry ourselves more responsibly.
Researching ALL of our selections though, with nearly 1,200 bottle choices on the restaurant wine list, would be extremely daunting, confounded by the very many and murky definitions of various forms of responsible winemaking and their associated certifications. So the whole idea has been deep in the to do list for quite some time.
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Enter ChatGPT and the power of AI. After some tweaking of the wine list spreadsheet requested by the program, I put it to task on seeing how close we were to having a wine list of all conscientiously farmed products. Several hours of back and forth ensued, with me approving several looser definitions of those terms. There are many producers that practice responsible farming because it makes better wine, but they don’t bother with getting certifications or trying to market their product in that way. There are many definitions in other countries that are more or less stringent than others.
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Several times I corrected the AI on including particular producers that I know are following sustainable practices, and it would either research deeper or accept my inclusion at face value. By the end of the exercise, I had the answer – 100% of the wines on the Fearrington House wine list are from producers following some form of modern conscientious farming, be it organic, sustainable, biodynamic, regenerative, or often several of those at once.
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ChatGPT was very complimentary at this point, saying that this level of standard on a wine list of this size was a profound achievement, but I am not that surprised for two reasons.
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1) Good winemakers are farmers first. They take care of their land not for marketing reasons or recent health trends, but because better land makes better wine, and real people make real products that they can believe in.
2) I am the latest in a long lineage of intelligently trained and thoughtful Fearrington Wine Directors and we’ve all been making purchasing decisions that are inherently (or frequently purposefully) supporting responsible wineries.
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So there you have it, one more reason to support what Fearrington has to offer. The wine list follows responsible philosophies similar to everything else on our property, which also aligns with the values of the Relais & Châteaux network. I thought it could take months or years of new purchasing if we were to commit to this standard, but we are already there.
From memorable wine dinners at The Fearrington House Restaurant to classes on The Garden House and free weekly wine tastings at Galloway's Wine & Beer Bar, there's always something to delight your taste buds.
