Is the Cost of Organic or Biodynamic Certification Worth It?
Let me clear something up right away: it does not cost a lot to get certified organic or biodynamic.
I’ve heard so many retailers and producers excuse the lack of certification in their wine inventories because of the exorbitant cost of certification, and that’s just absolutely not true.
Retailers, please stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why you carry wines produced from dubious farming. Producers, please stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why you don’t get certified. You’re spreading misinformation and doing a disservice to everyone involved.
I know much of this spreading of misinformation is just ignorance about the certification process. And it’s easy to speak confidently about something you don’t actually know about, because often, you don’t know what you don’t know.
But it is an immediate red flag for me when someone uses the cost of certification as an excuse. Because when someone assures me that their wines are farmed really well but the cost of certification is prohibitive and that’s why they have wines from non-certified vineyards, what I hear is a sales pitch.
Because I know the cost of certification is not prohibitive, I begin to wonder what else this salesperson either doesn’t know about the wine or is possibly even concealing from me.
Am I saying that every producer needs to go out and get certified, and that every retailer should only carry certified wines? No, not at all. Maybe that would be great, but all I’m saying is – don’t use the cost of certification as the excuse for why you aren’t certified or don’t carry certified wines.
Because… bottom line… getting certified organic or biodynamic doesn’t actually cost that much.
And some of that very reasonable cost is actually reimbursed by the US government.
Now, with that fundamental point made, let’s get into all the nitty gritty.
Because here’s the unfortunate next point in answering whether the cost of certification is worth it: it’s complicated and it depends.
Here’s something that a lot of people, even seasoned professionals in the wine industry, don’t realize:
You cannot say the phrase “Made With Organic Grapes” on your wine label even if your wine is made from 100% certified organic grapes… if your winery isn’t also certified in addition to the vineyard.
That’s right, there are two certifications - one for the vineyard and one for the winery. Without both certifications you cannot make the claim on your label that your wine was Made With Organic Grapes, even if it was. Nor can you use the term “Organic Wine” on your labels. Labeling restrictions under Biodynamic certification through Demeter are very similar.
Why is this? Well, I don’t know for sure (see how I admitted ignorance there? That’s okay, you can do that too.). But if I had to speculate, I’d guess it’s because in wineries there can be lots of mixing and blending of ingredients and wine. You could crush two tons of certified organically grown grapes and one ton of conventionally farmed grapes, and then blend them together and technically say your wine was “Made with Organic Grapes” – in fine print, 66 percent. So having the winery certified in addition to the vineyard probably adds another necessary layer of accountability in the organic claims made on wine labels.
You can see how this is problematic for someone who shares winery space or uses a custom crush arrangement to make their wines. If you don’t control your production facility, it may be impossible to get your winery certified because it would involve having the ownership and all tenant wineries get on board to follow the organic or biodynamic guidelines.
So if only your vineyard is certified, what can you say?
Well, Not much. And what you can say might cause a problem for some producers. Because the only organic claim you can make if only your vineyards are certified organic, is to give a complete ingredients list and list “organic grapes” as one of your ingredients.
I say this could cause a problem for some producers because it can look pretty strange to list “organic grapes” in an ingredients list that includes other common conventional winemaking ingredients like “diammonium phosphate” or “gelatin” or “Mega Purple” or “velcorin” or any number of the over 60 ingredients allowed to be added to wine during winemaking.
So if transparency scares you, you may not like the idea that the only way you get to tout your organic farming is in an ingredients list. And that may be a deterrent to you wanting to get certified at any cost. Why go through any amount of hassle that includes even a small fee if your label doesn’t get a boost?
That’s a great question actually. I would argue that there are many advantages to only certifying your vineyard, even if you have no intention of mentioning it on your labels. Because you can mention it pretty much anywhere else… like on your website & social media, in emails, in press releases, on marketing materials, etc.
Now, what is the actual cost of certification? Well, it depends.
Let’s talk first only about certifying your vineyard, and we’ll address certifying your winery later.
It will cost more the larger your vineyard because there is licensing fee based on your production (it’s a tiered fee for organic, and a half a percent of gross sales for biodynamic). But while this means greater costs for larger vineyards, you’d have the benefit of scale. So while your total cost will be more, your cost per acre will be significantly less than a smaller vineyard. I’ll break that down in a minute.
Keep in mind that to get certified for the first time takes three years. Even if you have been farming better than organically for 50 years, the certifying body doesn’t know this and has no records of it, so they need to do annual inspections to create this farming audit that shows you are indeed farming wonderfully, and that you’ve done it for a sufficient amount of time – three years – that your land is a viable organic farm, worthy of certification.
There are costs during these three years, because you’ll have paid an application fee and you’ll cover the costs of the CCOF or Demeter inspector’s time and travel expenses to come inspect your vineyard. But while you are paying these first three years you still aren’t certified and can’t make any organic or biodynamic claims.
In other words, we might look at these first three years as a single fee for the cost of getting certified, even though it will be in a series of smaller payments spread over that time.
And it’s different for Organic vs Biodynamic certification. For organic there are only two inspections in the first 3 years, and for biodynamic there are three inspections.
Further, once you get certified, the costs will depend not only on the size of your vineyard, but also on how much it produces and how much you sell your grapes for, or what they would cost if you sold them.
So let’s put this in a real life circumstance.
Let’s say you have a 20 acre vineyard producing an average of 3 tons per acre and that the market rate for your grapes is $3,000 per ton. That’s a gross production value of $180,000.
Now, I’m going to present a worst case cost scenario, so that we can see the absolute most it will cost:
Inspections cost an average of $500-1,000, and there’s one of those per year in Demeter. So let’s say $3000 for the first three years. The first-time application fee is $325 for CCOF and $350 for Demeter. And in your third year you’ll begin paying a renewal fee and inspection deposit to Demeter of $420 plus a production fee of $900. For organic there’s no renewal fee and the production fee is only $710.
So a 3 year certification process will cost you, at the very most, $4,035 for organic or $4,670 for biodynamic. That’s around $1,500 per year at worst. You’ll be fully certified at this point, and the truth is that the cost will likely be less. Inspections average less than $750 in a vast majority of cases, bringing the real cost of certification down below $1,200 per year for the first 3 years.
After getting certified your annual cost will just be the annual inspection plus the licensing and renewal fees. So your annual cost to have an organically or biodynamically certified 20 acre vineyard will stay at around $1,500 per year or less.
So there you have it. For less than $1,500 per year, you can have a certified organic or biodynamic vineyard. I would definitely not call that an exorbitant cost. And I hope you can see why I really want people to stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why someone isn’t certified.
One important caveat here is that while Demeter is a national certification, CCOF is just for California, and fees and processes may vary slightly depending on the organic certifying organization in your state.
But, don’t forget, through the Farm Bill the US government will reimburse you for a portion of the cost of organic certification… making it actually cost even less.
But it’s important to note that even if you’re farming 7 acres instead of 20, this cost won’t change that much. Because a majority of the cost is that inspection, and that cost will not change a lot unless the inspector is dealing with a very large vineyard spread over multiple blocks at distance from each other.
But that means that a 7 acre vineyard could pay over $200/acre for certification each year, while a 20 acre vineyard would pay only $75/acre.
And maybe that makes a difference. I mean for that extra $125 per acre I can afford a lot more cover crop seeds, compost and even some extra labor to help spread them, and those are vitally important expenses in an organic vineyard.
Or, for example, I could take that $1,500 annual expense for certification and use it instead to rent sheep to run through my vineyard each spring for a month to do all the wonderful sheepy things that sheep do for an ecosystem. (Although, honestly, it’s going to cost you more than $1,500 to rent sheep for your vineyard, but you see what I’m getting at.)
Now that doesn’t mean that the cost of certification is a deterrent, it just means you might have different priorities about where to put your money. That’s a very different thing.
Whether or not you choose to prioritize the use of a very modest amount of money for certification or not does not mean that the cost is prohibitive.
Ok, now, don’t forget that even if you choose to prioritize certification for your vineyard, you still haven’t certified your winery yet.
I’m not going to go into as much detail about certifying your winery, but suffice it to say that it will cost approximately the same as certifying your vineyard. So take that $1,500 and double it.
If you want to say “Organic Wine” or “Made With Organic Grapes” or “Biodynamic Wine” on your label, it’ll cost you, roughly, $3,000 per year (a bit more for Biodynamic, and again depending on your production value).
Now this still couldn’t be classified as exorbitant by any stretch, I don’t think, but it is 100% more than just certifying your vineyard. And certifying your winery may put limitations on your operations that you don’t want. If your winemaking skews more conventional, for example, you may find your choice of yeasts to be more limited.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a lot of interest in the additional cost of certifying my winery, and it would be currently impossible for us since we make wine for Centralas as a tenant winery in a shared production facility. Also, we already list all ingredients added during winemaking on our Centralas labels, and my reason for being in wine at all is because of the farming. If I can look on your winery’s website and see that you make wine from certified organic or biodynamic vineyards, I don’t really care at all what you put on your labels.
But you can see how the question of whether the cost of certification is worth it becomes very personal in the answering. If the main way that Centralas wines were sold was in a grocery store, and we had very little personal interaction with the folks who drink our wine, being able to say “Made With Organic Grapes” on the label might be really important to us.
So some of the questions you might want to ask would be:
What kinds of wine drinkers are you trying to sell your wines to?
What is your dominant form of messaging with those wine drinkers?
Do you want to list ingredients?
Is there an “organic premium” that comes from certification when selling wine to your demographic?
There are a lot of ways to evaluate certification.
I will say this, certification makes communicating with customers a lot simpler. Trying to explain good farming takes too long for most sales interactions, whether in print or in person. Brevity is one of your best sales tools, and “Certified organic” or “Certified biodynamic” is about as brief as you can be when trying to highlight the values and care that you put into your approach to winemaking.
It’s also a signal of accountability. I am a skeptic, so when someone says “farmed organically but not certified” my gut reaction is “they must cheat.” I immediately assume that they use chemical fertilizers, or they think that not using Round-up means they’re farming organically. Because I’ve encountered both of those examples too many times to count at this point. (By the way, if you are doing either of those things, you aren’t organic. Period.) If you’re certified, I will still want to know the details of your farming, but my skepticism won’t be immediately triggered.
Now, is certification a hassle, despite its low cost? That is, is it worth the time and energy to complete the paperwork and coordinate an annual inspection, etc? First of all, it’s really not that much extra paperwork.
The hardest and most time consuming part of being certified organic is farming organically. The paperwork of certification may not be your favorite thing, but it’s really not that much. And, the good folks at CCOF and Demeter are very good about answering questions and providing guidance. I got a very thorough and helpful email response to my questions within 24 hours. Really, if you’re going to use the hassle of certification as an excuse, you’re probably just looking for excuses.
On the other hand, are there any legitimate ecological reasons why you might not want to get certified organic or biodynamic?
That may seem like a strange question, but I can imagine a scenario in which keeping your organic certification might cause you to farm in a more harmful way, debatably.
For instance, this past year of 2021 the winegrowers on the East Coast of the US had to deal with an average of 5 out of 7 days of rain all summer. To be organic, that would mean spraying every 3-4 days to prevent fungal buildup, or spraying less, but taking a big risk of crop loss. In a larger vineyard, that would mean gallons and gallons of diesel fuel burnt, powering dozens of tractor passes causing serious compaction in muddy soil, and lots of stuff being put into the environment, even if it was organically allowed.
If you spray a systemic chemical fungicide, you’ll lose your certification. But from an ecological perspective, would it be worse to spray a systemic chemical fungicide once every 14 days? What if you had to do this only once every 5 years, and the rest of the time you could farm perfectly organically? I don’t think it would make sense to lose your certification every 5 years and start the process over again the following year, but you might make the argument that you are farming more responsibly than if you stayed within the limits of organic practices to keep your certification.
I honestly don’t have the answer to these questions, Although I might make the joke that this could be the universe’s way of telling us we shouldn’t be growing vinifera in climates where it can’t thrive.
The point is, evaluating what is the best farming for you can be very complicated and involve some very difficult decision making. And getting certified organic or biodynamic can further complicate those decisions.
Having said that, if you don’t at least aspire to farm organically at this point in history, you really aren’t paying attention… or you’re being lied to.
In the vast majority of cases, especially in the West and Southwest US, I would argue, getting certified organic and/or biodynamic is a smart choice, and a wise investment of $1,500 per year.
And I think it’s fair to be skeptical as a wine buyer when you hear organic claims without certification.
Finally, and most importantly, I hope everyone can see that the cost of organic or biodynamic certification is extremely reasonable, it’s partially government subsidized, and we should now and forevermore never use the cost as an excuse for a lack of certification.
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You can find a breakdown of fees for both Demeter and CCOF on their websites at CCOF.org or Demeter-usa.org.
Happy farming, and happy drinking!