There are moments in early spring when the year seems to show its hand too soon. The light is still gentle, winter has not entirely loosened its grip, and yet the vines have already begun to stir. On such a morning, the first buds of the Rondo and Solaris were swelling conspicuously — a full month too early — and after a few rows of successful pruning, the mind begins to move with its own rhythm. Mine drifted, as it often does, towards the widening gap between what is happening before our eyes and what is happening on our screens.
Climate increasingly seems to play upon our fear of change. Three weeks earlier than last year: what will that mean by harvest time? More Asian hornets, perhaps, and more common wasps too. These are the small, private apocalypses of the grower, of which the wider public still appears barely conscious. Meanwhile, world politics arrive minute by minute on our phones, while reality continues its quiet work in the field. We sit peering through the window with virtual reality headsets strapped to our faces, while behind us an elephant waits patiently in the room.
My thoughts, suspended between the virtual theatre of geopolitics and the physical reality of a changing climate, quickly return to the reality of my own undertaking at Lijsternest. Why am I doing this at all? What drives me to make life so persistently difficult for myself? I have always taken outsized risks, both in the vineyard and on the commercial front. How does one explain to the world that one offers a high-end product at a higher price, while its quality nonetheless retains a certain volatility — in some years, quite literally so?
For some, the wines of Lijsternest will fail to meet expectations of stability and perfection as defined by the classical appellation system. For others, they are an expression of freedom: surprising, alive, and reflective of an imperfect beauty — what the Japanese call wabi-sabi.
Quality, then, can be understood in very different ways, depending on the values and frames of reference a consumer brings with them. Such positions resist purely rational treatment because they are so deeply shaped by culture, feeling and temperament. For one person, the highest culinary experience is a Michelin-starred dining room serving flawless traditional dishes. For another, it lies in a surprising world cuisine. For yet another, there must be something unruly in it, something disobedient, something that resists polish.
And yet something else has begun to take shape in my own practice: the sense that there may indeed be such a thing as a quantifiable form of quality.
A wine can, of course, be measured against the criteria of an appellation rulebook, and that too is perfectly quantifiable. But it remains, in the end, the reflection of a convention drafted by human beings: the decision, for instance, to permit only a handful of grape varieties. Whether those varieties are planted or not makes, in itself, no difference whatsoever to the environment within that appellation. The matter changes, however, when one begins to ask whether those chosen varieties are actually robust enough to fend for themselves in nature, and whether they require crop protection products in order to survive at all.
At that point we are no longer dealing with a cultural convention, but with a biological reality.
And we human beings have always found biological reality rather difficult to accept. We are capable even of inventing entire belief systems in order to evade it when it becomes too burdensome. There are still people who prefer to believe the Earth is flat, or that oil is inexhaustible, or that the climate is not warming. These are all constructions of the mind — structures that may offer certainty and reassurance in the short term, but which lead, over time, to profound structural damage.
The wine world is hardly an exception when it comes to erecting such constructions: narratives that appeal less to biological reality than to vague and romantic sentiments about quality. Spend any time wandering through the websites of wine estates and one could almost believe they are all ecologists. Some more glossy than others, certainly, but all united by one claim: that they make wine with respect for nature, while carefully concealing just how polluting the industry remains for the environment in which it operates.
I have always found it deeply peculiar that an industry based on one of the most enduring perennial plants should require such an arsenal of interventions simply to keep its primary capital — its vineyards — alive. It sells a product wrapped in beauty and story, while the making of that product unfolds within something resembling an organised ecological disaster. It remains a mystery to me how successfully the consumer’s attention is diverted from the production side of the equation, so that almost no truly critical questions are asked.
I can already hear the objection: what of all the organic and biodynamic labels? Surely they draw attention to these matters.
But is no one aware that these organic growers often carry out even more mechanical soil disturbance in their war against weeds, while in their struggle against fungal disease they merely spray different substances — often less efficient, and not necessarily less ecotoxic? As long as such growers fail to understand that genetic resistance and soil health are fundamental to healthy production, those labels in themselves mean rather little.
When I look at Belgian viticulture, I can only conclude that this new sector has squandered a historic opportunity. After 2000, we began building an entirely new wine region within a framework in which almost everything was still possible. My simple mind would have assumed this was the perfect moment to create something original, something ecologically more responsible. In reality, the collective decision was to imitate Champagne and Burgundy.
I struggle to see the point.
We have knowingly enrolled ourselves in the masterclass on the swan song of traditional viticulture. In the future, we will be competing against major regions making the same product far more efficiently and far more cheaply, while in the meantime organising an ecological calamity of our own.
We could quite easily have brought a truly distinct product to market, but that would have required the courage to step away from traditional Vitis vinifera. What escapes me entirely is why it is so difficult to choose the ecological path. Everyone speaks the language of ecology; everyone claims allegiance to it. Yet when a real decision must be made, the inevitable “yes, but…” appears, and we retreat to the traditional option.
The result is an industry that facilitates soil erosion and the large-scale destruction of fungi across the rural landscape. Both phenomena are ominous for the future, and they are happening in plain sight, every time the media brings us images of flood or drought. There will always be a connection between erosion, the disappearance of soil fungi, and those streams of brown water tearing through the land.
And so, almost inevitably, one arrives at the question of externalities: the costs an industry offloads onto the wider community. The profoundly polluting aspects of our industry are socialised, while its image and profits remain resolutely privatised.
To my mind, quality ought to be weighed against the extent to which an industry transfers its burdens onto society at large. An industry that passes the greater part of its problems on to the public should not, in my view, be entitled to wear any badge of quality.
Over the course of fifteen years at Lijsternest, we have watched our surroundings evolve towards greater biodiversity, better water retention, and a landscape that is both safer and more pleasant for local residents. No sprayer is ever seen here. Not a single patch of soil is left bare. Why should that be possible only here, while elsewhere colleagues are already having to fear that triazole leaching from vineyards may yet prove worse than what is seen in potato farming?
Whether one works conventionally in the cellar, or chooses instead to vinify unfiltered and without sulphites, matters rather less in this respect. There the consumer may choose according to preference, without the surrounding environment having to suffer for it. But the vineyard itself is inseparable from the public domain, inhabited not only by those who live nearby, but by voles, foxes and countless other forms of life. As winegrowers, we therefore carry an immense responsibility, because we help shape the future condition of that environment.
Nor should we forget the people who work in vineyards, and who therefore come into more intimate contact than anyone with whatever substances are used there. I do not know how matters stand in Belgium, but in France, Parkinson’s disease has by now been recognised as an occupational illness among vineyard workers.
What ultimately ends up in the glass is, to my mind, secondary to the influence the producer exerts on the environment around them.
The same light-mindedness governs many aspects of communication and packaging — indeed, some appellations even mandate certain forms. One cannot, for example, market a Champagne simply closed with a crown cap, even if it has spent all its time sur latte beneath precisely such a cap. Convictions and rules of this kind generate waste streams that should not be underestimated. One might reasonably argue that a bottle of Champagne sold under crown cap, without its accompanying aluminium foil, ought to cost more precisely because the damage it causes to the commons is smaller. The only party likely to object would be the supplier of those unnecessary embellishments. The Champagne itself would be identical, and it would arrive with the customer just as safely, just as soundly, and with exactly the same intrinsic quality.
At Lijsternest, we have made sure that our entire packaging flow leaves as small a footprint as possible, while still being warmly appreciated by our customers. We have chosen a bottle weighing only 440 grams, sealed simply with a stainless-steel crown cap bearing a cheerful print of our little bird. On it sits an ordinary paper label applied with wet glue — no waste rolls from self-adhesive labelling. We keep to a single label, which is perfectly feasible if one’s ingredients list remains short enough. The Schlegel bottle we use is so efficient in shape that we can work with the smallest possible box, which in turn allows more boxes to fit on a pallet. Those boxes are sealed with paper tape, so that the whole thing can simply be composted. Even our straw-bale building is, in essence, compostable. Because we work with nothing more complex than alkaline soap and hydrogen peroxide, our wastewater can be discharged, via a small biological treatment unit, directly into the neighbouring vineyards.
All these are examples of how one may lessen one’s negative impact by spending less rather than more. Less is more is a cliché whose deeper meaning very few people seem truly to grasp, but here in Otegem we stubbornly continue along our own path.
Quality does not lie in perfection when that perfection is linear and culminates in externalities. Quality lies in recyclability, in endurance, in the capacity to last.
We were raised in a world of straight lines and arrows. Everything moves from one point to another, and there the matter ends. Nature, by contrast, is cyclical in all things. Every element is endlessly recycled. Every biochemical pathway is a circle rather than a line. Every element oxidises, is reduced, and oxidises again.
The product of the highest quality, then, is not the one that most perfectly obeys a rulebook, but the one that makes it possible to continue doing the same thing for a hundred years without any significant input or output.
Lijsternest, at any rate, is one great self-recycling bioreactor: everything that enters it is, sooner or later, reabsorbed and put to use again.