Question: Why are the chances of buying a bottle of certified organic wine almost as slim as finding a low-calorie takeaway hamburger?

Answer: Because the twin goals of growing tasty grapes and having them organically certified haven’t met face to face very often. Until now.

Until the mid-1990s, organic certification in New Zealand was led solely by BioGro, whose rules and regulations were better suited to horticulture than viticulture.

Now that reducing our carbon footprint has become the hottest thing to do, Kiwi wineries are getting serious about being green.

Late last year, the New Zealand wine industry adopted a sustainability policy that will see all the country’s grapes and wines produced under independently audited sustainability schemes by 2012.

It's as radical as it sounds.

Since the goal was put in place in 2007, there has been a rapid rise in membership of Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand (SWNZ), the body that monitors reduction in the use of pesticides, herbicides and other pollutants in wine production.

Only 71 of the 565 wineries in New Zealand are currently members, but they represent 70 per cent of all Kiwi wine produced each year. Seventy per cent of the country’s vineyards also belong.

Membership means these growers and winemakers are moving towards organic or biodynamic certification by 2012.

And if they’re not?

They won’t be able to cash in on that all-important sales tool: marketing.

New Zealand wineries and vineyards need to belong to New Zealand Winegrowers to benefit from the international marketing that the industry’s official body organises.

“We can’t make them belong, but if they don’t, our stipulation is they will not be part of any of the annual joint marketing initiatives we undertake, which is one of our main roles,” explains New Zealand Winegrowers' chief executive officer Philip Gregan.

“We can’t assist with costs to every one of nearly 600 wineries, but we are making sure that we minimise the costs for small vineyards and wineries going down this path. We can’t subsidise them because at the end of the day the biggest cost is being independently audited and that’s what has to happen.”

Last year a New Zealand winery won the first Planet Earth Sustainability Trophy at the world’s biggest wine competition, the London-based International Wine Challenge.

More than 9000 wines from around the world entered the competition, and Bald Hills Vineyard in Central Otago, New Zealand, won the inaugural trophy for its Bald Hills Pinot Noir 2005.

“Our sustainability was driven from the vineyard, where three years ago we introduced inter-row cultivation and a cover crop program, from which we have grown a bulk green crop and turned this back into the soil; this has enabled improved organic matter, water withholding capacity and general soil structure,” says Dr Blair Hunt, co-owner of Bald Hills Vineyard with his wife, Estelle.

The catchcry at Amisfield Winery in Central Otago is similar.

“We lease our land from our grandchildren and we want this farm to be [left] in better condition...than when we took it on,” says Amisfield winemaker Jeff Sinnott.

When the second Amisfield winery opened at Lowburn in 2006, a wetland was installed.

“The idea came from an old irrigation dam we had on the land, which is topped up from a stream that runs out of a mountain. We could see there was a range of species that survived in both the extremes of winter and summer, so we thought native species that adapted to this environment would help to ameliorate waste water,” Sinnott explains.

“In Central Otago, water is a fairly scarce commodity, so the idea of preserving and maintaining this precious resource was to make sure the outputs from the winery were as neutral as possible,” he adds.

How toxic is winery waste water?

“Wineries do not use a lot of chemicals. In the bad old days we used chlorine and caustic soda but these days we’re using soft cleaning agents, such as citric acid. We’ve put the Janola bottle back on the shelf and we’ve picked up a bottle of vinegar, so to speak. These days we use steam, hot water and ozone to clean things out. And if we have to sterilise everything we use peroxide (H2O2),” Sinnott says.

These treatments break down in water, and the wetland doubles as a bio-indicator of winery waste and a home for native birds such as paradise ducks, guinea fowl and frogs.

New Zealand’s first carbon-zero winery is Grove Mill, which is aiming to make its home vineyard organically certified with BioGro New Zealand.

The winery was carbon-zero accredited in September 2006.

Sustainable development manager Roger Kerrison says Grove Mill Winery became carbon-zero accredited by becoming part of Landcare Research’s CarboNZero program.

“We purchase carbon credits from an accredited program that Landcare Research is running. A credit is the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide, measured via the Kyoto Protocol. The credits that Grove Mill is purchasing are all farm based," says Kerrison.

Marginal farming land is allowed to seed into native bush, the land is put into trust and the farmer then gets the equivalent of CO2 that the bush has stored to sell as carbon credits.

Then there is biodynamics, founded by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), whereby a farm, vineyard or garden is treated as a holistic, self-contained entity. Demeter is the official biodynamic certification.

North Canterbury winemaker Mike Weersing says it was the taste of wine that first led him down the biodynamic path.

“When I was working in France, I kept tasting wines from wineries that had gone down the biodynamic road, and time after time they simply tasted better than other wines,” he says.

“I first went to biodynamics out of a quality perspective, to make the best wine from the best grapes, but as I started to work that way I realised there are other benefits, namely the health of the plant, and the life and health of the soil,” Weersing adds.

It's now 13 years since SWNZ was formed. When it started in 1995, it was called Integrated Winegrape Production (IWP) and there was no end goal in mind.

How times have changed.

The decree that New Zealand Winegrowers issued last year – to have all Kiwi wineries and vineyards sustainably accredited by 2012 – will ensure that words like organic, biodynamic, Demeter and even the acronym SWNZ no longer need explanation.

Watch this space.