We get asked "Do your products contain chemicals or do you hve organically grown grapes?"
However, this is a very tricky question. Strictly speaking, everything is a chemical compound – unless its a mixture, which is simply two or more chemical compounds mixed together. For instance, water is a chemical compound. Some chemical compounds are good for you such as our example of water. Other compounds are okay in moderation – iodized salt for example. Excess salt can lead to health problems – but if you get it just right you have some really nice mashed potatoes. Too little can even lead to a goitre!
In recent years, more and more people are looking for non-chemical natural fertilizers and organically grown foods. However, one common "natural fertilizer" is manure – which contains many chemicals such as ammonia.
With respect to wine, one chemical in wine is tannic acid, amoung many others. It gives red wines aging potential that people seek. So in the end, our products are a combination of naturally occuring chemicals.
Its difficult to say if a vineyard used insecticides or herbicides – except in regions such as France where "Appellation Controllee" laws dictate that no labratory produced products can be used. Of course, while this might be nice for various reasons, the downside is obvious – without protection from blights crops are at the mercy of nature. Example: the 19th century saw a couple blights which crippled potatoes in Ireland and nearly wiped out the vineyards in France. They even had to import plants from California to recover – the irony being of course that those plants had been exported from France in the first place.
All this is leading simply to the idea that the word "chemical" need not have negative connotations. Everything is made of various chemicals – the trick is simply which ones we want and which we don’t.