It's 2006. Do you know where your food is?

I dashed through the last few weeks before the holidays, working long hours to prep wines for bottling, getting tanks topped as much as possible, and making some final blend decisions for 2004 reds that will bottle in March. We actually bottled 2004 Chardonnay right up until Thursday evening at 6pm when I left to make it (late) to KLC's office party in Paso Robles, and start the Holiday season.

The winery is shut down, at least as far as production goes, from now until January 2nd. This has been great, I spent the first day with KLC taking a long, beautiful hike on the mountain ridgetops above the city, where you can see away to the ocean on one side, and over into the Salinas & California valleys on the other; even the Temblor range, thrust up by the San Andrea's Fault is visible from there.

KLC is back at work, and I am spending my time catching up on some reading. I finished MFK Fisher's "An Alphabet for Gourmets" yesterday, which I have been working on for a few weeks now. Spectacularly well written, as she always is. I am now making my way through a stack of wine industry periodicals that have been piling up since harvest!

One article discussed the FDA's Bioterrorism act. If you have not yet heard about this piece of rulemaking, it has already begun to affect the foods and beverages that you eat and drink every day. It will have huge implications for the company that I work for, as well as for our clients, customers, transporters, suppliers, growers, and distibutors.

The basic idea of the the provision, passed in 2002 is that a record of every ingredient, material, packaging supply, etc... has to be tracked from start to finish, even including the transport of said materials. These records have to be immediately available to inspectors, (the regulation requires a full accounting be available within 24 hours notice.) Every winery with more than 11 employees will have to be fully compliant by June of this year. Non-compliance will mean that the non-compliant products would be pulled from the shelves and destroyed!!

For a winery like ours, making wine for many different clients, using chemicals provided sometimes by the client, sometimes from our own stock, we need to track to the gram every lot number of every chemical and where it came from, who transported it, when it was produced and the provenance of every ingredient used in its production. Now multiply this traceability by nearly one-hundred clients, many different chemical additions, suppliers, origins of lots, and transportation of those chemicals to our plant. And then imagine blending multiple wines together that may have been produced in many different facilities. The paperwork alone becomes mind-numbing. And it will be still more bewildering for even larger companies, like Diageo and Constellation.

What does this mean for a small winery that grows all of its own fruit? Well, any chemicals or nutrients (sulfur, compost, micronutrients, etc...) that go onto the crop have to have complete traceability of the lot number, and transport from the manufacturer all the way through to the end user. Much of this is already in place in California, as registered agricultural chemicals are required to be reported monthly, it would just take a few tweaks. But trucking of the fruit to the winery has to be tracked, as well as origin and lot numbers for SO2 (Germany or Italy,) tartaric acid, (China, Italy,) tannin additions, (France, Australia) yeast (Canada, Netherlands, Belgium.) As the wine is finished, even filtration aids (Germany, USA) bentonite (USA) and other fining agents may be added.

Supposing you used all your own fruit, grown entirely organically, you trucked it to the winery yourself, you did not add any chemicals of any kind, let the native yeast conduct fermentation, etc... You still have to track the origin of the barrels (France, USA, Hungary) SO2, whether from KMBS or liquid SO2, corks (Portugal, Spain) and glass bottles (USA, Mexico, France, Italy.) As you can see, wine production is a complex international web, even at the simpest levels.

I imagine that this is going to extend to the rest of the food & beverage and agricultural system as well. All this red tape is designed to maintain the security of the United States' food supply, but in fact it really just exposes the vulnerability of the present, globally dependent system. The chain, especially for processed foods, extends out of the United States, with dependence on farmers in China, South America, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere. Tampering at any point along the line can comprimise the safety of our food supply, and expose us to pathogens, poisons, or other dangers. As we scramble to become compliant in the wine industry, with relatively short production chains, and limited numbers of ingredients, it exposes the near impossibility of compliance for other parts of the food industry. And what will the stance be on regulation of suppliers outside of the United States? Does it mean a ban on food and beverage products that are not compliant in the same way?

Perhaps the fragility of a globally dependant system is one of the strongest arguments ever for knowing where your food comes from, and how it is produced. Plant a garden. Get to your local Farmer's Market. Talk to the people who grow and supply your food. You can have a very direct influence over how safely it is produced, the effect of agriculture on your local environment, and economically reward those who are striving to grow sustainably and produce the highest quality.

If you simplify your personal food chain of supply, you won't have to depend on the accuracy and honesty of industry or government to know that your family's food is safe!