My guest for this episode is Ryan Opaz. His wine journey has led him to become a thoughtful wine business owner with deep ecological consciousness gained from decades of working at nearly every level of the wine industry. Besides being the founder and CEO of Catavino, with his wife and partner Gabriella he runs a natural and organic wine shop in Porto, Portugal, co-authored and was the photographer of the James Beard Award-nominated book Foot-Trodden: Portugal and the wines that time forgot. Previously he was also the photographer for the book The Amber Revolution, and a book about Porto’s Portugal’s Historic Bolhão Market. For his service to the Portugese wine industry he has also been inducted as a Knight of the Port Wine Brotherhood. Yes, this this is a conversation with not only a Knight, but a wine Knight.

One of the admirable qualities of Ryan that comes up in this interview is his desire to remind all of us in wine that answers to questions and solutions to problems aren’t universally applicable and timeless. That is, the issues we face are complex, context-dependent, and we would be wise to resist the impulse to simplify questions to single answers, or problems to single solutions, and even when we think we have found a way forward, we should continue to research and explore and be willing to find that we need to change our approach again next year.

We also talk a lot about emissions offsets. If you’ve been paying attention to the news about carbon offsets, from John Oliver to the Guardian, you’ll know that there are a lot of problems with offsets. In fact there are more than problems… there is a massive amount of deception and outright fraud. Ryan brings up some really interesting ideas about offsets that I think are important to consider, and his efforts to make his wine tourism company less wasteful and more ecologically positive have brought up some really good questions that I think we will all be wrestling with over the next decade or so. And I’m currently in discussion with a reputable company who provides offsets to do a future episode entirely devoted to the hard questions around these issues. So stay tuned.

The most important thing may not be that we seek ways to offset every ounce of carbon from our footprint, but that we begin to see that all of our choices and actions have ecological consequences, that there is a cost to everything we do, and if we aren’t paying for it, it’s likely that the earth or someone or something else is.

Full disclosure: Ryan’s company is a sponsor for the Organic Wine Podcast, and you can support this podcast by visiting CatavinoTours.com/OWP for organic wine podcast. I’m glad to have them for a sponsor, and I think this interview will help you see why.

Other Sponsors Include:

https://www.oom.earth/  Use referral code OWP

https://www.centralaswine.com/

And the most direct way you can support this podcast is:

https://www.patreon.com/organicwinepodcast

Thank you!

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