My guests for this episode are Nicole Dooling and Michael Frey. Nicole and Michael helped transition Nicole’s parents’ mountain top vineyard in Medocino into the first ever Savory Institute Global Land To Market Verified regenerative vineyard in the world. We talk in depth about the Land to Market cerification, which is results based, rather than process based like most other certifications, and takes most of the work of certification off the farmer’s to do list. And we talk about Nicole and Michael helped convince her parents, the Doolings, to make this transition after 40 years of pouring their hearts and souls into Mariah Vineyards, with a lot of respect and commitment to the economic as well as the ecological success of the farm. This generational transition and how to navigate it is vital to regenerative agriculture, and this conversation has some amazing insights into it.

There are some important new ideas including how to be regenerative as a winemaker or consumer even if you don’t do any farming personally, perspective shifts about transitioning to a nature based style of farming that may have a slightly more wild and messy aesthetic, and we mention several great resources mentioned for everyone interested in learning or doing more. And Nicole and Michael leave us with a challenge that if you claim to be regenerative, then show it with quantified results.

https://mariahvineyards.com/

Sponsor:

Centralas Wine

My guest for this episode is Justine Belle Lambright of Kalche Wine. Together with Kathline Chery and Grace Meyer, Justine has founded Kalche as a worker cooperative. If you’re wondering what it would mean for a winery to be built as a worker owned business, that’s exactly what we talk about in this episode.

Justine goes into detail about what is involved in setting up and running a winery as a worker cooperative. Because of the hard work they have already put in with their co-owners, Justine is able to give us almost a step-by-step how-to that includes many of the strengths and weaknesses, challenges and opportunities, as well as giving some great reasons why you might want to do this as well.

If you’re sick of Big Wine, if you envision a more equitable way of running a winery, if you want a business that is run democratically, if you want to think of people as humans rather than as human resources, if you think business should serve human needs rather than the other way around, then this conversation is for you. Justine not only breaks down the details of how we might go about setting up our own worker cooperative, they also offer further resources and lifelines to provide practical help and information to anyone actually undertaking this kind of human-centered business building.

And we talk about Kalche’s Hybrid Space Juice and make a strong case for why American hybrid grapes need to be included in the mainstream of the wine current wherever it’s coming from.

Justine reads a poem, we meditate on death and consider a cosmic perspective on ourselves, and generally have a really fun, informative conversation.

https://www.kalchewine.co/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

This is a technical, detailed explanation of some of the important aspects of making wine naturally. If you haven't listened to part 1, this one will make a lot more sense if you do. Included in this part 2 episode are further discussions of optimal temperature and pH ranges for fermentation, everything you wanted to know about racking wine - when, how, how often, and why - and a comprehensive discussion of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in wine and how to avoid and manage it, and many other aspects of natural winemaking.

Enjoy!

Sponsor: Centralas Wine

For this episode I have the pleasure of talking with two of my favorite authors on soil and our utter dependence on it, Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery

David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington.  He is an internationally recognized geologist who studies the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies.  His work has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, TV, and radio including NOVA, PBS NewsHour, Fox and Friends, and All Things Considered. 

Anne Biklé is a science writer and public speaker focusing on the connections between people, plants, food, health, and the environment.  She has been known to coax garden plants into rambunctious growth and nurse them back from the edge of death with her regenerative gardening practices.  Her work has appeared in digital and print magazines, newspapers, and radio and her gardening practices have been featured in independent and documentary films. 

Anne and David are married and live in Seattle, WA.  Their work includes What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, and a trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes, and farming—Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, The Hidden Half of Nature, and Growing a Revolution.

These books are not only about soil but about agriculture, our food system, human health and survival and the climate… and, perhaps shockingly, they provide ample evidence for a way forward that provides solutions to the problems we face in all of these areas… dare I say they provide hope? And, even more importantly, he says sarcastically, they provide ample evidence for how to farm grapes in a better way to make more delicious wine.

www.Dig2Grow.com 

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

This is natural winemaking 101, from a technical, principles-based approach, by Adam Huss, the host of the Organic Wine Podcast and the winemaker for Centralas Wine in Los Angeles, California.

Adam presents a vineyard to bottle, step-by-step how-to that focuses on protecting and expressing the beautiful ecosystems from which the fruit comes. He offers tips and processes to make this job of winemaking understandable from chemical and microbial standpoint, and gives general guidelines that enable winemakers to be creative while crafting clean and delicious wine that is free of microbial spoilage, with as little intervention as possible.

The principles and techniques Adam presents in this episode can help you make wine naturally, with practical tips about how to avoid Volatile Acidity (VA), Mouse Taint, Brettanomyces, and other common natural wine issues. The practical advice he gives can help you get a handle on how to make a delicious and clean wine with minimal to zero additives. He discusses the importance of CO2 and how to manage CO2 naturally to your advantage, the importance of pH and how to manage pH naturally, as well as two of the most important aspects of winemaking that are most often overlooked by natural winemakers.

This is a special episode that Adam recorded while driving in Los Angeles, so please forgive the audio quality and unscripted nature of the tutorial.

Sponsor: Centralas Wine

For this episode I had the pleasure of talking with Kendra Knapik of Ellison Estate Vineyard, a vineyard of American grapes on Grand Isle in the middle of Lake Champlain Vermont. Kendra and her husband Rob practice animal grazing integrated regenerative viticulture with a flock of sheep and organic practices, and make an array natural wines.

Kendra talks about the joys and challenges of embracing the life of a winegrower while having young children and a full-time job – in her case as a veterinary oncologist. As hard as you can tell she works, you can also hear in her voice that she is fueled by the beauty of what she’s doing. The process is as impressive to me as what she’s building, and one more piece of evidence that Vermont is a hot spot for some really cool winemaking.

https://www.ellisonestatevineyard.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Tom Plocher. Tom has been growing and breeding grapevines and making wine from them since 1980. He was a longtime friend and mentee of Elmer Swenson, and lives and grows grapes in Minnesota just north of the Twin Cities.

Tom has bred several varieties of grapes that are patented and available for sale out in the world… and you’ve heard about at least one of them – Petite Pearl – if you listened to the recent episode with Montpellier Vineyards in Vermont. In this interview Tom gives detailed instructions about how to breed grapevines, with some great tips and an in-depth sense of what is involved.

While Tom isn’t focused on breeding for resistance to mildew or pests, what he’s doing and what he teaches us in this episode may be some of the most valuable information ever shared on this podcast. Because learning to breed grapevines is what will make it possible to adapt to the rapidly changing climate and find a delicious future for wine that doesn’t require the unsustainable use of chemical sprays that make environmental degradation worse. Tom literally shows us the path to the future of wine, and that it’s something you can do with some intelligence, patience, and care on your own, without a lot of land.

Here’s a fun fact: The time it takes to research, develop, test, and get approvals of a new chemical pesticide is about 10 years. The time it takes to breed, grow, prove out and patent a new variety of grapevine that could have any number of beneficial traits – including a diminished need for new pesticides – is about 10 years.

Forget the fact that the development of the pesticide took millions of dollars too, and that breeding the grape just took time and some knowledge and practice. Imagine if all of us who grow vineyards also began collecting, crossing, and breeding new vines. Imagine where we’d be if we’d channeled our resources over the last 80 years into this approach to resilience and vitality in our vineyards, rather than trying to prop up a handful of increasingly more feeble grapevines with the ongoing development of chemicals that degrade our environment and make climate change and human health worse.

Think of how much further along we’d be to having real solutions to viticultural challenges by looking in the vines themselves. It is both possible and 100% achievable to have delicious wine made from grapes that never need to be sprayed with anything and thrive in the extreme climate that will be our future. But not as long as we fetishized and clone the same vines over and over again.

If we take the knowledge that Tom gives us here and apply it to the California wine industry, we could have a continually renewing, regenerating, and improving cycle of increasing health and flavor in our wine and our world, rather than this downward spiral we’re on that has an expiration date.

The only thing standing in our way, I believe, is prejudice. We’ve created a hierarchy in which a few types of grapes, and only those few select grapes, can make great wine. That hierarchy is bullshit. All grapes are hybrids.

I hope you’ll join with me in normalizing the idea that wine is not made from a few European grapes but from an ongoing process of adaptation, innovation, experimentation, and inclusion. If you do, I think the future of wine can be exciting. It can be diverse. It can be delicious.

In this interview, Tom gives us the tools to get there.

https://www.plochervines.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Diana Snowden Seysses. Diana studied Viticulture & Enology at UC Davis, and went on to work in both California and French cellars with Robert Mondavi Winery, Mumm Napa, the Araujo Estate, Château La Fleur de Boüard, Domaine Leflaive and Ramey Wine Cellars. And also for the last 20 years, Diana has been an enologist and part of the family at Domaine Dujac in Burgundy, and consultant at Domaine de Triennes in Provence; and she is also winemaker at Snowden Vineyards in Napa.

In addition to this enviable resume of incredible winemaking experience, Diana is one of the leading experts on carbon capture and reuse in the wine industry, and strategies for reducing the massive carbon impact of glass wine bottles. So, while I would have loved to spend this hour asking her about making wine in Burgundy, those questions took a back seat to discussing the urgent story she discovered there.

Because it was Diana’s experience of working with the natural world and tracking data in Burgundy that led her to the inescapable reality of the urgency and severity of climate change and altered the direction of what she is doing with wine.

It should come across rather quickly that Diana is a brilliant mind and bright spirit. So it makes the things that she says about the reality we’re facing all the more forceful, and, frankly, sobering. We talk very openly about the challenges of maintaining mental health and keeping courage in the face of what we know.

When I started this podcast I said I wanted it to bring hope. In a very real way, this interview with Diana is about moving beyond hope that things will get better, and yet finding the strength to continue to do the work that our planet needs us to do anyway. I personally find the inspiration for this strength in the natural world itself, in everyone I get to interview for this podcast, and in every one of you who listens. I’m extremely grateful for you, and please don’t underestimate the influence you can have on each other’s spirits and lives.

I recently came across this quote by Howard Zinn:

"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

I hope you find Diana’s defiance as inspiring as I did.

http://www.dujac.com/en/the-domain

https://www.snowdenvineyards.com/

https://www.portoprotocol.com/

sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guests for this episode are the father and son team Doug and Andrew Becker of Montpelier Vineyards in Montpelier, Vermont. Montpelier Vineyards is currently the only certified organic winery north of the Mason-Dixon line that I’m aware of, though there may be more in the process and soon to be certified.

As a quick clarification, a certified organic winery must have two certifications: one for the vineyard and one for the winery. There are other certified vineyards in New England, but only Montpelier Vineyards has both vineyard and winery certifications.

Doug and Andrew tell us their story, and we get technical about some of the challenges of Vermont viticulture, as well as how to deal with VA and reduction in the winery.

Doug and Andrew may introduce you to some new terminology, because in addition to grape wines they make pyments, cysers, and melomels and discuss the practice of bletting apples.

We also discuss the particular hybrid grapes that they’re growing, and their pros and cons. They are one of the few growers of a new hybrid grape named Petite Pearl, bred by Tom Plocher, that shows a lot of promise, and in fact they sent me a bottle of their Montpelier Vineyards 2021 wild fermented Petite Pearl that we discuss in the interview, and since this was recorded a few weeks ago I’ve had a chance to try it.

The color is the first remarkable aspect of the wine. Inky, opaque purple, tinged magenta at the rim. Extremely dark. After swirling in the glass the legs ooze down almost as dark as the wine itself. It smelled initially of blue fruit, snowy mountain air, grape jelly, and a bit of cocoa powder. It is extremely fresh, still young, while also rich and full bodied. It achieves that deft feat of having significant weight, even gravitas, without an ounce of heaviness. Only 12 and a half percent alcohol. The closest association I can make to something you might have drunk is along the lines of the black wines of Cahors, or something like a varietal Tannat or Teroldego. After a couple days open in the refrigerator it developed more chocolately notes and creamier texture, so while this was a delight to drink now, I think it will age very well and improve for quite a while. I have never done a tasting note like this before, so I hope that speaks for itself. I loved drinking this wine, and I think it shows that the future of wine made from hybrid grapes is extremely bright (and that’s not a climate change joke). So get some if you can.

So let’s take a trip to Vermont, where it seems like wine – in a beautiful diversity of innumerable flavors and forms – is really blowing up.

https://www.montpeliervineyards.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Eric Shatt. With his wife and partner Deva, Eric is the owner of Redbyrd Orchard Cider in the Finger Lakes Region of NY. I love that Deva and Eric put the orchard first in their name and in their philosophy of cider making. In fact, Eric is an apple breeder and preservationist. He grows over 150 varieties of apples in his 4-acre orchard and is cultivating trees propagated from the wild and then crossed with others. He also makes some unique and delicious cider.

Eric tells us how all that diversity in the orchard provides reinforcements against the unpredictable nature of, um, nature, and how it can also provide consistency to the cider. He gives us an intro to grafting, and discusses his unique approach to making cider, as well as his desire to promote freedom of technique and experimentation in the cellar.

Redbyrd has been certified biodynamic for years, but Eric and I discuss how he came to be aware of biodynamics’ troubling origins and the beliefs of Rudolf Steiner. While Eric is drawn to the spiritual connections in farming that biodynamics brings attention to, we discuss why its history has caused he and Deva to question whether it is something they’ll continue to support via certification.

This is a succulent conversation on many levels because of Eric’s thoughtfulness and curiosity about the many unknowns that are part of farming and making wine in our little corner of the cosmos.

https://redbyrdorchardcider.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Brian McClintic. For many people in the wine world, Brian needs no introduction. He’s one of the co-stars of the Somm documentaries where we watch him go from being a young, ambitions lover of wine, to becoming a Master Sommelier, and then his further evolution as global wine expert. Then, perhaps even more significantly, Brian became disillusioned with his membership in the Court of Master Sommeliers, turned in his pin, and resigned from the Court. The development of his perspective on wine continued through the projects and ideas he began exploring through his online wine club Viticole and its associated podcast.

When Brian recently wrote a post on his Viticole blog titled “Reimaging Terroir” – which I highly recommend everyone read – I knew I wanted to get Brian to talk about his new ideas here on the podcast. Brian presents a way to reimagine wine. He discusses how our climate issues are just a symptom of our disconnection from the natural world. He shares a vision where a diversity of wine ingredients leads to biodiversity in agriculture, and makes our obsession with clearing forests and landscapes to plant a monoculture of non-native single variety plants seem absurd. We talk about blind tasting, terroir, and growing polyculture agroforestry that includes grapes with fruit trees and bushes.

If you are ready for a new vision of wine, get ready for a ride of rethinking viticulture to remind us of our dependence on the natural world, reconnect and deepen our bond with nature, and be reminded of who is leading the dance… It’s not us.

https://www.viticolewine.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Drew Herman. Drew is the Vineyard Manager at JK Carriere Wines in Oregon, and, wow… listening to him makes me want to drink anything made from fruit that he helps grow. Before we recorded this, Drew gave me an outline of things that he wanted to talk about, and he titled it Microbial Democracy, and what he discusses here blows open doors of understanding about the way soil and plants work from a fundamental perspective. You will not be able to think about growing vines, or anything else, in the same way after listening to this.

Drew explains how the soil has a voice. He introduces the new findings about microbial quorum sensing and signaling and how the soil is like a big ongoing chemical conversation. We then get into epigenetics and how soil microbes actually impact not only vine health but also wine flavor, and so much more. He gives specific and practical applications for this knowledge, and promotes independent science and freedom from purchased bottled solutions to viticultural problems.

Beware: this episode may make you smarter, freer, and more full of wonder.

A special thanks to James Endicott of Vinocity Selections for introducing me to Drew. I think once you hear what Drew has to share, you’ll want to thank James too.

Enjoy!

Sponsored by:

Centralas Wine

My guest for this episode is the bestselling author of Drinking & Knowing Things, he's a Certified Sommelier with the Guild of Master Sommeliers, a Certified Specialist of Wine, and a Master of Wine Candidate with the Institute of Masters of Wine. His final blind tasting test is this month. He runs the wildly popular Drinking & Knowing Things wine blog which has been adapted into now 3 books. He owns the award-winning SoCal Rum company, which was recently awarded the highest point score in history for any Silver Rum. Michael was a professor at the University of CA, Irvine. And he spends his time blind tasting and doing extreme sports.

And, last but not least, He is the founder of the Bhutan Wine Company, and is leading the development of the wine industry in this magical Himalayan country for its first time in history. This was why I wanted to talk to Michael.

Because his journey led him to Bhutan to plant its first ever vineyards, I found out about and began looking into some of the truly unique and stunning aspects of Bhutan’s culture. That’s part of the power of wine.

If you haven’t heard about the 7 pillars of Gross National Happiness, or didn’t know that Bhutan is the only carbon negative nation in the world, or that it is on the path to be the first 100% organic nation in the world, and more… then you’re going to have as much fun with this interview as I did.

https://www.drinkingandknowingthings.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Tim Graham of Left Bank Cider in Catskill, New York on the bank of the Hudson River. Tim’s cider project is a joint effort with his wife Anna Rosencranz and partner Dave Snyder. The three of them are making local cider from local apples, both wild and cultivated, and serving them at their local bar along with other local ciders, beers, wines and liquors of NY.

It was such a delight to get to know Tim and what he’s doing. He’s thoughtful and smart, ecologically minded in his approach to every aspect of what he does, and he’s curious and deeply appreciative of the beauty of his world. He drops insights and illuminating perspectives throughout.

We go deep on the magic of fungus and its importance to growing and making fermented beverages. Tim takes us on a journey of discovering wild apples and makes an argument for why his local apples are the best apples in the world. And we learn from Tim how to incorporate a process of learning and expanding and growing so that we waste none of the delicious fruits of life.

http://www.leftbankciders.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Host:

Adam Huss

My guest for this episode is Greg La Follette. Just when you think you know something about wine, you meet someone like Greg. Talking with him about wine is like having the sun rise suddenly while you’re walking a path at night with only a flashlight. I apologize in advance to anyone who is trying to listen to this while doing something else, because you’re going to want to take notes.

Even if you haven’t heard of Greg La Follette, you’ve probably drunk wines that he helped make. He mentored at BV in the early 90s under Andre Tchelitstcheff. He has designed and redesigned fourteen wineries worldwide and was the consulting winemaker for the University of California Davis’ “teaching winery”. He has consulted for Kendall-Jackson, starting its La Crema and Hartford Court brands. He launched Flowers, turning it into a cult brand, featuring its gravity-flow “green” production facility that is still considered state of the art. He went on to manage wine operations at DeLoach, and founded Tandem Wines, and has consulted on many other projects too numerous to mention.

If you’ve been following the Organic Wine Podcast at all, it won’t come as a surprise to you that with his legendary reputation as a winemaker, Greg’s gives preeminence to the winemaking that happens in the vineyard before the grapes are even picked. You may have heard the cliché that “great wine is made in the vineyard.” In this episode, Greg tells us how. He discusses the 3 most important moments in winemaking that all happen in the vineyard, and in fact as I re-listened I counted at least 2 or 3 additional moments in the vineyard that he discusses as vitally important to winemaking.

And that’s before he gives a breakdown of microbial ecological succession during indigenous fermentations and how that lends more complexity to wine.

If you listen closely, you’ll find moments throughout what Greg says where he seems to talk about grapevines and people comparatively and even interchangeably. I found something profoundly meaningful in this, as it makes me feel as if Greg has come to know these beings so well that he has achieved a perspective that is not from this modern world, but recalls an ancient perspective from those indigenous groups who also knew their ecosystems with equal intimacy. A perspective of identification and equality with our non-human family. A perspective of compassion and empathy.

Even if you aren’t working with vineyards or making wine, this episode will give you a glimpse of how much there is to learn about wine, how deep scientific knowledge enables us to listen to and serve vines and ecosystems better, and how complex and beautiful our world can be the more we get to know it.

https://www.marchellewines.com/

With special thanks to Lucie Morton.

Sponsor: Centralas Wine

This episode is a bit unusual for this podcast. It’s about how to purchase real estate, and my guest is Rural Mortgage Banker for United Ag Lending, Brady Shepherd. I’m very grateful to Brady for the time he spent with me preparing for this episode, and I think you’ll find this episode packed with potentially life-changing ideas.

Why “life changing?” Because, for better or for worse, the US economy is founded on real estate. The laws and economic structure that guide our society were written by and for land-owners. And behind every glass of wine is a piece of land where it was grown that somebody or some entity owns.

Did you know that to buy real estate you don’t have to put 20% down? You might not have to put any cash down. Your credit doesn’t have to be perfect either. We talk about this and so much more.

A final disclaimer, nothing that I or Brady say on this episode is meant to be investment advice, and please talk to an accountant about your personal situation. Actually, talking to an accountant can be just as eye-opening as talking to a mortgage banker.

A big thanks to Brady, who, if you stay tuned, literally gives out his phone number for anyone who might need help getting a mortgage loan.

https://unitedaglending.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Colin Blackshear and Aaron Brown of Bardos Cider are my guests for this episode. This is their first podcast, and I’m honored to be able to spread the word about what the remarkable work they are doing. They have built Bardos Cider since 2019 to a significant production, of over 150 barrels, by gleaning fruit from abandoned, forgotten, and derelict old orchards from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

These trees have learned to survive only on the winter rains and despite human neglect, and this has made their fruit all the more exciting with age. Working with them has connected Aaron and Colin to the history of this land in some very meaningful and even spiritual ways. They clearly have a humility and respect for the wisdom of these elder beings, and through cider they have begun to realize a larger responsibility they have to protect and preserve these orchards.

So often wine and cider are produced from an egotistical standpoint. I decided I wanted to make a certain kind of wine or cider, so I found or planted vineyards or orchards to meet my specifications and invested my will and desires and resources into bringing my ego-vision to reality. When this is my approach, is the wine or cider that I end up with really a reflection of the terroir, or just my ego? Colin and Aaron of Bardos Cider remind me that there is another approach. I could instead look to work in service of what already is thriving without my ego, despite that it may not be what I thought I wanted or intended. I could work to highlight and preserve the beautiful work that was already being done before me, and that will continue on once I’m gone. Could this lead to a truer reflection of place? And if I applied this approach to my life more broadly, is this the kind of perspective that could lead to abundance?

https://www.bardoscider.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Recorded on, and released in honor of, Caesar Chavez Day.

My guest for this episode is Gabriela Fontanesi. Gabriela has one of the most unusual and unique paths into wine that I’ve ever encountered. Because of that, she brought questions and perspectives that have incredible power to transform the way you see and think about this industry and that led her on a journey of being a vineyard worker, and to Mexico where she recorded this interview, so that she could improve her Spanish and one day conduct wine tastings for Spanish-speaking farm workers here in California.

Some of the points she brings up include: the laws that surprisingly don’t apply to farm workers, and why that is; How our separation from farming is what allows for the exploitation of the people who do the farm work; the euro-centric nature of formal wine education; the troubling idea of objectivity in wine tasting and if it accounts for the treatment of those who grow the wine; and the opportunity that wine has to bring change because of the narratives it tells. And so much more.

Gabriela is a non-stop force of insight and this interview is packed with some of the most important ideas we can grapple with as an industry. If you get nothing else out of it, I hope you’ll be inspired by Gabriela to ask better, harder questions and to keep asking them regardless of where they take you.

Gabriela would like to give a shout out to two great organizations that she supports. The first is AHIVOY which provides mentoring & scholarships for vineyard stewards in Oregon. You can learn more at ahivoyoregon.org or @ahivoyoregon.

And the second organization is The Botanical Bus – a bilingual mobile herb clinic. You can find more at TheBotanicalBus.com or @botanical.bus

Gabriela can be contacted through her Instagram @gpfontanesi

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/