Vitiforestry, vines in trees, and the Lost Forest Gardens of Europe

Laurel Marcus - Fish Friendly Farming, Climate Adaptation

Kiss The Ground - regenerative agriculture with Ryland Englehart

Mark Shepard is the author of Restoration Agriculture, which proposes an approach to agriculture and viticulture that mimics nature through a perennial multi-story polyculture form of permaculture. He grows grapevines in trees, never sprays his farm with anything, and continually breeds and selects for varieties that are more resilient and productive.

This is episode is something a little different, and it’s sponsored by Centralas Wine. Centralas is my winery and the first chapter of this two chapter episode is a recording I made while driving around los angeles, as we angelenos are wont to do, so I apologize for the quality. But the content is pretty fun. The context is that I’ve stopped listing grape varieties on the labels for the wines I make and sell through Centralas. Since I made that decision, I’ve become hyper aware of how important grape varieties have become as handles that we think we need to understand a wine. It is literally the first thing people ask when I present one of our wines. This has led to some pretty interesting discussions and even debates. But Rather than make me think I made a mistake in not listing varieties, I’m more committed than ever to being the lone voice, if need be, calling for an end to our varietal obsession. I’m actually pretty convinced we’ve all been brain-washed by the global capitalist monoculture into thinking that knowing the variety of grape is necessary to understand a wine. So there you go… that should set up Chapter one as a fun and somewhat funny take on varietal labeling.

And chapter two, while very different, is very symbiotic. It’s called Why Wine is Important, and I think you’ll be a bit surprised at the answer I give, because I try to answer that question from a different perspective so to speak. And that perspective is really the same perspective that chapter one comes from. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll leave it at that.

My guest for this episode is Paul Dolan.

Paul Dolan has always been a pioneer leading the industry towards a more sustainable future. While a winemaker and then president at Fetzer, Paul proved to the California wine industry that wineries and grape growers can preserve and enhance their environment, strengthen their communities, and enrich the lives of their employees without sacrificing the bottom line. He introduced Bonterra, the first nationally distributed wine made with 100 percent organic grapes, placing Fetzer at the forefront of organic viticulture. Paul’s experiences at Fetzer led him to publish “True to Our Roots- Fermenting a Business Revolution” that set forth the simple but powerful management principles that enabled Fetzer to become one of America’s best- known wineries and an exemplar of sustainable business practices.

Through his leadership at the California Wine Institute, Paul introduced the Code of Sustainable Wine Growing and chaired the Institute from 2006 – 2007. He also served on President Clinton’s Council on Sustainability, Businesses for Social Responsibility, and The Climate Group, was Chairman of the California Sustainable Winegrowers Alliance, and received the Environmental Business Leader of the Year Award from the California Planning and Conservation League in 2006.

Paul has become a spokesman for and practitioner of regenerative winegrowing. He serves on the board of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and farms his family-owned Dark Horse Ranch as a multi-faceted certified Biodynamic® vineyard and regenerative farm, and is a founding partner of Truett-Hurst Winery. He is constantly seeking to enhance his understanding of the restorative capacity of the soil and the farm, and its relationship to the restoration of the health of the planet’s ecosystems.

Guest Interviewer Chiara Shannon (@theyogisommelier www.theyogisommelier.com) interviews the creator and producer of the Organic Wine Podcast, Adam Huss. Adam talks about what he is doing with wine and vines in South Los Angeles with his winery Crenshaw Cru and his estate urban polyculture winegarden Crenshaw Cru.

Some of the things that we talk about include: how viticulture is actually a form of agroforestry, how my urban polyculture winegarden known as Crenshaw Cru embodies a vision for the future of wine, how embracing local indigenous fruit can grow a diverse, resilient, and colorful wine culture, how human culture is part of your vineyard, and how all of this results from the revolutionary ecological approach to wine that makes our current wine culture seem completely backwards.

https://www.centralaswine.com/

In this episode I get to talk to the co-founders and winemakers for RAS Wines - Dan Roche, Joe Appel and Emily Smith.

Dan, Joe, and Emily make a dry sparkling wine from Maine wild blueberries, and we talk about some of the incredible aspects of this unique wine culture.

Maine wild blueberries are one of the few fruits indigenous to and perfectly suited to the challenging terroir of Maine. Even though they occur naturally – thus the “wild” aspect – they are actively tended as a commercial crop. I’m fascinated by this kind of agriculture which shows a way that we humans can integrate with natural ecosystems and be instrumental to their health and vitality, while also using them to support our own health and survival.

Working with and selling wine made from a fruit that isn’t grapes and for which consumers have many preconceptions, has given Dan, Joe, and Emily some profound insights into wine in general. They want us to ask ourselves: Is what we think we know about wine actually limiting our experience of it? They have realized how much we need to unlearn, and are part of a domestic wine scene that is locally based, resourceful, creative, as diverse as the land they make wine from, and the most exciting part of wine today, I think.

As they say, we don’t expect wine made from Cabernet Franc to taste like a grape, so why do we have different expectations for blueberries?

I’m excited to share these winemakers with you and the unique world of Maine wild blueberries that they are helping to share through their wine.

Kelly Mulville’s life has been guided by an awe and respect for the natural world and a deep appreciation for its beauty. This led him to want to learn how to farm in a way that protected or enhanced the natural world, and made him a better listener and observer of what made ecosystems work. Through his years of farming he has attempted to answer the question of how we can turn agriculture from one of the most destructive forces on the planet into the method we can use to repair that damage and restore biodiversity and health to ecosystems?

Kelly’s journey has led him to test various kinds of grazing-based viticulture in many contexts throughout the west and south-west US, and to ultimately build a vineyard system that incorporates animals year round in central California at Paicines Ranch. The work he is doing is laying the foundation for what I think will be the future of viticulture, and Kelly lays out the vision and principles that guide it.

Kelly is working with vinifera that he basically doesn’t have to spray because of the system he has implemented and his attention to soil health, biodiversity, and amazing new findings around SAP brix analysis that is revolutionizing our understanding of how we can prevent insect pest issues. We get into the details of the Watson trellising system he uses now to create a kind of vine forest rather than a vineyard, as well as how to potentially integrate sheep year round into an existing VSP trellis system, ground squirrel management, the ecology of birds in viticultural and agricultural systems, and the amazing return of an endangered species for which his vineyard is helping to provide desirable habitat.

If you haven’t heard of Kelly Mulville, or the work he’s doing at Paicines Ranch, this is potentially revolutionary stuff. I could not be more impressed with Kelly’s humble, passionate, and compassionate approach to viticulture. He grounds everything he does in science and real, detailed data, because he sees everything he has accomplished so far as just the beginning, and he wants others to be able to learn from and build upon this work to do even better.

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/