My guest for this episode is Dave Carr of Raging Cider and Mead, and he’s helping to redefine what cider can be and where it can come from. Dave makes cider in San Diego County… and for those of you unfamiliar with California, that’s south of me. We often look north for great cider cultures, and I’ll admit that’s why it took me so long to have Dave on the podcast, but it turns out there’s an old, very special, and pretty outstanding cider culture just over an hour south of Los Angeles… in fact, once you hear Dave’s description of growing cider here you may begin to see it as one of the BEST places to grow cider.

I don’t want to give too much away but you’re going to find out about a unique population of banana slugs, the rich apple and pear history of gold rush town Julian, CA where Dave is helping rebuild and regenerate old, historic and neglected orchards, a seedling pear name Screaming Weasel, a perry named Perry Feral, the Quest for the Palomar Giant, sweet meads, cysers, and pyments, Dave’s approach to orchard polyculture including cover cropping with collards, composting with mushrooms and mulching with spent mushroom substrate, alley cropping with asparagus, beans, and squash, as well as looking on the bright side of orchard pests and how to manage them.

In addition to renewing legacy orchards and farming his home orchard and other local orchards in a beyond organic way, Dave is caretaking old, historic orchards for a local tribe council that preserves land from development, and he’s trying to develop locally adapted seedling apples and pears to create a uniquely Southern California cider culture. You’ll hear about all this and more, and how you can taste his diverse array of natural, regional ciders, meads, and co-ferments at his taproom in San Marcos.

https://www.ragingcidermead.com/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

This is the second part of the special in-person, on-site conversation that I had in June of 2023 (just a few weeks ago as I write this) with Mike Biltonen of Know Your Roots. Please check out part 1 for Mike’s full bio, and for a fantastic episode about holistic orchard culture within a biodynamic context.

On this episode we leave Mike’s Apostrophe Orchard and enter the forest that surrounds it. We leave the realm of the known, the controlled, the cultivated, and enter the realm of questions, of curiosity, of the unexplored. The pace changes, the energy shifts, and the conversation evolves. I invite you to take this walk with us, but the suggestion I make is this: Don’t enter the forest. Become it.

The forest is the source of the orchard, the source of the vines and vineyard. It is also our source. Our bodies and lives, our cultures, grow out of nature, out of the wild. When I speak of developing a more ecological wine culture, I’m essentially talking about ecomimicry, biomimicry, or just emulating the forest ecosystem more closely with our cultures.

Along this walk we discover amazing wild vines and talk of wineforests and vitiforestry. We speak of the need for further research into plant communication and energetics. We observe the values that the forest manifests in its multiple diverse and interconnected forms, and how these differ from and could be better incorporated into our production-oriented farming. We ask how to embrace beauty in our viticulture and pomiculture, along with ecological integration and economic viability.

At a time when we now see the effect that industrial food and beverage production system has, not just on what we eat and drink, but on the human psyche, and on gaia, Mike asks us to begin to consider the integration of secular and esoteric science. While he affirms the importance of data and statistics, he asks how we can marry those with our observations of nature that often give us better intuitive insights. Mike suggests that the more time we spend in nature, on our farms, in our vineyards and orchards, without the intentions of productivity and economic extraction, the better our observations become and the better our science becomes.

I’ve recently started reading a book that I’m already sure will be added to the reading list at OrganicWinepodcast.com. It’s called The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber, and this bit from his introduction, Towards a Poetic Ecology, seems to really fit this episode:

Also, Mike and I have done a fair bit of name-dropping in these two episodes, and I want to give shout outs to some of the great New York producers who informed various ideas and observations and experiences mentioned here: Alfie and Deanna at Dear Native Grapes in the Catskills, Autumn and Ezra at Eve’s Cider in Van Etten, Deva and Eric at Redbyrd Orchard Cider in Trumansburg, and Charlie and Josh of the brand-spanking-new Sylvan Farm in Hammondsport. Get to know these folks and their ciders and wines. There’s a reason we mentioned them.

And now, let’s become the forest.

Enjoy!

My guest for this episode is Mike Biltonen.

Mike is the co-owner, with his wife, of Know Your Roots, an orchard and vineyard consultation and management business in the Northeast US. Mike has spent almost 40 years working with orchards, vineyards, and other specialty crops. He’s farmed in Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, California, and New York. Over the past 20 years his passion for sustainable agriculture has evolved into a profound dedication to the principles and practices of ecologically focused, biodynamic agricultural. He serves as the president of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. For the last 15 years Mike has consulted for orchardists and farmers while also operating his own biodynamically enlivened orchard and mushroom operation in central New York. He keeps alive the legacy of his friend, the late Michael Phillips, and helps maintain Phillips’ Holistic Orchard Network.

This was a very special conversation for me for many reasons, not the least of which was because it was the first in-person interview I’ve done on location. Mike was gracious enough to spend a morning guiding me through his newly established Apostrophe Orchard. As we walk through the trees and other plants, Mike gives us an incredible tour of an orchard established and maintained ecologically with the principles and practices of biodynamics, and a permaculture perspective. You’ll hear the sounds of birds and orchard life all around us in the background as we talk. Since this happened within the context of the freeze event that left no fruit on the trees of Apostrophe Orchard, we discuss what the future of pomiculture and agriculture might look like from both a big perspective and a technical holistic orchard care perspective. The conversation culminates in a discussion of “high frequency beverages” and how human energy has a vital impact on the farm environment and its products.

And this is just part one! In part two, to be released soon, we leave the orchard and walk into the forest… and the conversation becomes influenced by things more ancient, primal, mystical, and even magical by the end… So stay tuned, and … Enjoy!

https://knowyouroots.com/index.html

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

My guest for this episode is Brent Mayeaux of Stagiaire Wines. Brent makes zero-zero wines with a lot of heart and hard work on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. This year Brent also organized and held the Wine From Here wine fair, with help from several other people of course. I’m very impressed with the humility that he embraces with the name of his winery: Stagiaire – the Apprentice. WE never really if we continue to seek and follow our curiosity and passion to make better wine. We will always have more to learn, and I love that Brent owns that with his brand. I also love Brent’s desire for and commitment to honesty and bringing the highest level of integrity with his wine making. And I of course value his promotion and support of making wine a local, farm-to-table experience.

Now this episode has a back story. We recorded an entire episode before this which I decided not to release. I thought I had done a disservice to you and to Brent by drawing him out about some of the discouraging and frustrating aspects of being a winemaker today in California, and elsewhere. However, in addition to those negative elements, there were some good and practically helpful things too, and tons of information and a fun conversation. So I’ve released this original conversation on patreon as “subscribers only” content. If you’d like to support this podcast and listen to that previous conversation, here's the link to our patreon channel where you can subscribe, and visit the "support" page at OrganicWinePodcast.com.

https://www.stagiairewine.com/

https://winefromherefair.com/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

My guest is Marcelo Castro Vera of Octágono, one of a few natural wines in Mexico and the only winery nationwide that ferments in clay vessels buried in the ground. They don't have electricity in the winery, so the whole winemaking process is done by hand. They add zero sulfites to their wine. They also produce artisanal mezcal. The agaves are cooked in earth pits using fallen wood, crushed with a stone tahona using spring water to extract sugars, fermented naturally with no yeast or additional sugars added in wooden vats, distilled in copper stills. They also produce beer, mead, cider, and distilled prickly pear alcohol.

I love Marcelo's thinking about how doing all the winemaking by hand creates jobs for more people, and that he sees this as the goal of the winery rather than getting rich. I hope you are inspired by him to think about what wine could become by eliminating some of the things we take for granted.

@octagonomx

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

My guest for this episode is Dan Durica, and when I asked him about what inspires the work he does, he essentially credited limitations for his inspirations. What if we couldn’t throw fossil fuels at our problems? What if we eliminated the easy solutions we’ve relied on for the past 80 years? What if you couldn’t use fossil fuels to make or sell your wine? No driving, no electricity, no chemical sprays and fertilizers or diesel farm equipment? Answering these what ifs would inevitably cause us to arrive at a very local wine culture in both scale and reach. Putting these limitations on ourselves would make us more resourceful, creative, ecological, and adaptive in our thinking.

Dan lives in a unique community called Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri where he also farms a no-spray, poly-culture vineyard built on the principles of permaculture. He also produces and hosts the Hardcore Sustainable Youtube channel where you’ll find a lot of helpful info about living and growing vines without fossil fuels and get to see what Dan is doing.

Dan also mentioned how far our understanding of what the best agriculture is has grown so much in the last twenty years that the idea of “organic” is kind of outdated. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve joked multiple times about changing the name of this podcast, and that may actually happen soon… when I have a spare minute to redo the entire online infrastructure that it relies on. So… for now it will stay the Organic Wine Podcast… but know that in my heart, and in everything it stands for, it is so much more.

After recording, Dan and I spoke a bit longer and he also proposed the idea that, historically, vineyard establishment has probably taken much longer than it does now. Vineyards were likely integrated into a local ecosystem over decades, rather than years, and thought of as an intergenerational project. Finding vines and other fruit that thrive without sprays can take years of selection, and even breeding. Building fertility and resilience into a vineyard takes years of ecosystem enhancement. I hope to be able to reach back out to Dan in a few years and see how the development of his vineyard has come along.

Also, we both talk about how the future we face will require us to stop thinking of ourselves as grape growers or apple growers or any single vineyard or orchard system managers, and start becoming polyculture farmers who grow a diversity of dozens of crops, and who build a business plan based on much less than 100% production. In California we have just lived through one of if not the wettest winters on record, and that’s following one of, if not the, driest years on record. The northeast US just had the awful combination of an unseasonably warm April followed by a multi-day freeze in May, which devastated the vineyards and orchards.

What Dan is doing, even though on a smaller scale, is an example of what is possible in even the most difficult growing conditions, when you approach wine with a different mindset.

https://www.dancingrabbit.org/

https://www.youtube.com/@HardcoreSustainable/videos

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic W

My guest for this episode is Xaime Niembro, of Vinos Barrigones. Vinos Barrigones translates to “Paunchy Wines” in English, though Google will translate it to “Pot-bellied wines.” And you’ll hear Xaime’s hilarious story of how the name Barrigon became the name for their wines and aesthetic.

Xaime is using his Vinos Barrigones to regenerate his family’s 6.5 hectare or 16 acre vineyard near Queretaro, Mexico. Queretaro is just a bit more than an hour north of Mexico City, and quality viticulture is possible here at this southern latitude because of the high elevation 1800 meters or close to 6000 feet above sea level. Of course that brings some unique challenges as well, and Xaime gives us a great explanation of how he makes wine with the climate to fit his culture and cuisine perfectly.

We also talk briefly about the ciders Xaime is making, and Mezcal, which is where Xaime got his start in fermented beverages. One of the insights Xaime offered that has made me appreciate Mezcal much more than I did was its possibility to express terroir. Unlike grain spirits, which are made with an annual crop, Mezcal is made from a perennial plant that lives in the soil for years – sometimes decades – before harvest. This new way of seeing and appreciating Mezcal has strangely affected my pallet, and Ive found myself actually enjoying it for the first time. I have a decent bottle at home, of course, this is Los Angeles, but I’ve negelected it in my cabinet for years. After this interview I immediately poured a glass for myself … and loved every drop, and mezcal has been the only liquor I’ve ordered at a bar since. So there you go… a little mind pallet connection magic was made possible thanks to Xaime.

So a big thanks to Xaime for expanding my world, and for being the first Mexican wine producer on the podcast. There’s an old and vibrant and growing wine culture in Mexico, and I hope to share more producers with you soon.

Amy Lee – Oom co-founder - Solving Wine’s Biggest Problem

This is a special episode. More than an episode, it’s a direct request to all of you listening right now. Here’s the request: let’s solve the glass bottle problem right now.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast recently, the name Oom should be familiar to you. They’re a sponsor of this podcast, and they are a company based here in my fair city that is tackling the bottle re-use challenge head on. They have begun collecting, de-labeling, cleaning and sanitizing wine bottles to re-sell. They’ve encountered some problems that they can’t solve on their own… they need you. Or really, we all need each other. As you listen to this conversation with Oom co-founder Amy Lee, you’ll see what I mean. Amy wants Oom to help eliminate single use packaging across all industries.

The scope of this conversation is mainly focused on California, but this is a conversation that needs to happen and is happening everywhere. The reason I wanted to get this conversation out to you is because any of us trying to do this anywhere will encounter the same problems, and sharing these problems and their potential solutions as a global community of winemakers and wine lovers will move all of these efforts forward toward solutions much more quickly.

The main issues come down to two things that all of us listening can help make happen: first, we need to use label materials that can be removed without chemical processes, and second, we need to agree on just a handful of standard bottle shapes and colors that we all use if we buy new glass.

Why do we need to do this? Why is this conversation not only important, but urgent? Because glass is far and away the biggest source of emissions for the wine industry, and re-using bottles can drastically reduce the emissions associated with producing and using new glass.

Also, most wine bottles do not get recycled in the US. Those of you listening in Europe do much better with your recycling, but in the US we recycle less than 31% of our wine bottles. And the bad news about recycling glass is that it produces a lot of emissions to heat glass to close to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit so that it can be re-molded.

My hope is that those of you listening now can choose to alter your bottle and label purchasing behavior immediately to begin to facilitate a transition to a re-use system. If you’re not a wine producer, tell your favorite producers about this opportunity. Let them know you’d like them to embrace these bottling choices and that you’d not only be okay with it, you’d love it. If you’re a wine maker, get everyone at your custom crush onto the same bottles and labels. Spread this podcast and this message to everyone you know in wine. Because it will take all of us, and we’ll need to work with the glass producers too.

I was at a local wine fair yesterday here in Los Angeles for natural wine producers. I think every producer and supporter there was philosophically receptive to this kind of change, but what was lacking was a moment in the center of that event where someone called everyone in attendance to attention and rallied us all together as community of like-minded individuals who have a lot of power to make that change happen, and appeal to us to take action to make this happen. This is that appeal.

And if you are hosting or organizing an event or know someone who is, please consider structuring that moment into your festival. Whether it’s to instigate action to create a bottle re-use program, or a three-minute appeal to make any other change happen that we desperately need to make, I’m beginning to feel like these festivals are missed opportunities to do something important.

We have linear systems in place right now. Linear systems can only exist if we assume the earth’s resources are infinite, if we assume that we can continue to take without giving back. We all know this assumption is tragically wrong – linear systems all have dead ends, and so it’s time to set up a new circular system based on the assumption that our world and its resources are precious and finite and require us to give back on the same level at which we take. This conversation is about how we start to do that.

Prepare to go on a magical, and at times hilarious, journey to a special place on earth.

Your guide on this journey is Jess Hopwood, and she has a lot of experience spoiling voyagers with amazing trips. She has been, among other things, a flight attendant on private jets, a butler on luxury yachts, and now runs Farm to Glass Wine Tours in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The Okanagan is that special place on earth. The furthest north location on the planet with a hot Mediterranean climate, the Okanagan centers on a lake that runs 81 miles north to south and is surrounded by beautiful towns, towering mountains, Mediterranean blue lakes, and wine. I have to admit that I was woefully ignorant of this area, but it has jumped to the top of my list of wine regions to visit thanks to Jess.

Jess guides us through the climate, the scenery, the history, and some of the amazing people, farming, and wines that can be found in the Okanagan. This is by no means an exhaustive accounting of producers who are doing great farming and making amazing fermentations. The Okanagan is a large and diverse region with much more to be discovered, but I think you’ll be enchanted even by just this short day trip.

Jess visited me on a recent trip to LA and brought some unique wines from the Naramata sub-region of the Okanagan, and we discuss these wines and their producers, and the beauty of this place where vines grow on benchland cliffs over the lake, and the land was named for a famous smile. The Okanagan is at the forefront of organic, or better, agriculture, in Canada, and Jess focuses on small, local producers who do great farming. At the end of the day, before a final refreshing dip in the lake, Jess takes us on a quick trip up the Similkameen – a river valley with sheer mountain walls that flows into the Okanagan and is known as the organic capital of Canada.

https://farmtoglasswinetours.ca/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

Master Sommelier David Keck discovered his love for wine while pursuing a career—and traveling the world—as an opera singer. He has a Master of Music Degree from Rice University, an undergraduate degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and attended Juilliard for opera performance.

After years of bartending and working in hospitality between operatic gigs, David took his first sommelier course with the Court of Master Sommeliers in 2010 and decided to make the career change. David was named one of Food & Wine’s Sommeliers of the Year in 2016, and passed his Master Sommelier exam later that year, making him the 149th American Master Sommelier and the 233rd in the world. He was awarded the StarChefs Rising Stars Restaurateur of the Year award in 2019. He has presented seminars for the Court of Master Sommeliers, GuildSomm, Vine Society, and numerous other educational organizations, as well as being a featured presenter at events such as the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, Pebble Beach Food & Wine, Nantucket Food & Wine, and many others. He is a sought-after wine judge for competitions both nationally and abroad.

Since going full-force into the hospitality field, he has worked in every aspect of the beverage industry: He has opened restaurants, wine bars, honky-tonks and retail shops, worked as a sales rep. and directed wine programs for distribution companies, and now farms a vineyard and makes wine with hybrid grapes in the mountains of his home state, Vermont, under the label Stella 14 with his partner Lauren.

https://www.stella14wines.com/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

This is a winemaker’s episode, and I just realized – to my satisfaction – that the vast majority of this podcast focuses on the farming of wine. Since I’m at around 10% in the cellar and 90% in the vinyorchard in terms of my focus, I tried to make up for lost cellar time with this episode.

My guest is Clark Smith. Clark has been making and studying wine since the 1970’s. He’s had a huge influence on the wine world through his wine consulting business, and in 2013 he published the book Postmodern Winemaking. Ten years later, that book is still groundbreaking.

Clark knows more than you do about the chemistry of winemaking. In addition to that, he’ll tell you he has a bit of an ego. He may say some things that rub you the wrong way. He may say some things that you find hard to believe. He may say some things that contradict everything you know. But he may also say some things that enlighten you and revolutionize your winemaking. There really isn’t a way to pigeon-hole him. Clark is candid, transparent, a bit of a pot-stirrer, and in pursuit of the most soulful wine he can make.

In the past he has been the whipping boy for the natural wine press, partly for his embrace of new technologies, and partly for his willingness to confront hype with science. Depending on your convictions, you can fault him or thank him for introducing Reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation to America, but you cannot fault him for concealing his use of techniques or technologies in his winemaking… which is more than I can say for some who claim to make natural wine. You may disagree with him, but make sure you understand him before you dismiss him.

We cover A LOT of ground in this conversation, including:

What wine really is – the googe-ness of wine

Minerality comes from living soil

Why brix has nothing to do with ripeness, and how determining ripeness takes a personal relationship with a vineyard

Why watering back wine increases its aromatic and color intensity

Why he makes his best wines without sulfites, and how everything that’s common knowledge about sulfites in wine is wrong

Why Brettanomyces is a hospital disease, and why a living wine with good structure beats it.

Wine Diamonds

White Wine making

Sweet Wine making

And Much more.

Buckle in… maybe grab a note pad… and

Enjoy!

Drew Herman – Assume Superiority, Farm Scared, and Pretend Like You Know What You’re Doing While Killing Your Plants

Imagine if you were a thousand foot tall giant. How successful would you be at helping a 5 foot tall farmer collect her chickens eggs? Drew Herman is back for a second episode jam-packed with information and laughs. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode with Drew, I highly recommend checking it out first. It was episode # 74, published back in July of 2022 and was titled Microbial Democracy for a Healthy Vineyard and World. In this new episode, Drew discusses the game changing discovery of rhizophagy and what that means for the way we farm wine… and he manages to crack me up with memorable quips about once a minute. Drew wants to impress upon us how each new discovery about the soil microbiome and the way plants function with it shows how little we know. We discuss plants’ incredible genetic intelligence and the need to start assuming that they know vastly more than we do about how to take care of them.. We discuss recently discovered fallacies about fallowing and soil pH. We talk about the desperate need to reintroduce breeding new vines as standard practice in wine, and the stunning genetic potential in a seed, including a full arsenal of microbiology that actually teaches it how to grow. Given our deepening understanding of our ignorance, Drew beseeches us to stop blundering around with fertilization and pesticide programs, the impacts of which we really don’t understand. The vines we farm, as it turns out, are much better farmers than we are… and our efforts to help them usually just get in their way. Like a mushroom foraging expedition, there are non-sequitur delights scattered throughout this conversation all the way through to the end when Drew discusses the importance of voles and how to manage them in the vineyard. He also offers numerous free resources to deepen your knowledge and learn how much we have to learn.

Drew is vineyard manager at JK Carriere wines in Oregon, but I think his true gift may be in making deep soil science as fun as playing in the dirt… hopefully playing in the dirt sounds fun to you. If not… well, just think of something fun, and then associate that with Drew.

Enjoy!

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine - delicious, ecological wine

Catavino Tours - amazing, wine tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards - plant your own vineyard

When I think of Vermont, I think of slanted light and moody skies, wildflowers and rosy cheeks, small farms and big forests. And because of my guest for this episode, when I think of Vermont I also think of hardy vines and delicious wines. Deirdre Heekin is the person behind La Garagista and Domaine de la Forêt, along with her husband Caleb, and what seems to be a continual stream of young winemakers who help and learn and have become the next generation of Vermont wine.

Deirdre is a restauranteur, vigneron, writer, photographer, mentor, gardener… and more, and that means we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about the magic of the forest and why grapevines are integral to the forest edge ecology that we aim to replicate with holistic, regenerative agriculture. We talk about Deirdre’s approach to farming Brianna, which involves not pruning it. She also shares some of the unique approaches she has developed for making cider and wine and coferments and other things that don’t have names by gleaning from ancient techniques and by learning from nature and the opportunities it presents to work with it to create one-of-a-kind fermentations.

My guest for this episode is Hans Peter Schmidt. He goes by Peter Schmidt, and he is a director and faculty member for the Ithaka Institute,  an international network for carbon strategies and climate farming, and he farms and makes wine from the amazing Mythopia wine-ecosystem in Switzerland, which he also uses as a research vineyard for the Ithaka Institute. He’s also involved in other winegrowing projects around southern Europe, and has a pretty big reputation for his approach to wine.

In this interview we cover viticulture, winemaking, and the philosophy of wine. Peter may be the most non-interventionist – or natural or naturalistic – winemaker I’ve ever encountered. You may think him strange for some of the things he does with wine, and you may think him mad for some of the things he doesn't do. You’ll hear how these things are even possible. Hint: it has to do with mindset as much as ecology.

Peter makes wine in a way that, once you hear its simplicity, could revolutionize your own winemaking. If you end up making wine in the way that Peter does, Peter only requests that you send him a bottle to thank him for the idea… a sort of intellectual property royalty payment.  I for sure at least want to try a batch of wine the way Peter makes – or really doesn’t make it.  

Peter ends the conversation with a perspective, or really a meditation, or how wine fits into the human story. Like so much of this conversation, it merely scratches the surface and gives a glimpse of many beautiful things that we can begin to explore.

Enjoy!

https://www.mythopia.ch/mythopia/fe/de

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

My guest for this episode is Virginia Samsel. Virginia is a unique kind of vineyard, or orchard, consultant. She provides energy work and consultation using a synthesis of biodynamics and reiki. She translates the the messages she receives from a site into helpful advice for the people who care for it, and that can help farmers build a spiritual connection to their land.

Much of this conversation is at and beyond the limits of our language to express. So it’s important to be open. You may not be able to go along with Virginia on everything, and that’s okay. I think you will find that she doesn’t subtract from anything you already know, and she can add some new ways of seeing and knowing your landscape.

She gives us some really important tips on how to begin to connect with the land and the things living in it. She talks about spending Non-transactional time with your vines and or trees. Developing a relationship with your site that includes being vulnerable and allowing it to get to know the other parts of you beyond just your farmer side. She offers ideas about how to relate to the land and develop it as more than just a production facility. She reminds us that tending our vineyards is synonymous with tending ourselves.

Ultimately, this interview is full of resources for turning this Anthropocene, or capitalocene, into an Ecocene of renewed connectivity.

Enjoy!

https://vavadynamica.com/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

One of the sponsors for this episode is actually the guest for this episode: Stephen Wilson of Vermont Vineyards. I met Stephen at the Vitinord Conference, where VT Vineyards was also a sponsor, and I admired him and his approach to viticulture enough to suggest that we have this conversation… and I guess the feeling was mutual because he simultaneously suggested sponsoring the podcast. The result is that you can go to VTVineyards.com/owp and hire Stephen to install a vineyard for you, and that vineyard installation will support this podcast.

If you’ve considered planting your own vineyard, or even just putting in a few vines for landscaping features, like over a pergola or fence, then you’ll find this conversation helpful. Since both Stephen and I plant vineyards in backyards or even larger landscapes – or front yards in my case – and since we do this in the very different contexts of Southern California and Vermont, we have a wide range of perspectives and approaches to compare and discuss. We don’t get highly technical, but we do get to some of the dirty details and realities of being a vineyard caretaker. So there’s some very valuable information for potential vineyard owners and some important ideas for everyone to consider. And both Stephen and I find tending vines to be very rewarding work on multiple levels. Stephen’s idea for VT Vineyards was born during the pandemic, and grew from a desire to heal and enrich other people’s lives with a reconnection to the natural world through vines.

Stephen and I talk about the Vermont wine scene, and we both want to acknowledge that we couldn’t talk about everyone. There are, and have been, many winegrowers who we didn’t mention by name who have done much important work for Vermont wine. Since this was not a conversation about the history of Vermont wine, we inevitably omitted lots of people who deserve mention and respect.

Enjoy, and Happy Spring!

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

This episode is about making room for the unknown. Or the known, but unmeasurable. If making wine means more than botany and chemistry to you, if you find yourself so deep in the soil that you've started making mycorrhizal connections, if you've begun to notice that what we talk about when we talk about wine is connected to things that have nothing to do with wine... this episode is for you.

A big thanks to Chiara Shannon and Darek Trowbridge for candidly discussing these ideas. We’d really like to know what you think about this episode, so please email any comments, or questions to connect@organicwinepodcast.com. We only scratch the surface of this topic, but I think you’ll find some inspiring ideas including:

Darek’s proposal of Sacred Grade wine, quite a few books and resources to check out, a discussion of some of the as yet unmeasurable aspects of Biodynamics, with a really amazing story that Darek shares about the efficacy of the 501 preparation and how he made believers of his entire vineyard crew. And we talk in many ways about regeneration and rewilding, how these land-centered ideas are connected to and echoed inside us, as well as how our interior lives get reflected in how we care for our land and our vines.

https://www.mindfulwine.co/

https://www.oldworldwinery.com/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

Catavino Tours

Oom - recycled bottles for wine

VT Vineyards

Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.

I’d like to introduce you to a source of inspiration for me personally, and my guest for this episode: Marreya Bailey. Marreya’s winery is Mad Marvlus, which, as she mentions, sounds like a super hero name. And maybe that’s appropriate. Marreya doesn’t really make wine with Mad Marvlus, she creates living embodiments of personality and spirit that you can drink. She calls them her creatures. Don’t expect just grapes, but any and every natural thing that produces sugar and flavor in her environment. Don’t expect traditional wine either, unless by traditional you mean the actual traditions from cultures around the globe that were practiced for millennia prior to this strange thing that has happened for the last fifty years.

Marreya is also the founding mother and co-partner of The Bathing Collective, which you’ll have to listen to find out what it is… and the future that it hopes to bring about.

My guest for this episode is J Stephen Casscles, author of the book Grapes of the Hudson Valley, and grower of 106 varieties of hybrids and heritage wine grapes in the Hudson Valley.

If I were to boil this entire episode down into one message it would be to Treat hybrids like real grapes!

We talk all about the benefits and characteristics of these heritage and hybrid grapes. We talk about the added benefits of growing grapes on their own roots, rather than rootstock. We talk about why hybrids were banned in France. We talk about the benefits of the greater productivity of these grapes, the benefits of the disease resistance of these grapes. We talk about making wine from hybrids, and how they can immensely expand your palate of flavors to work with.

Stephen has a wealth of information to share and this interview is a non-stop firehose of wine knowledge.

Enjoy!

I recently introduced a new sponsor for the podcast, Catavino Tours. One of the main reasons I decided to partner with Catavino Tours was because of their founder, 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.