This episode is a conversation with three gents who help caretake the oldest winery in the world: Staffelter Hof. It has been a winery since the 800s… and it seems incredibly fitting that Jan Matthias Klein, Kosie van der Merwe, and Nicolas Haack are thinking and talking about how to build resilience into their systems. They farm organically, have planted PIWIs, and implements several hectares of a vitiforestry block. We dig into what’s going on in the Mosel that has necessitated and allowed for these changes. We dig into their vitiforestry project, and talk about the mindset shift that may be required to embrace it. Shade is not shade as it turns out, in the sense that there are many kinds of shade and not all shade is equal. We look at how some aspects that may be perceived as potential problems of vitiforestry become irrelevant once you take a different perspective. Monoculture has infiltrated the way we think, as it turns out, and diversity grows out of a change in thinking.

Staffelter Hof seems to be embracing the Albert Einstein quote: We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

And I hope this conversation helps inspire you to new ways of thinking.

https://www.staffelter-hof.de/

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Sponsors:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

This episode is an outdoor spirits tasting with Rob Easter in the backyard at Crenshaw Cru… so you will hear some authentic LA audio texture in the back ground. Rob Easter is the man behind Workhorse Rye and Modern Ancient spirits, and he’s trying to instigate a revolution in the grain spirits industry.

The vast majority of grain spirits in the US come from a single variety of genetically modified corn, rye, or wheat and are made in a handful massive industrial facilities using the same recipes. Slap a new label on it and market the hell out of it, because they’re all the same other than how much time they spent in charred American oak barrels.

On the other hand, there are thousands of varieties of heritage grains that have many different delicious flavors and could introduce an incredible diversity into our spirits industry… God this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Rob is not only taking on the status quo with regards to ingredients and the way they are farmed, but also the use of oak in spirits, traceability, and more. There hasn’t really been a Natural Spirits movement the way there has been a natural wine movement to shake things up. Even the craft spirits industry sources similar grain, or, with very few exceptions, doesn’t register the farming of the grain in its top concerns. So… maybe Rob is in the vanguard of what should be called the Regenerative Spirits movement. I hope he helps inspire a wave of spirit enthusiasts who care, as he does, about what the ingredients are, where they come from, how they’re farmed, who farms them, and making spirits that showcase these flavors.

https://www.workhorserye.com/

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Sponsors:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Regine Rousseau. Regine is the the founder & CEO of Shall We Wine, and she’s also the communications director for The Veraison Project… one of the best named programs in wine. Regine explains the work of Veraison Project, and she offers some really important insights into how we can help make wine more inclusive. I’ll be honest, I got a little choked up as I relistened to her describe why someone might get involved in wine, as it has been narrowly defined, despite it not being friendly to people who look like her. Here’s a hint… it’s about love. Ultimately, I hope Regine helps you, as she helped me, fall even deeper in love with wine.

https://www.theveraisonproject.com/

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Sponsors:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

When we say the word "wine" we most often express a system of unquestioned assumptions that excludes the fruit fermentation traditions of everyone throughout all time who has made "wine" from anything besides Vitis vinifera. As we head into 2024, I'm asking us to begin to question those assumptions. Whose definition of wine are we using? Who and what is included and excluded from the dominant definition of wine?

This is a journey through history, enslavement, genocide, marriage, archaeology, culture, love, and truth. This is a journey to discover the soul of wine.

My guest for this episode is Cameron Clark. Cameron just finished a masters program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. As part of completing his masters he spent several months working on an Biodynamic farm and the wrote a thesis titled: Spiritual Agriculture, Wellness, & Sustainability: A case study of Biodynamic agriculture in South Tyrol, Italy

Last week’s episode with Garett Long about Biodynamics asked us to reconsider what questions we haven’t asked of our farming systems. In this episode, we discuss the central claim of Cameron’s that a spiritual approach to agriculture is not just an optional add-on for farmers who happen to have that bent, but it is an essential part of the most efficacious and productive forms of agriculture and will be necessary as we navigate the transition away from anthropocentrism and economically motivated values systems.

Cameron’s definition of “spiritual” may not be what that term normally conjures for you, so hang in there to hear how he defines "spiritual agriculture." We also discuss, as Cameron does in his thesis, the conflicts that arise from trying to practice spiritual viticulture in an economically driven world, and the compromises, complexity, and nuance that result. These are the tough decisions we all face daily – whether we are directly involved in agriculture or not. And that’s why I think you’ll find this discussion with Cameron so relevant. As he says in his thesis:

"We have no choice but to use land--our existence requires food procurement and energy usage, tying all of us into inextricable relations with the world that leave a wake in the lives of others (Heldke, 2018). We are only left, then, with a choice of how to engage with our land--in a life-diminishing or life-promoting way."

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Sponsors:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Robin Wall Kimmmerer's Three Sisters Essay

This episode is a special how-to exploration of a year of biodynamic viticulture.  The more I’ve learned about biodynamics, the curiouser and curiouser I’ve become, and the more I want to learn. So this episode digs into biodynamics from both a practical and a philosophical perspective. 2024 is the 100 year anniversary of the start of Biodynamics, and I thought it was time to both celebrate it and take a deeper look at why it has been effective. 

My guest for this episode is Garett Long. Garett is the Director of Agriculture at Troon Vineyards. Troon Vineyard is a Demeter Biodynamic® Certified and Regenerative Organic Gold Certified™️ farm in Oregon’s Applegate Valley. They are only the fourth farm in the world to achieve Regenerative Gold Certification, and they are creating a beautiful culture in southern Ofregon. I had a great conversation with Troon’s General Manager, Craig Camp, over a year ago for an episode that I highly recommend finding in the Beyond Organic Wine library.

Garett takes us through an entire year of biodynamic practices at Troon, so this episode is information rich. One of my favorite things about talking to Garett is that while I intended this to be a step-by-step instructional for practicing biodynamics, he made it so much more. We get the practical how-to, but we never get very far from the relevance of the spiritual aspects of agriculture to those practices. This is in part due to Garett’s deep sense of the importance of the spiritual aspects of farming to farming itself, and in part due to biodynamics, which is unique as a farming practice in its embrace of spiritual perspectives. Garett talks frankly about some of the ways that biodynamics is often dismissed, but he also offers alternative perspectives and interpretations about what these things may arise from.

One note to keep in mind is that I ask Garett to talk quite a bit about the requirements of Demeter Biodynamic certification, and I just want to point out that while he’s extremely knowledgeable about this, he isn’t a BD certifier and isn’t speaking for Demeter. So please do your own research and talk to the folks at Demeter if you want to get certified. Having said that, Garett is a wealth of information, and I think everyone will find this conversation to be incredibly valuable whether or not you plan to get BD certified. Most valuable of all, I think, are the questions about whether we have been asking the right questions about biodynamics, the questions that ask us to consider what we don’t yet know.

https://www.troonvineyard.com/

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Sponsors:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

For a dose of hope and imagination and a vision of beauty and permanence, for this episode I bring you Ron and Monique of Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands. Ron and Monique are doing so much cool stuff all at once I don’t know where to begin. They are the largest commercial no-spray vineyard that I’m aware of, at 6 hectares or 15 acres, and they’re doing this in Holland… That means that the vines they grow are resilient to some pretty bad, wet weather… trust me, I spent a year there. And 2 hectares or 5 acres of that vineyard is a younger vitiforestry planting that will use trees as living trellis posts. When you hear about how and why they use a high cordon trellising system, how and why they mow very sparsely, how and why they don’t need to add fertilizer, how and why they’ve chosen the tree partners in the vitiforestry block, and how this system lends itself to expressive wines… and so much more, you will see how incredibly caring and thoughtful they are about the ecology of every element of their system… and why I’m so thrilled to share this with you! While there are folks doing pieces of what Ron and Monique are doing, I have yet to find anyone doing all of this in one vineyard… and they are doing it in a place that doesn’t even have a wine tradition, mostly because of the shitty! I guess what I’m trying to say is… if they can do what they are doing where they are doing it… the rest of us have no excuses. Let your imaginations run wild!

https://dassemus.nl/

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Sponsors:

https://stokewines.au/

We at the Stoke wanted to sponsor the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast because of the importance of the message that so many of these conversations bring. Our future generations depend on us, and education is the key to a change in our concepts of how we could and should be farming and treating our soils. It doesn’t matter your level of education with these topics, as long and you are willing to learn and your heart is in the right place, YOU will make a difference and it doesn’t matter the size as it all adds up. Keep pushing and please keep chatting. Let’s do this.

Mentioned in the intro:

https://www.lylajune.com/

What if things get better?

Tags: vitiforestry, no-spray vineyard, biodynamic vineyard, piwi grapes, hybrid grapes

This episode is sponsored by Stoke Wines.

https://stokewines.au/

My guest for this episode is Jason Haas. Jason is the partner and general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles California. I hope that you’ve heard of Tablas Creek, but if not, let me give you a short list of their environmental leadership in the wine industry. Tablas Creek was the first Regenerative Organic Certified winery in the world. They’ve been farming organically since their start in 1989, certified organic since 2005, and certified biodynamic since 2015. They employ a full-time shepherd to manage a year-round flock of over 250 sheep that rotationally graze their 270 acres of vineyards, as well as the woodlands around them. Their winery is 100% solar powered, and they use their wastewater to feed a native species wetland. They are leaders in reducing glass bottle weights and bringing awareness to the many downsides of heavy glass bottles, and they are pioneering alternative packaging for ultra-premium wine. And this is just a short list. We talk about all of this, as well as get into the technicalities of no-till and low-till considerations in regenerative viticulture. We talk about how Tablas Creek has brought every grape from Chateauneuf du Pape to the US through the rigorous and time consuming process of quarantining that can take over a decade… and it’s likely if you’ve drunk a wine from the US made with a Rhone variety of grape, you can thank Tablas Creek.

Behind all of this, I hope you get a sense of the timeline of the vision for this winery. It extends beyond Jason’s, or any single person’s lifetime. It’s a vision of continual, incremental improvement, of regeneration, over centuries. It’s a vision that I hope inspires the way we think about wine.

https://tablascreek.com/

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Sponsors:

https://stokewines.au/

We at the Stoke wanted to sponsor the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast because of the importance of the message that so many of these conversations bring. Our future generations depend on us, and education is the key to a change in our concepts of how we could and should be farming and treating our soils. It doesn’t matter your level of education with these topics, as long and you are willing to learn and your heart is in the right place, YOU will make a difference and it doesn’t matter the size as it all adds up. Keep pushing and please keep chatting. Let’s do this.

My guest for this episode is Nick Dugmore. Nick is a winemaker in South Australia for his winery The Stoke. Nick listened to the episode I recorded with Jeff Lowenfels about the soil microbiome, and he’s been traveling down the regenerative viticulture rabbit hole ever since. In 2023 he was named Australia’s Young Gun of Wine, and then four months ago he was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer. He’s 39 years old.

When you hear Nick’s positivity, humor, and joy, keep in mind that he’s in the midst of the following treatment schedule: 5 x 3 week rounds of chemotherapy with 1 week of intravenous followed by 112 tablets over two weeks and then a week break. Then 6 weeks of radiotherapy which is 5 days a week at the hospital for 45 mins. Then a 3 month break and then surgery to remove what’s left.

We talk frankly about his cancer and the fact that his alcohol consumption may have contributed to it. Yet Nick is incredibly grateful to work in wine, and he loves the winemaking community. Both Nick and I can thank wine for the most important relationships in our lives – our spouses. But if his cancer was caused by alcohol, there’s a chance that alcohol could take his life. Both are parts of wine, and there are many more. Nick talks about the wine community that has come to his aid, and he talks about the spirituality of wine, and the beauty of Kangaroo Island where he converted 12 acres of conventional vineyard to a thriving regenerative ecosystem. He makes some profound connections between soil health, physical health, and mental health. And at least twice he mentions how busy we all are, and how this leads us to make thoughtless decisions… because we don’t have the time to be thoughtful.

It reminds me of the famous quote from Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual: "The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature, of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action."

As I think about regenerating wine, Nick has made me think about how important time is. The speed of our lives is completely antithetical to the complexity of life. Look how patiently nature grows an ecosystem, look how it builds complexity and diversity layer by layer over centuries. I want to make wine this way. I want to think about wine this way, and let this perspective inform the decisions I make for this vintage. I want to stop rushing to buy things when I don’t know where they came from or how they were made. I want to take the time to observe and learn about complex things carefully. I want to take the time to be grateful.

AKA - How to make wine from everything besides grapes!

It seems to me that what we have called wine and revered as wine and created certifications and diplomas about, is not actually wine. It’s one perspective on one kind of wine from one region of the planet. And I think the first step, the lowest hanging fruit if you will, to having an authentic local wine culture is simply using local ingredients. Put another way, culture grows out of the earth. If it is imported and forced onto the land, it is neither sustainable nor is it culture. Do we even know what American wine, or Australian wine, or Chilean wine actually tastes like? Or do we only know what French wine tastes like when you make it in various places around the planet?

My guests for this episode are the gentlemen of Hermit Woods Winery in New Hampshire: Ken Hardcastle, Chuck Lawrence, and Bob Manley. They have an incredible story of asking these questions and beginning a journey of discovering and creating their local wine culture. These guys are exploring unexplored territory in wine, and they have a lot of knowledge to share about what they are finding.

The wines of Hermit Woods Winery are well-aged, dry, textured, complex, with great mouthfeel and nuanced aromas, but they aren’t made from grapes. They’re made from blends of things like quince, day lily, kiwiberry, black raspberry, honey, and rhubarb, and many other fruits and plants, herbs, flowers, and spices that thrive in New Hampshire. They make about 35 different wines, at least, every year, and they have been at this for over 15 years. They started by asking “Does it have to be a grape?” and I think they’ve answered that question with an emphatic “Absolutely not.”

We cover their philosophy and their unique approach to winemaking, and this conversation has an inordinate amount of practical and helpful ideas for anyone who might want to consider joining this local wine movement. These guys are an incredible resource, whether for technical advice on navigating the particular challenges of fermenting things like tomatoes and how long you need to wait before Japanese knotweed wine stops smelling like baby wipes, or for how to reconstruct a metaphoric grape.

Though this should be obvious, I think it’s very important to point out that the diversity of ingredients that Hermit Woods uses supports, honors, and generates more biodiversity and more diversity of wines. There are many practical advantages to not relying on a single variety of fruit for your entire production, and in the bigger picture it also leads to a healthier, more resilient, and more beautiful wine culture. These three friends are changing the world of wine as we know it, and they seem to be having a lot of fun doing it.

https://hermitwoods.com/

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Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

My guest for this episode is Zac Brown of Alderlea Vineyards in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Zac grows an array of grapes in his vineyard, some that he has to spray multiple times every year, and some that he doesn't really have to spray but chooses to once per year. Zac grows resilient wine grapes (some PIWIs), side by side with more common vinifera, and he has direct comparisons between their resilience and performance in many ways. His findings are striking: the resilient hybrids out-perform vinifera in every measure, including fungal resistance, drought resistance, recovery from extreme heat and cold, and productivity... and the hybrids don't need to be sprayed to do this.

In addition to talking about the viticultural advantages to growing resilient grape varieties, we discuss wine making techniques for working with specific resilient grapes. Like any grape, they can make beautiful wine but each variety requires its own specific care in the winery to elicit its best flavors. Zac had some great insights for making wine with the varieties he grows.

Zac is at the forefront of a revolution - the dawn of the ecological era of viticulture, guided by biology. His mixed vineyard provides a great example of a way that the larger wine industry may begin to transition to a kind of wine that can withstand climate change... and be interesting, indigenous, and delicious.

https://www.alderlea.ca/

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If you'd like to sponsor an episode, please contact Adam at:

connect@organicwinepodcast.com

My guest for this episode is Nan McCarry, and she’s no exception to the exceptional people I’ve been fortunate to get to know because of this podcast. Nan is an ethnobotanist by passion and trade, and she has had a focus on the native grapes of North America over the last few years. What we might call “native” grapes, Nan refers to as “crop wild relatives.” She talks about the importance of preserving the biodiverse gene pool contained in these crop wild relative, and the work she has helped with to catalog and inventory these North American vines. One of the most famous incidents demonstrating the importance of the biodiversity contained within crop wild relatives is the rescue of the entire European wine industry from phylloxera.

The term “crop wild relatives” of course refers to the genetic ancestors of our current domesticated wine crops. But by the time Nan gets done explaining the process of domestication from an evolutionary perspective, you may begin to think of that term in a different way. You may begin to step away from your human-centric perspective and see yourself as a relative of the grapevines that you tend.

This idea was introduced to me, actually, on a podcast called The Land You’re On, which I highly recommend. It’s a podcast that interviews members of the Onondaga and other nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy… the oldest currently functioning democracy on earth, and the inspiration for our current society here in the US and other western democracies. If you’ve heard of the three sisters in gardening and farming – corn, beans, and squash – this came from the people of the Haudenosaunee. Like strawberries? You can thank these folks for those as well. And in one of the episodes about an incredible living library of seeds, an Onondaga Seedkeeper talks about how her culture sees food as a relative. The crops collaborate with the people who farm them to help each other survive, have sovereignty, and provide for 7 generations to come. If you’re going to listen to just one episode from this podcast, let it be this one… I never would have thought that a seed bank could make me cry, but wow.

And I began to think about how I could see wine as a relative. What would that mean? How would I work differently with vines? How would I work with fermentations if I took this perspective?

Nan and I talk about a presentation she created which is one of the most unique and impactful combinations of science and psychology that I’ve seen. Nan sees wine, grapevines, and everything from an evolutionary standpoint. And like many of you, and myself, cares deeply about what humans are doing to the environment. Because of this, she partnered with a local organization dedicated to mindfulness – imaginebeingwell.org - to explain the Cosmic Evolution Story and how this helps deal with eco-anxiety. I’ve definitely experienced eco-anxiety, and I found Nan’s presentation to be one of the most helpful things I’ve ever seen, which actually speaks to me from a scientific perspective that I found refreshing and more compelling than many other things I’ve seen. We only touch on a small part of her presentation here, but Nan has generously allowed me to post the entire presentation on her episode page at BeyondOrganicWine.com. Also at BeyondOrganicWine.com you’ll find a link to Nan’s talk about the importance of native grapes, and you can learn more about Nan and her other projects at:

Ethnobot.org and on Instagram at @successionalforest

Enjoy!

In the intro to this episode I introduce the new name of the podcast: Beyond Organic Wine Podcast. I also talk about the three weeks I've spent working with the crew of La Garagista, including Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber, and Camila Carrillo of La Montañela, and Anna Travers of Lilith Wines.

Should you get a chance to come to Vermont, you could not be more fortunate than to meet this crew – maybe coven is a better word – who make up the team here at La Garagista. Deirdre and Caleb, Camilla of La Montanuela, and Anna of Lilith Wines, I’ve had the honor to work alongside and learn from these lovely folks, both in the vineyard and winery, and I can’t say enough here to do justice to the amazing work that they are doing. Their commitment to an ecological approach to growing grapes and making wine is beautiful, inspiring, and delicious. If you haven’t listened to my previous interview with Deirdre Heekin, it’s pretty special. But also, her wines, and the wines of Lilith and La Montanuela are transformative. The wines are informed by deep passion and a seemingly preternatural ability to intuit what kinds of wines these grapes in these conditions want to become, all without any inputs other than cosmic energy and probably a little magic.

https://www.lagaragista.com/

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Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

My guest for this episode is Mireia Pujol-Busquets, and she’s breeding the future of Catalonian grapes at her family’s estate vineyard just outside of Barcelona, Spain, called Alta Alella.

27% of the organic vineyards globally are in Spain, making Spain the country with the most organic vineyards in the world, by area. Mireia grew up on a vineyard that was organic from its inception in 1991, but she wanted to go her own way and follow her fascination with science. So instead of viticulture and oenology, she studied Biology at university, and then had two unique experiences working with agriculture in Thailand and Switzerland.

In Switzerland she got introduced to resistant hybrid grapes, piwis, and saw that if grapevines were allowed to reproduce sexually, instead of through cloning, they could evolve and adapt to the changes of nature. In contrast to the traditional vinifera grapes that her family grew organically – that needed to be constantly sprayed with copper and sulfur – she saw that grapes could be bred to need no sprays at all. As she looked to the legacy and the land that she would leave not only her children, but generations to come, she realized she needed to start the process of making viticulture something that improved the land, and as a farmer she saw the increasing need for more resistant and resilient vines that could survive in a rapidly more extreme climate.

So Mireia has started a project to breed the traditional vinifera varieties of Catalonia to produce resistant varieties that preserve the culture of her land, but that can be farmed without sprays of any kind, and that can withstand the increasingly extreme weather conditions. Her project is called the Resistant and Autochthonous Varieties Adapted to Climate Change (VRIAACC, acronym in Spanish). With resistant varieties of grapes and the elimination of the need to spray, she will reduce compaction, reduce emissions, create a healthier environment for humans and animals working in and around the vineyard, and reduce losses due to fungal infestations.

https://altaalella.wine/

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Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

his episode is a special update on the 2023 vintage at my "estate” winegarden - Crenshaw Cru - in Los Angeles, where we lost essentially the entire crop to powdery mildew this year despite regular organic treatments and canopy management.

But more than that, this episode is a call for an honest assessment of the vine species upon which we base our global wine industry: vitis vinifera. The truth is that it is inferior in almost every way possible, and can no longer even claim superiority of flavors, to other grapes that have been hybridized in recent years. It has become a drag on our resources, our creativity, and our joy, and it’s time to explode the narrow box - the coffin - that we’ve put wine in for far too long. It’s time to eradicate prejudice and bring wine back to life with a diversity of wine cultures.

My guest for this episode is Gizem Duyar of Kerasus Wine. Gizem lives and makes wine in Turkey from “married vines.” That are over a century old. A married vine is a vine that has been wrapped to a tree, grown with the tree, and lives symbiotically with a tree as its support structure. It is likely the most ancient form of viticulture because it is simply mimicking how vines grow naturally without human intervention. This was the original vitiforestry. Because of this relationship with its partner tree, the vine gets many benefits that Gizem discusses.

There’s something so special about this relationship that Gizem has committed to making a very traditional form of natural wine in amphora that she has altered to include a unique technique for keeping the wine amber or orange wine while including both white and red grapes. She adds nothing and removes nothing to the wine so that it can reflect that special expression of the relationship between the vine and tree. She calls the wine Melez, which is the Turkish word for hybrid. It describes her winemaking process, but it also takes on a much more literal meaning when you discover that the red grape she blends with is a hybrid grape from America that has been living in Turkey for over 100 years.

Turkey has an ancient winemaking tradition that has fallen out of popularity lately for social and political reasons. It is home to thousands of indigenous varieties of vitis vinifera, and it has also lost thousands of acres of vineyards in recent years. Turkey’s neighbor, Georgia, gets a lot of attention in US wine circles, and it should, but once you start digging into Turkey you’ll find as much as three Georgia’s worth of wine culture… It’s incredibly rich in wine history. After all, both countries have been at it for about 8000 years, from times before the borders or the names Georgia and Turkey meant anything.

Westside Winos - Drinking Local At Offhand Wine Bar

My guests for this episode are my friends, my neighbors, and my bosses, Khalil Kinsey, Teron Steveonson, and Justin Leathers. Collectively they are known as the Westside Winos, and they own Offhand Wine Bar where I work a couple nights each week, and we talk about why Offhand is special, and why it shouldn't be. Offhand serves only West Coast (of the US) natural wine, meaning almost every wine by the glass is both organically farmed and from California. It is unique in this sense in Los Angeles, and extremely rare in the US. But why is there so seldom a focus on local wine in America?

During this conversation I introduce the guys to six very special wines from all over the US as we try to answer that important question, and they talk about how they are re-writing the script at Offhand.

https://www.offhandwinebar.com/

Wineries represented:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

https://www.fingerlakesciderhouse.com/

https://www.dearnativegrapes.com/

https://www.wildtexaswines.com/

https://kesselringvineyard.wordpress.com/

And after recording:

https://redbyrdorchardcider.com/

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My guest for this episode is Etelle Higonnet. Etelle is a graduate of Yale Law school and she spent her early career working on some war crimes tribunals, and with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. She then shifted focus from human rights to environmental protection and worked with Green Peace focusing on, among other things, ceasing global deforestation. She continued her focus on stopping deforestation as Campaigns Director at Mighty Earth, and ultimately began to shift her attention from just stopping deforestation to beginning to rebuild global forests through agroforestry. She is a founding member of the Sustainable Wine Roundtable, and has become a vitiforestry enthusiast and is compiling an online vitiforestry library, for the SWR, of every publicly available peer-reviewed study published about vitiforestry as a resource for anyone considering the possibility of introducing agroforestry into their viticulture. She has graciously allowed me to link to this library – while it is still in development - from the episode page on Organic Wine Podcast.com.

Etelle discusses the many benefits of vitiforestry, and the many ways trees can be incorporated in and around vines.

https://swroundtable.org/

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Sponsors:

Centralas Wine

When we think of the word “forever” I think most of us think of it as a single concept, related to time. “Forever is a long time,” we say. And if we think about the actions we take now, the choices we make on a daily basis, having consequences that last forever, this is a profound and humbling consideration.

But after speaking with Gelert Hart of AmByth Estate winery, I gained a new insight into Forever, because that’s what AmByth means. In Welsh, AmByth is two words though, and you’ll notice the B is capitalized in the winery’s name. So I began to ask, what if the Welsh Forever contains a deeper insight by making this idea two words? For Ever. In other word, it’s not just about time. It implies that there is something that we are giving to the future. It reminds me of gift giving. The world we build now is the gift that those who come after us will find under their tree.

The work that I do, the way I manage my life, the way I manage land, the ideas I spread and support, are not just the means I use to survive… they are gifts for: ever. For everyone and everything that comes after me. In this way, forever becomes a meditation on what kinds of gifts I want to leave for ever. Will the ever after me be as delighted to find the world that I created as I was to find the gifts tagged “For: Adam” by my parents?

How would this perspective of gift giving change our relationship with our metaphoric children… those who follow ever after us?

In the case of AmByth, it means that their vineyards are head-trained & dry-farmed on steep hillsides since planting, certified organic and biodynamic, and biodiverse with inter-plantings of olive trees in the vineyard and chickens and sheep (with a protective llama) rotating through their land. AmByth is the first winery to make Demeter certified biodynamic wine in Paso Robles, and to respect this farming they make all of their wines without adding to or taking away anything away from the grapes.

And they do all of this not only for practical reasons related to ecosystem and wine quality enhancement – though those are also benefits. They do it because it makes life more joyful and more beautiful.

Gelert and I discuss the role beauty has in this idea of For: Ever, and we get into some very big questions. I was in the middle of reading Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein when I recorded this with Gelert, and the next day I came across these lines from one of the final chapters:

“When I drive through American suburbia with its fast food restaurants, enormous boxy stores, and cookie-cutter subdivisions, or look upon the architecture of modern office buildings and residential high-rises, I cannot help but marvel at the ugliness of it all.

…I marvel, with indignation bordering on outrage, that we can live in such an ugly world after thousands of years of advances in material technology. Are we really so poor that we can afford no better? What was the point of all this sacrifice, all this destruction…

…we have created a material world devoid of soul, barren of life and killing of life. All for what? The pursuit of efficiency, the grand project of maximizing the production of commodities, and underneath that, the domination and control of life. This was to be the paradise of technology, life under control, and finally we see it for what it is: the strip mall, the robotic cashier, the endless parking lot, the extermination of the wild, the living, the messy, and the sacred.”

It probably goes without saying, but I highly recommend this book if you haven’t read it.

When I look at the dominant wine culture – the global monoculture that blindly believes in its own superiority – I see a wine culture built around the pursuit of efficiency, the grand project of maximizing the production of commodities. But what if we began to build our wine cultures around beauty? What if we designed our farms to inspire wonder? What if we tried with wine to embody peacefulness, embrace diversity, enhance connections, and honor the complex community of living beings that we are part of? How would this change the way wine looks?

I’ve begun to think about these questions more and more, and they are beginning to change the way I grow fruit and make and sell wine… really they’re reshaping everything that I do.

I’m very grateful to Gelert for this conversation which inspired me further down this path, and for his family’s stewardship of a beautiful piece of this earth as a gift for: ever.

My guest for this episode is Deborah Parker Wong – the co-editor, with Pam Strayer, of Slow Wine USA.

Centralas, my winery, is honored to be listed in the Slow Wine guide. I say honored, because Slow Wine is unique in the entire realm of wine scoring or recommendation guides in that it takes into account the ecological context of the wine that they recommend.

All other wine scoring and recommendation guides reflect the problem that plagues wine in general – that is the problem of disconnection. When wine reviewers and guides give a 100 point score to a wine, what does that tell you about the way that the fruit was grown? What does it tell you about the way that winery conducts it business, treats its employees, manages its land, or interacts with its community? It tells you nothing about these things. Yet aren’t these things vitally important to the “greatness” of a wine? Can a wine be great if it tastes amazing yet poisons children in nearby schools? And I use this example of poisoning children because it is an actual example from both Napa and Bordeaux. Our disconnection from the context of wine is the only reason we revere 100 point scores that are based on the flavor of a wine, rather than think them ridiculous.

I tried to point this out at one point by creating the Ecological Wine Score, as a comprehensive, yet satirical take on giving a wine a score that is actually meaningful, and all that would have to be considered. You can see this at EcologicalWineScore.com

Slow Wine and the Slow Wine Snail of Approval reconnect wine to it context in a human community and living ecosystem, and Deborah walks us through how it does this. We talk about the Slow Wine Manifesto, which I’ll make available on the episode page at OrganicWinePodcast.com, and we talk about the research that is required to get behind some of the green façade that wineries rely on, and understand the complex practices that no one certification can capture. So much more goes into a wine than just its sensory evaluation or a biodynamic certification.

Just for fun we talk about Drops of God which we don’t spoil if you haven’t seen it, and we talk about how the common idea of wine – you know, the Euro-centric monoculture that has been spread around the globe through capitalist imperialism – is actually not going down so well among young folks. Crazy, right?

A big thanks to Deborah for this fun and engaging conversation, and for letting us know about Slow Wine.

https://slowfoodusa.org/

Snail of Approval

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Organic Wine Podcast

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Centralas Wine