Winegrowers around the globe have made it their goal to grow grapes without sprays. Not only are they succeeding, they are reshaping the way we think about wine.

This is a special episode featuring a story about multiple winegrowers who make wine from grapes that they never spray with pesticides or fungicides, neither conventional nor organic. If the thought of attempting this makes you queasy, it may be because of some foundational beliefs you hold about wine that you've never challenged. This story will ask you to challenge them.

In fact a wine publication who had bought this story as a pitch decided to kill it because of the questions it asks of the entire wine industry. Yet when we begin to ask how we might grow wine without sprays, we discover an entirely new way of thinking about wine, how it is grown and made, and what it is made with.

If you care about zero zero wine but have never considered no-spray viticulture, you're missing out on the fundamental zero that could and perhaps should be the essence of natural wine.

At the heart of the no-spray viticulture revolution is reconnection with the natural world, to see how it grows and thrives and produces abundance without sprays, and then to emulate and work in cooperation with these forces. It may take a perspective shift, and the eradication of some prejudice as well. The result will be economic benefits, emissions reduction, health, diversity, and true reflections of terroir in our wines.

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Sponsor: Paicines Ranch

My guests for this episode are Kelly Allen and Andrew Napier of Artemisia Farm in Virginia. They are hybrid grape growers, and winemakers, aromatized wine makers, makers of wine made with native American fruits besides grapes, writers and publishers, wine faire organizers, farmers who do a regular CSA, foragers, entrepreneurs, and more. We ask some really hard questions in this episode. How to motivate a sense of urgent responsibility for the earth with love rather than fear? Is wine sustainable? How do you make wine with paw paws and persimmons?

Kelly and Andrew use lots of wild fruits and ingredients, as well as some permaculture farmed fruits – so things that are far beyond organic – and they use some other farmed fruits that are farmed organically though not certified. But they don’t farm their hybrid grapes organically. This is an intentional choice they make because they believe it is the more ecological choice in their context. Virginia, for those who aren’t familiar, is a subtropical climate that also has cold winters. Their growing season is hot, sticky, humid, and wet… and the perfect conditions for every grape fungal and insect pest. In these conditions, many people in Virginia are growing vinifera. To do this often takes weekly applications of chemical sprays, as many as 15-25 conventional sprays in a growing season. That is frankly insane and is tantamount to poisoning our environment. But Organic sprays, which are less effective, often need to be applied at least as frequently in Virginia – that is weekly - even when using resistant hybrid grapes, which means a lot of substance buildup and compaction and fossil fuel use. Meanwhile Kelly and Andrew can spray their hybrids once per month and are learning how to manage the vineyard so they can do even less. I’m not saying what’s right or wrong here, I’m saying that if you are trying to grow grapes in the most ecological way in this context, I think an organic label doesn’t give you enough information and there are likely compromises to any path you take. However, Kelly and Andrew and I all agree that growing vinifera in Virginia is not only foolish, it’s irresponsible, and we aren’t afraid to piss some people off by saying that.

This episode is the second part of the conversation I had with Nicolas Haack of Triebwerk agroforestry consulting in Germany. In this part, Nicolas asks me to go into detail about the vitiforestry project I’m planning near the Finger Lakes region of New York. As part of my education and design process for this farm, I took a permaculture design certification course last year through Oregon State University, and used the New York land for my design project. As we learned in last week’s episode, it’s probably more accurate to call this an analysis process, rather than a design process, because the emphasis is really on carefully learning about the land, who lives there, what kind of relationships exist prior to my involvement, how can we best enter the picture without doing harm, how can we ensure that the actions we take on the land are beneficial? Once you ask these questions, and listen and observe and research for the answers, the design almost takes care of itself… all of the elements of soil, water, wind, sun, fire, ecology, culture, social connections, climate, and history join together to guide what our stewarding of the land could look like. Our passions and intentions are important, of course, but in ecological design, they should respond to the land rather than force the land to respond to us.

In this episode we discuss many of the details of the vision I have for my vitiforestry project and how it was informed by this process of land analysis. As you’ll hear, even though grapes are what inspired this project, I’ve come to see them as only a part of what is best for this land. I think it’s an important point that I began by thinking about features, and through a lot of learning and considerations I realized I needed to pay attention to systems and relationships. The permaculture course I took led me to these considerations, and asks us to plan “plant system designs” rather than “tree planting” for example.

Relationships are at the heart of regenerative viticulture, and that’s what I love about vines growing with trees.

2000 years ago Pliny the Elder wrote a Natural History encyclopedia, and one chapter was about growing vines in trees. He said, “The experience of ages has sufficiently proved that the wines of the highest quality are only grown upon vines attached to trees…” Since then we’ve lost most of the knowledge that was common to his time about this practice of “tree-lising” vines, as Nicolas coins the term in this episode.

So much of the work that is being done in vitiforestry now is re-discovery… We aren’t providing answers, we’re asking questions. If you, like me, want to create a wine culture that isn’t built on fossil fueled industrial inputs, that is diverse and regenerative, then growing vines in living trees seems an important form of viticulture to consider. It has some obvious benefits. But it also has some obvious challenges. Like anything, there are some compromises to consider, and there are even more unknowns.

I mention this in the episode, but I want to underline that all of this planning and designing of a vitiforestry system on this land in New York is not my idea, I’m just mimicking what’s already happening on the land. Without any help or analysis or planning and designing, grapevines are already growing in trees all over the property. All I’m really doing is encouraging more of that natural cultural expression in a way that is easier for humans to manage and produce even more grapes and tree fruits. The Context – the ecology of the land – is of utmost importance. For example, if I was planning a farm in California now, I would probably be thinking about agave and prickly pears and peyote, rather than grapes and pear and persimmon trees.

There are some things that we know about vitiforestry. As Pliny pointed out, one reward for embracing vitiforestry is diversity. To me, diversity is one of the elements of beauty. As you’ll hear, my primary goals for my vitiforestry project are to ask what viticulture might look like if we designed our systems, if we built our cultures, to be beautiful rather than just efficient, to be self-sustaining, rather than just productive. I want my farm, my WineForest, to give you a sense of wonder as you walk through it, and to be resilient when the fragile systems we’ve built quickly with fossil fuels come crashing down. I don’t think beauty and wonder and resilience have to be at odds with living, but they might be at odds with my current mindset about some things, they might be at odds with our current dominant culture that exerts so much pressure on our thinking through its economic values. Maybe what I’m proposing is an alternative universe.

But I hope I can share it with you someday.

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Sponsors:

https://paicineslearning.org/events/regenerative-winegrowing-workshop/

“To care for what we know requires care for what we don’t, the world’s lives dark in the soil, dark in the dark.”

“Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know. We live by lives we don’t intend, lives that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast our designs, staying by passing through, surviving again and again the risky passages from ice to warmth, dark to light.”

Wendell Berry, A Small Porch

I care deeply about the natural world. That’s why I do this podcast. And of course when I use the words “natural world” these aren’t exactly the right words. They’re just the poor abbreviated metaphor of the English language for something Wendell Berry refers to elsewhere as “the presence of the world being made, a fabric of interdepending wonders, moment by moment completed in beauty, leaf shadows on light leaves moving.” The Forbearance Berry mentions describes what it looks like to love in a world where we know so little. It reminds us that our actions have consequences much bigger and that last much longer than what we intend or even know, and the preeminent gift we can give to what we love is forbearance – patient self-control, restraint, avoidance of urge fulfilment and impulsive action.

When I first fell in love with wine and developed a taste for my favorite grape, I wanted to find some perfect terroir that rivaled the Crus of France and grow the worlds greatest version of my favorite thing. I’m really lucky I’ve never been rich enough to do all the stupid things I wanted to do with the earth.

Having said that, I have lived long enough and been fortunate enough to finally access to a piece of beautiful land. I’m also fortunate that this land came into my life after my ecological consciousness had been awakened and begun to be educated. I remember walking the land for the first time and thinking how absurd an idea it is that land can be “owned.” I remember how seeing the roll and slope of the land, walking its forests and meadows, made my heart beat faster. I fell in love with it, and this love made me terrified to harm it. It is something in itself, I realized. Not something for me to calculate as an asset, not a commodity to harvest. As Berry says, “The conversion of trees to wood to money, which is all “the economy” asks, is limitlessly the mistake of arrogance, for it is the forest, not the tree, that is the source of economic good; the forest as the whole community of itself, its lives living as the gifts of lives lived.”

This episode is the first of a two part conversation I had with Nicolas Haack. You may remember Nicolas from the episode just a couple weeks ago, as he was the consultant for the vitiforestry project implemented at Staffelter Hof, the oldest winery in the world. Nicolas is one of the founders of Triebwerk, an agroforestry consulting company in Germany, and vitiforestry projects are one of the kinds of agroforestry that he helps implement. So, naturally, I had to talk to him some more.

This first part is a conversation about engaging in a process of forbearance before embarking on any viticultural or agricultural implementation. We talk about the kinds of questions to ask, and analysis that’s advised, before acquiring a piece of land and altering it to achieve your goals. There are many valuable insights scattered throughout the conversation, but I hope the most important thing you takeaway is questioning your goals. Is what you want what’s actually best for a given place?

As Berry says, “We must acknowledge first that it is dark, and we are blind by sight.”

Joyce Jones and Charity Potter sound like the street names of Marvel super heroes, but they’re actually the real women I interview for this episode. They’re better than super heroes, though, because they actually live in this messy, complex real world and take part in the real battles that result from living with the courage to speak up and ask questions and call BS when they see BS.

This episode is an expose, and it focuses on the experiences and insights and conflicts and unquestioned assumptions and prejudices that Joyce experienced, and continues to experience, as a woman of color taking classes in what passes for wine education currently. We did not name the institution or the instructors where she takes classes, because it’s really unimportant. The things she experiences could and do take place in any wine education institution on any given day.

I’ve talked a lot about diversity on this podcast. It’s one of the few agricultural solutions we have to climate change. It allows us to adapt and be productive regardless of the crazy weather the year brings. It is the antithesis to our current dominant wine culture. And Biodiversity is the solution to our farms’ health and resilience.

But equally, if not more, important is the diversity of people we include and listen to and allow to challenge our perspectives. Our mental and spiritual health is an ecosystem just like the ecosystem of our farms and forests. We cannot grow without the help of diverse connections to as many different perspectives as we can find, understand, and learn from.

Joyce Jones stepped into the bubble of our dominant wine industry, and popped it. Her impressions of her wine education are an incredible example of how important it is to get a fresh perspective, to include those who have traditionally be marginalized, to let down our guards and stop defending, to listen, to see our hypocrisy and self-contradictions. Though there aren’t many like her, we need more Joyces in the world to keep us forever young, forever learning and growing. I want to thank Joyce and Charity for their bravery and their willingness to share their personal experiences and challenges. This is heavy lifting. It’s difficult, it’s lonely, and it’s frustrating… and I’m not sure the wine industry deserves it, but we certainly need this help and are incredibly fortunate for these women’s perepsectives.

I think that our current wine education is laughable, or maybe cry-able. It needs to re-envisioned and re-designed from the ground up, literally. It creates and reinforces an entire structure of prejudice and exclusion that is not only cringe-worthy, but completely unacceptable. If anyone wants to help me build a better wine education, please contact me at connect@organicwinepodcast.com.

In the meantime, I’m so glad to help Joyce and Charity swing the wrecking ball through our current wine education.

Joyce is a force of nature, in the best sense. If you are a wine educator and you want to learn, to really learn, you want her in your class. But let me leave you with a warning that Joyce sent to me in a text, her words, quote:

The air becomes still, reminiscent of the calm before a big storm. The sheep stop grazing and look out in the field. A shadowy figure emerges from the horizon and slowly approaches… is it an alien? Is it the death angel? No. That would be too quick and merciful. It’s Joyce Jones… and she’s hungry.

Gird your loins, and Enjoy!

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/

Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.

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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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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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.