I had such a great time on my first trip and was so impressed by the wines that I went back to Quebec for a second trip and discovered another fantastic producer who has been certified organic since 2021, growing a few select vinifera and several hybrids, and making some outstanding wines. They are Vignoble Sugar Hill and please do yourself a favor and try their wines. This is a second career for the owners, and their first career must have been successful, because the winemaking at Sugar Hill indulges in the one secret ingredient to making incredible wines that almost no one can afford: TIME.

They have a sparking vidal blanc for sale right now that spent 12 YEARS, not months, 12 YEARS on lees before disgorging… it is the best expression of Vidal Blanc I’ve ever tasted and one of the best sparkling wines I’ve ever had. They have a St Pepin that is not only the best St. Pepin I’ve ever had, but was so good that I almost smuggled a case across the border so that I could share it at the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference… I didn’t but there’s still hope for those of you coming… the good folks at Sugar Hill maybe sending a representative with wine to the conference. Then there’s the Dolce Luna, their off dry wine that will convert you to off dry, made with a blend of hybrids….

We talk about all these and more, and we talk about them in English, Quebecois, and Spanish… because their vineyard manager and winemaker Jorge is Guatemalan, and one of members of the small team there, Ariane, acted as translator for us and gave her own input… so this is a fun and colorful conversation about cold climate viticulture and some of the most precision winemaking of some of the best examples of hybrid wines you’ll find anywhere.

The vast majority of champagnes we buy and drink in the US are over-priced luxury brands made of cheap materials, harmful farming practices, and at times exploitive labor. We get told constantly that Champagne, the region, is “moving toward” more sustainable practices, and that it is continually “doing better” with regard to ecological viticulture, but that’s because it has so far to go. As a region it consistently uses the highest percentage of pesticides of any wine region in France. Its governing body made a commitment for all of its producers to be pesticide free by 2025. But by 2025 they had abandoned this commitment, and instead this year several growers were found to be exploiting vineyard workers from North Africa and Ukraine in squalid, indentured-servitude conditions. The big brands that Americans pay over $60 + for to have a boujee soiree are sparkling pesticide-laden swill.

Champagne was always a marginal climate for wine. That’s why the English back-sweetened the tart, flavorless barrels of cheap booze, accidentally initiating a re-fermentation and inventing sparkling wine… they were trying to make it palatable. And climate change isn’t helping. Yes, they get some more ripeness now… but also more rainfall, hail, and fungi. Pinot noir and chardonnay – the big varieties of Champagne – aren’t 21st century grapes. Some of the most susceptible to mildew and disease, they require enormous amounts of sprays… and being organic doesn’t help. With these varieties it just means you’re creating a toxic environment with copper and killing your soils with compaction. The hybrid grape Voltis, which is less susceptible to mildews, was approved for use in Champagne, because of all of this… but it has only been allowed to make up to 6% of the blend. There are some very thoughtful producers doing a lot of hard, amazing viticulture… but they are small scale. Most Americans outside of the coasts will never see or even have access to their bottles.

So let’s call most Champagne what it is: A con job. It’s a shoddy, environmentally-damaging concoction sold as VIP experience. It’s snake oil.

Instead, start the new year right. Drink something local, authentic, and organically farmed at least. A prime choice for an incredible price is the Northern Spy from Eve’s Cidery in Van Etten, New York. Amazing bubbles and a sweet appley nose, but bone dry, flinty and tart lemony palate. It’s a fine, champagne method sparkling wine from New York, using organically farmed apples of a variety that was bred in New York. Or try Ci Confonde Rose from La Garagista if you like your bubbles to be pink. This is a special wine that will blow your mind, made with Frontenac Gris and using uncertified but organic and biodynamic practices. Or try Lightning Bug from Appolo Vinyards in New Hampshire, a sparkling from their no-spray Brianna grapes. Or try the certified organic sparkling rose from Loving Cup winery in Virginia, a stunning rose made from mostly Cayuga White with a splash of Corot Noir for blush. One of my favorites of 2025 was Dear Native Grapes sparkling Deleware, made in the Catskills from organic Finger Lake Grapes. For 100% American native bubbles you can’t beat the Muscadine Pet Nats of Botanist & Barrel in North Carolina. And if you really need that “imported” feeling to feel special, the most special sparkling wine I had in 2025 was a bottle called Pelechacz, Cuvee Exceptionelle, Vidal Brut Nature 2011. It’s a sparkling Vidal Blanc that spent 12 years… yes, I said 12 years… on lees before disgorgement. It’s from Sugar Hill Winery in Quebec, and worth whatever it takes to smuggle it across the border into the US.

On the west coast we have so many options… In California we have everything from Domaine Anderson if you want that traditional method vibe certified organic and biodynamic; to the selection of sparkling treats from Tilted Shed if you could care less about grapes; to the historic and amazing no-spray Pariah from North American Press – a sparkling rose with the most yummy flavors you can only get from American grapes like Catawba; to Durham Cider & Wine’s selection of unique and local flavors, to the biodynamic line-up of sparklings from Montinore in Oregon… among so many others who I regret not mentioning. The point is you can do sooo much better than Champagne… and you can do it locally, organically, and without paying exorbitant amounts to support bad farming and bad practices.

Happy New Year!

Reflections on some of the big questions of 2025, and recommendations of some of my favorite books from 2025. An end of year wish for you and your wine, and a big thank you to everyone who makes Beyond Organic Wine possible.

I hope to see you at Embracing Hybrid Grapes on January 26, 2026.

Embracing Hybrid Grapes in California.

What if I told you that you could take a piece of degraded, marginal land with 3.5 pH soils and turn it into an agricultural production system with five times the productivity of neighboring conventional farms without using any fertilizer or pesticides or outside inputs besides sunlight, seeds, and plants? What if I told you that there are decades of data to support this and that it can be done anywhere, and that this system makes grapes more productive, healthier, and more delicious?

Erik Schellenberg is the Commercial Horticulture and Natural Resources Educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension. He runs Black Creek Farm & Nursery in the Hudson Valley of New York, and he’s implementing a commercial scale married vine (or vite maritata) vitiforestry polyculture. If you don’t know what married vines are, it means growing vines on and with living trees as their trellising. But I prefer to think of it as the “Three Sisters” of perennial agriculture, in the sense that I don’t think the emphasis should be solely on the vine… I mean why isn’t it called a married tree? But that we should think of these living partnerships as polycultural guilds with symbiotic and stacking benefits.

In this episode, Erik outlines a syntropic approach to agroforestry, and breaks down how this system works whether you’re growing cacao and coffee in Brazil, or grapes in Switzerland… and anywhere else. You likely have some appreciation for the importance of trees. But so much of our approach from a viti-forestry perspective is about how to integrate trees into our wine monocultures without hurting productivity, and sometimes we even may argue that we have to sacrifice productivity for ecological reasons. After listening to Erik present how syntropic agroforestry with vines works, you will begin to see that not only is using trees the most productive way of growing vines, but that without trees we will be handicapped in our efforts to farm with fewer inputs and to increase health and resilience. In this system, pruning functions almost exactly like rotational grazing, and really takes regenerative viticulture to the next level, where we think of perennials as cover crops… but even that doesn’t capture it exactly.

This is a kind of viticulture that embodies succession, the ecological process that most of our vineyards fight against, and how humans become the regenerative partners we are meant to be in our communities. We dig into the details of vitiforestry and how to select the right tree to grow with vines. And we get into the myth of invasive species… and even some ecological solutions for the spotted lantern fly.

There’s a moment in this episode in which Erik talks about how a tree responds when it gets pruned, and I got goosebumps thinking about what it would mean if we followed this example. And there’s another mind blowing moment where he discusses the ecological function of a vine and how vines may be the plant equivalent of a mastodon or elephant, and how that informs pruning and developing an early successional wineforest for their greatest productivity.

I was excited about growing vines with trees before, but now I can’t imagine growing them any other way. Enjoy!

My guest for this episode is Nika Carlson of Greenpoint Cidery in Hudson, New York. There are some unique and wonderful aspects of what Nika does that make this conversation fun and enlightening in ways that I find thrilling and inspiring…. She planted her estate orchard entirely from wild seedling apple trees that she selected from her region. She ferments a landscape of flavors, including herbal and floral ingredients in her concoctions. She lives part-time, nearly off-grid at the orchard. And she offers a cider CSA by sailboat on the Hudson River. She also introduced me to a wonderful book titled “Folk Wines, Cordials, and Brandies” by anarchist and puppeteer, M. A. Jagendorf, a source of inspirations and recipes for a incorporating more diversity into our fermentation cultures, much like Nika is herself.

My guest for this episode is Joseph Brinkley. Joseph is the Senior Director of Regenerative Organic Farming at Bonterra. He oversees farming of Bonterra’s 800+ acres of estate vineyards in Mendocino County, all of which are farmed with organically. Bonterra is one of the largest organic B-corporation wineries in the US, and they are now the largest winery to achieve Regenerative Organic certification. Joseph discusses the importance of the social focus of the Regenerative Organic certification, which is unique in nearly all wine certification requirements. Since 2011 Joseph has helped Bonterra show the world that ecological best practices in viticulture, which includes the entire community, can be done at any scale, and they do this while producing delicious wines for under around $15 a bottle. We discuss all of this, biodynamics, hybrid grapes in California, and much more.

Enjoy!

My guests for this episode are Julia and Alex Alvarez-Perez of Usonia Wine in the Finger Lakes region of New York… and they will be sponsoring Embracing Hybrid Grapes in California with two of their wines… and I’m very much looking forward to sharing them with those of you who attend… you are in for a surprise and a treat…

Very much like you are in for …

My guest for this episode is Franz Weninger of organic and biodynamic certified Weingut Weninger in Horitschon, Austria… and you, dear listener, are in for a treat. Franz is a second generation winegrower who thinks deeply about the soil, the plants, the systems and ideas that go into the ecology of wine. He offers practical and surprising insights into how to grow vinifera with less sprays, how to design vineyards for human psychological health as well as environmental health, how using highly-resistant hybrids shouldn’t be an excuse for neglecting our vines but an opportunity to care for them in different, less obligatory ways, how hybrids shouldn’t be an excuse for keeping high-density monoculture, and how a single tree can benefit a vineyard, and how if we don’t want to picnic in a vineyard… maybe we shouldn’t drink the wine from it.

If this talk inspires you as much as it inspired me, you might want to check out weninger.com where Franz has published many posts that dig even deeper in to his thoughtful and revolutionary approach to winegrowing.

My guest for this episode is George Gale. George has led a double life. On the surface, George presented a public façade as a philosopher of science, American historian, professor, and author. He was a PhD student at UC Davis, and wrote his dissertation at Oxford. He has a Wikipedia page, spent 43 years as a professor of science and philosophy at University of Missouri Kansas City, and published multiple papers and books on the philosophy of science, the big bang theory, the anthropic principle, the philosophy of modern cosmology, and the Many Worlds Theory, among many other topics. But George also had another life, a dark and mysterious life. Outside of the classrooms and lecture halls of academia, George grew hybrid grapes. Not only did he grow them… he fell in love with them, made wine with them, and even hybridized more of them. For decades George has had a secret affair with Leon Millot, Villard Blanc, and many other outcast grapes. After decades of secrecy, George tells all in this scandalous interview.

Well, sort of. George wrote a book that turns out to be THE book about the phylloxera crisis. Without knowing this history, I think many of us in wine take a lot of how things are for granted. But George’s book, Dying on the Vine, gives an amazing historical perspective on how phylloxera shaped the world that we live in today in ways much larger than just how we grow wine. Phylloxera became the catalyst for Big Science in the sense of international collaborative science that is tied up in national and international politics and economics. It was a cultural trauma that caused mass global population migrations that affect our cultures still, and it was one of the main drivers of hybridization in grapes that led to some of the enduring varieties we still drink today and use for further grape breeding efforts. But there was a dark side to all of this. Anti-american prejudice festers in the subtext of this history, and informs the wine world we inhabit. George gives us an overview of this history and even more details of the fascinating elements that still influence our wine culture now. This broad and deep look into the history of hybrids gives us insights into human nature, globalization, and the future of wine. Enjoy!

My guest is Rueben Lange of Amiti in Oregon FromAmiti.com. Rueben first worked a harvest in 2016, but he has packed in something like 12 harvests since then by bouncing between Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and three continents, including some notable vintages at Idiot’s Grace in the Columbia River Gorge, Maison Maenad in the Jura, and Forlorn Hope in California. Rueben says of Amiti:

“The goal of this project - beyond employing the basic tenets of good land stewardship (both in my farming and the vineyards I choose to purchase from), caring for all those who work for me, and crafting wines that are meant to celebrate those I hold dear - is to deeply explore a sustainable future for Oregon, and push the envelope of Hybrid grape varieties. I love vinifera and want to continue to celebrate it, given the remarkable wines that come from them in this state. However, we as an industry continue to push the narrative of this being Pinot country - a notion I believe to be utterly false given the challenges associated with farming it here - and fail to focus on varieties that are better suited to our climate and its ever shifting nature. For that reason, I choose to work with what are considered A-typical, or non-normative varieties for this region, specifically those that I believe are well adapted to the level of climate change I will experience in my lifetime.

I choose to make hybrid wines because I believe that they are the only option for a sustainable future in this state, and present an exciting possibility to develop a true sense of place and varietal typicity, free from the constraints imposed upon us by the old world. If we truly want to develop an understanding of what American terroir looks and tastes like, it seems like a no-brainer to me to do it with a variety that has no mandates handed down from the ‘higher ups’.”

On the last episode we considered how natural wine is not about minimizing intervention but about a total perspective shift to seeing life as process to celebrate. On this episode we again flip a common understanding of natural wine on its head as we discuss how natural wine is not about removing human influence but actually finding the distinctively personal touch of humans engaged in intentionally fermenting. In this spirit, Rueben makes a case for abandoning the zero-zero ethos, or at least any celebration of it or smugness related to it, referring to it as a kind of recipe winemaking for natural wine.

This is a wildly pro-human discussion of wine, that will piss off the misanthropes and the worshipers of that pristine ideal known as “Nature” which is kept pure by lack of contact with the malodorous miscreants known as people. Rather, we envision wine as a flowing stream in which we, besotted beavers that we are, immerse ourselves and play and mate and build dams to overflow the banks and flood our communities with life.

Rueben’s wines have been described as “disorientingly delicious” and I hope you’ll find this conversation to be the same. Enjoy!