Christian Cain does contract grazing for vineyards and orchards in Northern California with sheep and goats with his company Perennial Grazing.

“We are members of natural communities: what we do to them, we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them can we nurture ourselves. Palates link cultures with landscapes and moderating the impacts of palates on human and environmental health will require changes in the kinds of foods [and wines!] we produce and consume…”

That’s Fred Provenza and others from the article titled “Is Grassfed Meat and Dairy Better for Human and Environmental Health?” 

I love that statement that “palates link cultures with landscapes”

In this episode I speak with contract grazer Christian Cain about the work that he does with his company Perennial Grazing in Northern California. You’ll discover, as I did, that Christian is a very thoughtful person who was inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka and Alan Savory, among others. So we discuss not only the practical considerations that will be very valuable everyone who is planning or considering working with a contract grazer, but also we dig into how regeneration of a landscape with well managed animals actually works. What should you expect when working with a contract grazer? How much does it cost? Will my vineyard benefit from grazing? Christian answers these questions and more. This is packed with juicy insights and important information for anyone who wants to integrate grazing animals in their vineyard or orchard, or for anyone who wants to learn about soil health and how beyond organic, regenerative viticulture translates into more delicious wine. 

https://www.perennialgrazing.org/

Reid Griggs et al:

Sources and Assembly of Microbial Communities in Vineyards as a Functional Component of Winegrowing

”The microbial ecosystems within vineyards exert critical influences on grapevine health and wine quality.”

Here's the completely useless French study on drought tolerance of various varieties of grapevines, used erroneously to suggest hybrids have poor drought tolerance:

Quantifying the grapevine xylem embolism resistance spectrum to identify varieties and regions at risk in a future dry climate

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This is part 2 of my interview the Dan Rinke of Art + Science. We get into even more specifics of how he makes his holistic farm of vines and trees and animals work with very little inputs, his lessons and insights from multiple years of running both egg and meat chickens through his vineyard, his experience as an organic transition advisor, and much more. At one point Dan mentions how his orchard planting was influenced by Michael Phillips, and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow during the conversation, but I should mention now that there is a fantastic interview with Michael Phillips in the Beyond Organic Wine library, which I feel very fortunate to have recorded in the year before he died. Check it out if you haven’t, and check out part 1 with Dan Rinke if you haven’t.

https://www.artandsciencenw.com/

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This episode is part 1 of a two part episode with Dan Rinke of Art + Science Cidery and Winery in Oregon. The conversation was interrupted by technical difficulties after about 45 minutes, which was plenty of time to get to hear about Dan’s ecological journey with wine, and how his love of winemaking turned him into a crazy beyond organic wine and cider grower and maker. Dan has had a pretty serious career in organic and biodynamic vineyards and cellars in California and Oregon, and he and Kim Hamblin started Art + Science together in 2011. Kim is a fabulous artist, and you’ll see her artwork on their website and labels. The first wine of Dan’s that I tasted was a slightly fizzy, zero-zero, carbonically feremented in amphora field blend of hybrid and vinifera grapes… at a tasting that was otherwise almost entirely Oregon Pinot Noir… so it kinda stood out to me.  Talking to him has been the same kind of experience.

https://www.artandsciencenw.com/

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My guest for this episode is Fritz Westover. Fritz, like me, is originally a fellow Pennsylvanian, and he’s going on 3 decades of learning about, working with, and teaching about viticulture. He runs a viticulture consulting business, focused primarily in Texas, Georgia and the US South, and he reaches an international audience through his Virtual Viticulture Academy. And he’s also a fellow podcaster with The Vineyard Underground – a fantastic resource for technical viticulture knowledge presented in an accessible and even entertaining way. And I’ll be a guest on his podcast soon too!

The emphasis in this conversation is what to consider when planting a vineyard. Fritz has seen many many vineyard implementations and speaks to the most common mistakes, and the questions you should ask to avoid them. Choosing to grow what’s right for your land as opposed to growing your favorite thing turns out to be really helpful, and of course this leads us to discuss hybrid grapes… which in many places allow for much easier winegrowing with fewer inputs. We discuss several varieties of hybrids common to the southern US because of their tolerance of the fungal and other pressures there, including Pierces Disease. Pierce’s Disease, or Xylella fastidiosa, is in California too, and heading north, so getting to know these varieties of grapes is becoming vitally important for most of the US wine industry.And there’s so much more to this conversation. Fritz is a wealth of knowledge and shares a ton of insights and practical tips for winegrowing. 

https://www.vineyardundergroundpodcast.com/

https://www.virtualviticultureacademy.com/

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My guest for this episode is Rob Schultz. Rob is the vineyard manager for Lemelson Vineyards in Oregon, and farms 130 acres of organic vineyards in the Willamette Valley. Lemelson Vineyards has been certified organic for over 25 years, and has been one of my favorites since I started in wine over 2 decades ago. Rob also happens to be one of the main people responsible for the Organic Winegrowers Network there in Oregon, which led to the historic Organic Winegrowers Conference this spring of 2025.

Rob has a droll, straightforward manner that I think belies a passionately thoughtful approach to his relationship with the vineyard ecosystem. Throughout this conversation we’ll be bantering along and then he’ll drop an insight bomb out of the blue that I’m still thinking about now having re-listened to this several times. Some topics that come up include: Spanish language skills should be a requirement for work in wine in the US at least, vine sentience and the domestication of humans, breeding a better baby doll sheep, why Oregon makes the best pinot noir in the world, and much more.

https://www.lemelsonvineyards.com/

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My guest for this episode is Elaine Chukan Brown.

Elaine is a writer, speaker, wine educator, and now author of the book The Wines of California. Elaine has been a contributor, columnist, editor, and/or wine reviewer for nearly every wine publication out there, and they co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum, and have advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries.

In 2019, the Wine Industry Network named Elaine one of the Most Inspiring People in Wine. In 2020, they were awarded Wine Communicator of the Year in the world by IWSC and VinItaly, and they were named a Wine Industry Leader in the North American wine industry by Wine Business Monthly.

In 2021, The Hue Society created the Elaine Chukan Brown Award in Wine Education, awarded annually and named for Elaine in recognition of their work in education and their effort to help open the way for others’ success.

In 2022, Elaine was nominated for a James Beard Award in Journalism.

And this is just a short list of Elaine’s work, honors, and awards.

So it should be no surprise that their new book, The Wines of California, is a worthwhile read. But more than that, it presents an overlooked history of wine in the US, and makes it clear how deeply indebted those of us working in wine today are to innumerable unsung people… both past and present.

In some structural ways Elaine’s book gives you what you might expect from a book titled The Wines of California – a history of the wine industry here, regions and producers and grape varieties, and the current challenges we’re facing – but Elaine presents the substance that fills in that structure in such a holistic way, contextualizing each event within global and national currents, and telling this story from a perspective that includes all the participants in all of their complexities…so that I found fresh insights, deeper understanding of my own participation in this history, inspiration for action, and even, believe it or not, hope.

Don’t be fooled by the title. This is not a ponderous exercise in academic wine writing… this reads like a hot take, as well as helpful reference with up to the minute relevance. You might think of it as a People’s History of the Wines of California crossed with a progressive California wine travel guide. In our conversation we talk about the book of course, but it leads to some really important questions that transcend not only the book, but also wine. Elaine talks about how we are in the midst of a revolution, and I’m finding it really exciting to take this perspective into everything I’m doing with wine. I hope you do too.

A big thanks to Napa Green for sponsoring this episode. Don't miss their RISE Climate & Wine Symposium. 

Get Elaine's book:

The Wine's of California

Learn about Hildegard of Bingen

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In this episode I interview Wendy McNabb, the current owner with her husband, of Carolina Heritage Vineyards, one of only four certified organic wineries on the entire East Coast of the United States. They use paper bottles, so we talk about the pros and cons of this alternative packaging. And we talk about some of the really interesting wines they make at Carolina Heritage, including dry Muscadines. Now, Muscadines have come up on Beyond Organic Wine before, including last week’s episode, but Wendy and I really dig into them. The oldest vine in north America is a Muscadine, growing in North Carolina (over 400 years old). Muscadines aren’t hybrids. They are a species of grape native to North Carolina and the South-eastern and southern US. Some even argue that they should be classified as a different genus of Vitis, as they are unlike every other Vitis species in that they have 40 chromosomes instead of 38. There are over 150 individual improved cultivars of Muscadines with a variety of colors and flavors much too diverse to generalize about.  Muscadines are resistant to pierce’s disease, downy and powdery mildew, phylloxera, and more.  They are highly prized for these resistances in grape breeding programs despite the difficulty of crossing them with other vitis species due to that chromosomal uniqueness. What I’m trying to say here is that Muscadines are pretty special grapes, not just in the US, but globally. If we Americans were smart, we stop trying to imitate someone else’s culture and start building a viticultural legacy from this truly American native grape that is unlike any other grape on earth, and that can be grown virtually no-spray under some of the most intense fungal pressures and weather extremes on the planet. That is a foundation on which to build a legacy, and I’m really happy to introduce you to Caroline Heritage because they are building their legacy on that foundation. Enjoy!

https://www.carolinaheritagevineyards.com/

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I’ve known about Botanist & Barrel and DeFi Wines for a couple years, and even visited them in Asheville, North Carolina. They introduced me to both Muscadine grapes and Paw-paws through their wines. And they have a wine named Grapes Have Feelings, made with apples and muscadine grapes, that is both a delicious wine and one of my favorite names for a wine. I talk to Lyndon Smith, one of the founders and winemakers for Botanist & Barrel and DeFi Wines. We discuss true regionality in wine, the many benefits of co-ferments, whether muscadines express terroir, connecting with deep sense-memories in wine, using wine to stop food waste, trialing new species to both see what works and help plants adjust to climate change, the amazing array of uncommon fruit that Botanist & Barrel uses to make wine, and at the end Lyndon shares about the emotional and physical aftermath of Hurricane Helene and how Asheville is recovering. Welcome to the rainbow of diverse colors and flavors that is possible for Southern Wine and Ciders.

https://www.botanistandbarrel.com/

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Tommy Fenster is a scientist who studies agroecological systems, but specifically for the last few years he’s been focused on gathering data from dozens of vineyards around California and studying the practices and impacts of regenerative viticulture. Tommy gathers data across something like 49 vineyards. In a sense, the largest regenerative viticulture trial is the one being conducted across all vineyards in the world right now as more and more farmers embrace more and more regenerative practices we begin to deepen our understand of how the impacts of regenerative farming compare against the impacts of conventional farming… and Tommy is collecting the data to be able to understand this.  

Grazing is a big part of this conversation, and we get into the weeds about how, when, the impacts in different contexts and season, alternatives to sheep and some of the limitations of sheep, as well as some of the creative ways to incorporate sheep and other animals. There’s some really helpful info here that you might not have considered, as well as some important considerations about the potential issues that can arise. We talk a lot about contract grazing and why you shouldn't make assumptions about contract grazing as an easy way to incorporate animals into your winegrowing… you may need to be more creative.

We also dig into tillage and ask some hard questions about where and when and how and if it is ever a good practice. As California attempts to define regenerative agriculture, I think everyone should learn from the system that Tommy and his team uses to parse what it means across an array of best practices and a variety of contexts.

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Gideon Beinstock started Clos Saron with Saron Rice in 1999 as an attempt to purely and distinctively express the terroir of their home in the Sierra Foothill outside of Oregon House, California. Over the years they've developed and refined both their winegrowing and winemaking with an eye always toward a more pure expression, less about them and any input, and more about finding what the land has to say through grapes. This objective has led them to some fascinating techniques and approaches to making wine, always thoughtful, and always guided by an attempt to meet authentic needs rather than trendy or contrived philosophies. The result is a kind of integrated farming and wine flavors that you don't find in the rest of California. This is a journey out of time into the world of timeless wine.

https://clossaron.com/

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