Beyond Organic Wine

I have a great episode for you with Matt Killman of Walloon Lake Winery in Michigan.

This week we announced the open call for producers to pour wines (or send wines to be poured) at the 2027 Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference, and I fielded a couple questions in the comments that turned out to be relevant to this episode and the next episode I’ll be releasing… both featuring growers of hybrid grape varieties in northern and eastern US states.

Embracing Hybrid Grapes will be held February 21-22, 2027 at UC Davis Conference Center and Donkey & Goat Winery. The first day will feature keynotes, panels, and presentations related to the way that hybrid grapes make, not just a sustainable, but a regenerative wine business possible, even or especially in places like California.

What’s unique about California is how little work has been done to develop bespoke grapes for the largest winegrowing region in North America. What I’ve come to realize is that this is merely the result of economics: it still can make economic sense to grow the high-input, conventional vinifera varieties in California. This is because in most regions, in most vintages historically, the cost to grow these old varieties doesn’t exceed what you have to charge for the wines to be profitable, and because we have trained consumers on these old varieties as if they are brands of quality. The reality of the word “chardonnay” on a bottle is that it mostly meaningless in terms of the flavors and quality you will find when you drink it, but we’ve trained wine drinkers to believe that it means something important. Varietal names, pinot noir, chardonnay, cabernet, sauvignon blanc, etc are brands in the US that convey some promise of status experience, and this, coupled with the economically conducive climate for these vinifera varieties, continues to make it economically viable to plant monocultures of these grapes.

But both of these conditions are being tested and pushed to their limits with climate change and generational change. And while there are less than a handful of growers working with less than 20 acres of hybrid wine grapes out of the over 400,000 acres of winegrapes in California, every country in Europe increases their hybrid acreage every year, and every country has at least one if not multiple institutional breeding programs that have been releasing new, resistant, low-input wine grape varieties for decades.

To me, this is the huge opportunity of California: an untapped market with huge resources and a reputation for progressive innovation is currently one of the most conservative and backward looking when it comes to our wine culture. But California is going to have to make a decision: will it move forward with the rest of the wine world in relevance and innovation? Or will it attempt to become an archive and museum for old varieties? I see value in both, to some extent, as long as being a museum doesn’t imply destroying ecosystems to grow maladapted varieties. And California can do both… this doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. Right now, however, there is zero movement on the side of moving forward with ecological innovation and adapting our wine cultures for the new world.

So… that’s why we’re doing Embracing Hybrid Grapes in California again this February 21st and 22nd. EmbracingHybridGrapes.com is the website, and tickets go on sale November 16th, next week!

And getting back to that open call for submissions of wines for the tasting day, we have two requirements: 1) The wines must be 90-100% made of hybrid grapes, 2) and the wines must have been produces with zero herbicides.

When we posted these requirements, someone asked: why only zero herbicides, why not require the wines be farmed organically, with zero chemical fungicides and insecticides too?

This is an important question, and it is extremely relevant to this episode and the next one. And here’s the answer:

When a grower eliminates herbicide, and we are mainly talking about synthetic herbicides, when these get eliminated, they most often aren’t replaced with other organic herbicides…. Though some growers may wish they could be. When herbicides are eliminated, they are usually replaced with mechanical options like mowing, weed whacking, and tilling, and sometimes fire, or design and management changes and mindset changes.

This can also be the case with fungicide to some extent, but the reality is that you can’t eliminate fungicide in many wine growing regions, and the regions with the highest fungal pressure are also where most hybrids are planted. You can reduce fungicide applications with hybrids, sometimes enormously. You can often have success with organic fungicides with hybrids. But fungicides don’t go away. And depending on the varieties grown, and the extreme fungal pressures of growing them in places like Michigan or New York, the locations of this and the next episode, using only organic options may require you to spray significantly more often and at the exact times when it is worst to drive a spray rig over the soil: when the soil is wet and soft from the rain that is the reason you need to spray.

Insecticides are similar. You can refrain from using insecticides most years in most wine regions. And there are many ways of increasing biodiversity and habitat to allow for a good predator and prey dynamic in your vineyard that keeps parasitic insects from becoming a problem. But sometimes you’ll get an infestation of Pierce’s Disease-carrying sharpshooters, or canopy destroying Japanese beetles, or grape berry moth, or new species that don’t have predators like the spotted lantern fly… and then you have a choice of either losing a significant part of your vintage or even your vineyard, or spraying something… and whether you spray conventional pesticides or organic pesticides, neither are soft options.

Yes, there are a few, brave people who grow grapes organically in places like Virginia, New York, and Michigan, and every other state and region. It is possible, and I greatly admire these folks, and I’m growing by strict, better than organic guidelines on the Wineforest Farm in New York myself. But I think even these organic growers would tell you that, yes, it works for them, with their grapes, on their site, with their management… so far at least… but they probably wouldn’t say you can apply that to all sites, contexts, management, and grapes… even hybrid grapes. And some who are growing vinifera organically in these contexts may admit that they spray some organic fungicide or biological every five days or more some years. And we know that despite our best efforts we are taking a risk. It is our goal and aspiration always to be organic or better, yes. But we know that there may come a vintage where that risk results in a potential catastrophic loss, at which point we will have to make the decision of whether to absorb that loss and keep our prohibition against all pesticides and systemic fungicides… or spray something once or twice.

But that isn’t true of herbicides. There are many non-chemical alternatives to herbicides. No catastrophic loss will result from the plants that grow under vines. And some design and management and mindset changes can virtually eliminate most serious problems that result from under vine plants.

So we have a zero tolerance policy towards herbicides in the wine at Embracing Hybrid Grapes, and a more nuanced perspective on fungicides and insecticides. And while part of the “Beyond” of Beyond Organic Wine is related to exceeding organic standards in our approach to wine, the other part of “Beyond” is that nuance. And that nuance comes from my perspective not being guided by what is most organic, but by what is most ecological.

While many people who farm organically have larger ecological values that guide their organic viticulture, “Organic” by definition is a pretty narrow set of standards that are mostly focused on prohibitions of conventional pesticides. And while this again is a gre…

Pierre & Antonin is a winery in the South of France that uses only organically grown resistant grape varieties (aka hybrids) using ultra-light-weight bottles and local materials for packaging. All of these urgently needed, ecological approaches to creating a wine business gives them a marketing edge and allows them to operate much more affordably, and t…

Here’s a quick mention of a few upcoming things that I’ll say more about in the future:

First, the book release party for my book Wine Liberated will be held in Ithaca, NY at Autumn Leaves Bookstore on November 14th. Wine will be served. It’s an anarchist book store. I’ll be there, trying to inspire a new odyssey for the next century of wine exploration.

Second, the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference is happening February 21-22 at UC Davis and in Berkeley at the Donkey & Goat winery. Tickets will go on sale in a month-ish, and we are looking for sponsors and hybrid wine producers who want to showcase their herbicide free wine to a thirsty west coast.

Third, I’m going to MC Undercurrent 2027, which is THE organic and biodynamic wine conference in New Zealand, maybe the entire southern hemisphere. It’s June 1-3 in Queenstown, and the amazing Alica Anderson of Amvive will be the keynote speaker.

Finally, please subscribe at beyondorganicwine.substack.com to support this podcast and all the work of Beyond Organic Wine. Thank you!

At this point in history, Halloween 2026, talking about the very scary crisis in agriculture, especially in the US, may be like being on the Titanic and brining attention to the fact that the boilers are flooded. It’s true, and it’s a seriously serious issue… but it’s merely a symptom of much bigger issues.

So I start this episode with a quote from my guest as a reminder of where our focus needs to be. I started a boycott of glyphosate and all herbicides in wine because it is an important statement that we don’t need to tolerate discussion about this anymore. The known knowns of glyphosate are utterly damning, and even though there are certainly many unknowns, they give zero reason to excuse its use.

And yet this boycott doesn’t solve the larger issues. And Dr. Michelle Perro reminds us of the power and responsibility we have as agents of change, as instigators and initiators. But we need to speak up, stand up, and own our capacity to re-engage with our communities in not letting our lives be dictated by corporations who seek short-term material gain and the power to protect and increase their profit-making ability despite its devastating effects on humans and all of the lives with whom we share this world.

Wine invites us to think about the future. We make decisions today in wine that we know we won’t taste, in some cases, for years. Wine asks us to think long-term. To think perennially. To think about systems that exceed our own brief lifetimes.

I find it ironic that we think we can’t live and make wine without these novel chemicals that were only invented a few decades ago, that are harmful for us in multiple, intergenerational ways, when our wine cultures were developed over thousands of years without fossil fuels, let alone chemistry, I know it isn’t easy to farm ecologically, but easy is only a short term solution, and short term thinking seems to have created some long term problems.

We find ourselves deeply invested in an approach to winegrowing that is only possible with chemicals. But that doesn’t make those chemicals good or wise, and examples to the contrary, the hundreds of folks I’ve interviewed for this podcast, prove that these chemicals are not the only way to grow grapes commercially. I know that there can be pretty extreme consequences to weaning off some of these things when there aren’t other easy alternatives, and it would suck to be the people who bear the burden of those consequences in our lifetime. But I think those consequences can be felt voluntarily by us now or they can be felt by our children involuntarily, because agricultural approaches that are only possible with chemicals are not sustainable in the long term.

If you haven’t read my post, How To Grow Wine Without Herbicides, please do.

My guest is Dr. Michelle Perro. Dr. Perro is a veteran pediatrician with over four decades of experience in acute and integrative medicine, co-founder and CEO of GMOScience, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. More than fifteen years ago, Dr. Perro transformed her clinical practice to include the health effects from GMOs and their associated pesticides. She has worked as both Emergency Room Director and Attending Physician from New York’s Metropolitan Hospital/New York Medical college to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Oakland, CA. Dr. Perro has co-authored the highly acclaimed book, What’s Making our Children Sick. Stay tuned for her upcoming book, Making our Children Well, an instructional guidebook for parents on nutrition and homeopathy.

Her charity, GMOScience, has a mission to educate about the connection between regenerative organic agriculture and human health. Her motto is “Educate to Regenerate.”

I posted on Instagram about an article Dr. Perro wrote exploring new findings about the way that glyphosate robs our minds of needed metals like lithium and it went viral… 150,000 views later, we had this conversation about how important a vibrant and diverse microbiome are to both humans and grapevines, and the importance of many minerals and metals to human and vine health, and how stupid it is, therefore, to spray ourselves and our vines with a chemical that is both a patented anti-biotic and chelator.

Enjoy.

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My guest for this episode is Morgan Twain-Peterson, MW. Morgan is the owner and winemaker of Bedrock Wine Co. in Sonoma, CA, a winery dedicated to preserving California’s historic vineyards. The wines have been featured four times in Wine Spectator’s Top 100 List, placing as high as number 9. In 2014, Morgan, alongside friend Tegan Passalacqua, was named the San Francisco Chronicle Co-Winemaker of the Year. In 2017 Morgan became a Master of Wine, making him one of a handful of winemakers in the United States to get that certification. In 2020, Bedrock was named Winery of the Year by Antonio Galloni.

Bedrock farms and sources grapes from some of the oldest vineyards in California, preserving some varieties of grapes that no longer exist anywhere else on earth. The Bedrock estate vineyard is Regenerative Organic certified, and produces wine from grapes that are 135 years old.

We talk about how to regenerate decades of conventional thinking in viticulture, how regenerative organic viticulture is the best way to prepare for this Super El Nino that’s hitting this winter, nutritional considerations when transitioning to a no-till system, reducing inputs through regenerative viticulture, what we can learn from old vineyards as we consider planting new vineyards, how diversity generates uniqueness, Morgan coins the term “sheep exudates,” and much more.

Beyond Organic Wine podcast is listener supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy Harvest, Merry Samhain, and a Celebratory Equinox to you all wherever you are. This episode is about Magic, the cunning arts that have been practiced for millennia in most cultures.

Even if you have clear and strongly held thoughts about Magic, I think it’s important to consider for a moment the space between those thoughts. You don’t have to let go of healthy doubts to admit that any thoughts contained within words, like the ideas of this sentence, are quite limited… threads of logic spun across vast oceans of truth. Our net of language may catch fish, but can it catch the sea? Enlightenment, I’ve heard it said, is the space between thoughts.

The practices of Magic are as old as agriculture. And I think we can find something to hold onto in that word “agriculture” or “viticulture,” even as we follow my guest for this episode into realms that are unfamiliar to some of us, myself included. The root of “culture” in viticulture or agriculture is the same root of the word “cult.” It implies both turning or tending the soil, and worshiping, honoring, and caring for it. The same proto-Indo-European root gives us the words “inhabitant” and “servant.” And so we have embedded deep in the roots of our language a reminder that what we do as farmers, as winegrowers - the material work of caring for the soil-plant communities to which we belong – is simultaneously a spiritual rite of worship, of love, for this land, and that this land is our home and our role in relation to it is not to manage it but to serve it.

This understanding asks us to re-imagine, in a way that is both literally and figuratively radical, the kinds of perspectives and relationships that have come out of the reductive, materialistic approach to science. My guest for this episode, Todd Elliott, wrote a book to help us with this re-imagining. I see the approach he offers - the cunning approach, the use of Magic - as a way to help us re-imagine our relationship to the community of life as one guided by the ecological intimacy, the devoted dependence, and the deeply rooted love that is our true and ancient relationship with a world teeming with sentience.

Whether you believe in Magic or not, I think Todd and his book, The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magical Practices, Mythology, and Folklore, can help us approach our interaction with our local ecology, our land, our community, with more curiosity, more care, and deeper connection. And those are all urgently needed things. And re-engaging with our land, re-immersing ourselves in the wild and mysterious communities of life that surround us, may bring a bit of magic back into our wines and our lives. And that may be what actually saves us.

Enjoy!

Another great book:

Wine Liberated

In 2020, Spain experienced one of the worst downy mildew outbreaks in modern history. The conditions were perfect, or perfectly horrible, for downy mildew to spread rapidly. Some producers lost 100% of their crop, even after spraying 15 or more times with fungicides. Albet i Noya already had been growing a block of resistant hybrid varieties in 2020, so…

What if the multi-year contraction in wine sales is a good thing? So much press and media attention has been given to the causes for the ongoing decline in wine sales, and are we at the bottom, and why aren’t millennials or gen Z drinking, or why they are but we mis-read the data (as if these designations represent real people in any meaningful way), an…

A prejudice-free re-telling of the evolutionary history, as well as the redacted wine history, of the world’s most popular grape.

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Katya, Domaine de Cassagnas - Vivan! Co-op founding member

I’m incredibly inspired by this episode for multiple reasons. First, this is about a positive action, a proactive solution, to some of the wine’s biggest issues right now. Secondly, this solution embodies the values I want to promote, increase, and spread in wine, while de-funding the parts of wine that don’t need to continue. This episode answers the questions of how do we increase wine sales for small, beyond organic wine producers? How do we increase profit on every sale of wine they make while also increasing and helping to stabilize their sales? How do we connect drinkers with the people and stories behind the wine that they buy? How do we make it easy to find wine that represents our values? This solution answers all of these questions.

The third reason I’m inspired by this episode is because my guest, Gregory Kinsman-Chauvet, is an entrepreneur who is clearly motivated by mission rather than by money, as you’ll hear. Greg is one of the members of the Vivan! Co-op and he is helping to create this online hub for small organic, biodynamic, and natural wine producers to sell directly to consumers without the middleman taking half of the sale price.

We started with the overview of what the Vivan Co-op does, and as I began to realize how important this was, I began to consider how I would apply this to the US, since Vivan is exclusively local to Europe. So I began asking details, and then I let the recording continue as we talked about a few other fun topics, so there are some funny surprises toward the end. So have fun and enjoy!

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Raf, Karma Village - Vivan! Co-op member

This episode is first interview with a New Zealand winemaker, and I’m glad to finally be taking us all on a journey to one of the most beautiful and special wine areas on earth, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the sub region of Central Otago, and the sub-sub region of Gibbston. This is Pinot Noir country, and one of the precious few areas on earth where a co…