Beyond Organic Wine

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…

My guests for this episode are Marta and Cristina of the the Porto Protocol, which is both a resource hub and community promoting climate action for the global wine ecosystem. Because of the emphasis on community that Marta highlights in this conversation, I recorded a special introduction for it. Here’s the text of it:

Glyphosate, the main active component in RoundUp, has been considered to be safe because it acts on the shikimate pathway, and the shikimate pathway is not found in mammals. And since we humans are mammals, glyphosate was deemed virtually harmless to us.

But what is a human being? Are we individual organisms? What is a grapevine? What is a tree? Who am I in relation to the world around me? Am I independent of it or completely and utterly dependent on it?

The fascinating thing about glyphosate is that it has forced us to realize that we are not individual organisms. We are consortiums of myriad and diverse organisms working as a community. We have more micro-organisms in and on us than there are cells that make up our body. Even the mitochondria, that live inside the cells of our bodies are, in a way, little microbial entities with their own needs and characteristics separate from ours… whoever “We” are.

As it turns out, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, and many other forms of microbial life all have the shikimate pathway, and “we” – this community of life to which we attach our human identities – need all of those other lives to be able to live and thrive. So when we use a substance like glyphosate, and saturate our world with it, and eat it, and drink it with almost every bite of food and sip of wine… what does that do to community of life that we call ourselves? When I use glyphosate I dissolve the foundation of “me.”

And so glyphosate has shown us how to use the reductive perspective of science to sell corporate, political agendas. It has shown us how to monetize the omissions of faux-objectivity in an interdependent world. It has shown us how to profit off the ignorance implicit in a disconnected world-view that we bless with peer reviewed studies. The questions we don’t ask about these substances that are being sold to us to make our lives easier are the loopholes of our own dissolution.

So when I talk about the soil-plant community (rather than referring to individual “plants”), when I talk about grapevines and trees as community builders, when I use the term “community of life” instead of that human-alienated term “nature,” it’s because this shift in perspective is at the root of the cultural revolution that we need to be able to see what’s happening clearly and make real change that will finally enable us to re-envision and stop the insanity of what we’ve been doing to our community in the name of agriculture. The return to a community perspective is not some feel-good phrasing. It is the revolution.

In this episode with Marta and Cristina of the Porto Protocol, Marta talks about how the community aspect, the engagement, the sharing and collaborating, is the most valuable resource of all the resources the Porto Protocol has to offer. I hope what I’ve just said makes this resonate even more deeply as you listen. I hope you boycott glyphosate and all herbicides from wine. I hope you exercise extreme skepticism about anything that promotes reductive thinking, hyper-individualism, and disconnection. I hope you see yourself as a host and steward of legions of lives and begin to ask what it means to be human if being human depends on the survival of all of the lives of this world.

A special thanks to Lindsay Valdez for connecting me with Marta and Cristina, and for boldly asking great questions.

My guest for this incredible episode is Michael Cook. Michael is the Viticulture Program Specialist for the 55 counties of North Texas with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

His primary function is to provide educational support for the nearly 120 commercial regional vineyards, which grow vinifera, hybrids, and muscadines, by providing workshops,…

My guest for this episode is Eric Mayer of Napachar, and this episode is all about biochar. After Eric earned a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University he went looking for a more immediate way to alleviate the climate crisis. When he learned about biochar’s potential for rapidly scalable carbon sequestration and the simple technologies…

My guest for this episode is Pierre Muller. Pierre is an agroforestry consultant and owner of AGECO in Catalonia with a wide range of experience and projects in multiple contexts, and this episode digs into some of my favorite topics and the subjects that I’m personally exploring on the WineForest Farm in New York.

Vitiforestry, Agroforestry with Vines, polycultures, married vines and why we don’t like the term “married vines,” agroecology, incorporating permaculture design in wine landscapes, thinking of our wine farms as mosaics, creating alternatives to monoculture by creating communities of collaboration and cooperation, and building some of the most powerful solutions to climate change… and beginning to understand that the secret to those solutions is that we build them first in our minds.

Pierre also gives definitions and a metric for evaluating the differences between conventional, sustainable, and regenerative, and they are the best definitions I’ve heard.

This is one of the most exciting and inspiring discussions I’ve had with someone working and thinking at the cutting edge of ecological winegrowing.

Pierre’s Handbooks and Guides (most available for free):

https://www.ecoag.org/en/guides

PDF of all the Scientists, Authors, Reference Materials, Books, etc. mentioned in the episode