Beyond Organic Wine

My guest for this episode is Harold Langlais, who works as Marketing Director for and part owner with the Amoreau family at Chateau Le Puy. Chateau Le Puy’s land – the Hill of Wonders - has been chemical free since it began in the 1600’s. After WW1 they refused to begin using the novel chemistry that came out of the war and they have continued on that …

My guest for this episode is Alder Yarrow. Alder writes and does everything for the blog Vinography, and I’ve been receiving Alder’s weekly email for several years. He gives a list of links of articles he’s been reading, and I always enjoy scanning this list to see what’s going on in the wine zeitgeist.

Alder’s Vinography.com blog has been published daily since 2004, and was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2013.

Since 2011, Alder has also been a monthly columnist for Jancis Robinson where he also contributes wine reviews for American wines. Alder has been judging competitions for many years, and spent nearly a decade as a judge for the World of Fine Wine’s annual Global Restaurant Wine List awards, and for the James Beard Restaurant awards.

His coffee-table book of essays and photographs, The Essence of Wine, was named one of the best wine books of 2014 by the New York Times and won the Chairman’s Prize at the 2015 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers Awards.

In 2013 Alder was inducted into the Wine Media Guild of New York’s Wine Writers Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with only 24 other living wine writers. He is also a member of the Circle of Wine Writers.

Alder was the architect of and serves as the day-to-day manager for the Old Vine Registry, the world’s first and most authoritative public database of old vine vineyards around the globe.

I reached out to Alder for this conversation because of a comment he made about the recent Eric Asimov article about hybrid grapes. I gave Alder questions in advance, so he knew I wanted to challenge him on several ideas. To his credit he still agreed to the conversation, and you’re about to listen to the results. Though I think we share most of the same values and agree about a lot, we don’t agree about everything, and that’s why I wanted to talk with him. I hope that makes sense. You have to get out of your own echo chamber if you want to learn, and if you care about truth. And more and more you have to actively seek the company of those who disagree with you if you want to break free of the control of algorithms… if you want to cultivate diversity. So I’m grateful to Alder for being game and taking the time to have this conversation/debate.

And if you listen until the end, I’m also including as an epilogue the verbatim exchange that we had via email after the conversation. As I re-listened to a specific part of the recorded conversation while editing, I realized I wanted to make a comment about something that I had let slide, but I wanted him to be able to respond to that comment. So stay tuned at the end if you’re interested in hearing more.

Please join Beyond Organic Wine on Substack.

Enjoy!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon editing Wikipedia entries about hybrid grapes because they were either factually wrong, omitted important and relevant information, or pushed prejudiced perspectives… and sometimes did all of this.

Sometimes the edits were small but important. In the entry on Hybrid Grape, a contributor thought it important to mention that they “exhibit a mix of traits” from their various parentages (this is true and relevant), and that hybrids with Vitis labrusca in their parentage “have a strong ‘candied’ or ‘wild strawberry’ aroma.” While I applaud this description (which isn’t the negative description I’ve found in other labrusca mentions), I changed this entry to read “can have a strong ‘candied’ or ‘wild strawberry’ aroma depending on many factors.”

Labruscana have come a long way since the original 50/50 crosses (200 years ago), and Concord (with its 75% labrusca parentage) is very different from, say, Marquette, which has labrusca in its parentage but is the result of many, many crosses including quite a few species. The similarities of flavor between Concord and Marquette are extremely minimal, and they do not share a “candied” aroma, despite both having labrusca in their parentage. Additionally, I’ve had labruscana that were picked and made in a way that none of these “characteristic” aromas were present. But it’s true that labruscana “can” have those flavors, depending on many factors.

Of course that begs the question of why even mention these things if you have to qualify them so extensively? Would it be relevant to say that “grapes with Vitis vinifera parentage can have aromas of cat piss and tar, depending on many factors”? This is factually true, but… does it matter to understanding vinifera? Or does it actively confuse people who haven’t been exposed to the wide variety of vinifera cultivars?

This double standard results from wine writers – likely MW’s or other “experts” – who have had very little exposure to anything but Vinifera Culture and see the world through the prism that limits “fine wine” to only European “pure” vinifera grapes (and usually only a select few of those). Several of the most egregiously prejudiced lines in some entries about the flavors hybrid grapes were actually cited, and the citation linked to entries in the Oxford Companion to Wine. So it seems more than just Wikipedia needs to be edited. While Vinifera Culture has been navel gazing for the last half-century or more, the rest of the world has continued to adapt and change, and… surprise! Vinifera Culture finds itself completely out of touch with the current realities in wine.

But more than lack of awareness permeates entries about hybrids. I edited the entry on the grape Kyoho, which started with the line: “Kyoho grapes (巨峰葡萄, Kyohō budō; lit. 'giant mountain grape'") are a fox grape (Concord-like) cross popular in East Asia.”

The term “fox grape” is, again, outdated, and also inaccurate. “Fox grape” is the term given to the crop wild relative (Vitis labrusca). The children of the sexual reproduction of labrusca with other species of grapes can no longer be called the fox grape. This might be semantic. I know many people have called grapes with labrusca parentage fox grapes, even if not entirely labrusca. But it might also be a dog whistle. What they seem to want to imply, strongly, is that Kyoho is a “foxy” grape, for those of you who know what I mean, wink wink.

What troubled me most was that the writer felt the need to put this piece of information as the first line in the entry about Kyoho. So someone coming to Wikipedia to learn about Kyoho now must see it through the lens of “fox grape” and what does that mean and how should I feel about that? How relevant to its existence and importance in the world of grapes is the fact that it has similar parentage to Concord and is a “fox grape”? I’m relatively sure that’s a designation that neither its breeder nor the billions of people who love it would ever apply to it.

So I changed the entry about Kyoho to read: “Kyoho grapes (巨峰葡萄, Kyohō budō; lit. 'giant mountain grape'") are the most planted grapes in the world by area.[citation added] They are a variety of hybrid grape popular in East Asia.” Isn’t that a more accurate, helpful, and unbiased introduction to a grape you might be trying to learn more about?

Then there were the really big changes. The “History” section of the entry for Hybrid Grape in Wikipedia read:

“During the first half of the 20th century, various breeding programs were developed in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the Phylloxera louse, which was responsible for the destruction of European vineyards from 1863 onwards. After extensive attempts, grafting European varieties onto North American rootstock proved to be the most successful method of dealing with the problem.”

I changed it to read:

“During the first half of the 20th century, various breeding programs were developed in an attempt to deal with the consequences of globalization, which resulted in Europeans and European-Americans bringing the Phylloxera louse from North America to Europe, as well as several North American parasitic fungi - like black rot (Guignardia bidwellii), downey mildew (peronospora), and powdery mildew (oidium). Phylloxera devastated European vineyards throughout the late 1800's. While many hybrids were able to successfully resist Phylloxera, as well as the novel fungal pressures, European producers chose to graft their susceptible traditional, single-species European varieties onto North American resistant rootstock.”

I spent a lot of time re-writing to choose this wording and version of history-telling, and I won’t go into all the details. But one of the things that I think is worth noting is the line ending the previous version saying that grafting “proved the most successful method of dealing with the problem.”

What bothers me about that line is that I don’t think grafting actually dealt with the problem. The problem wasn’t Phylloxera. The problem was an unwillingness to adapt. The problem wasn’t with the world, out there, it was with our prejudices and perspectives, inside us. If phylloxera was the problem, hybrid grapes did and do deal with that problem and the other “problems” of grape-loving fungi. But Europeans instead chose not to adapt, but rather employed a technique that allowed them to continue to grow their susceptible varieties of vinifera: i.e. grafting. However, this left the problem of the fungi, which they dealt with by using new chemical pesticides. Again… this didn’t deal with the problem, actually. It kept their viticulture stagnate an enabled them to avoid adapting.

What this wiki edit, and really all of the edits I’ve done, shows is that the problem was never dealt with. The real problem continues to shape the thinking of those who have come to know wine through this culture, and it comes out in the way they write about wine and grapes on Wikipedia. Until we free our minds from the prejudice of Vinifera Culture, we’ll continue to kick this problem down the road for someone else to deal with… for someone else to try to edit.

After spending a couple hours editing, I did find a bit of encouragement. I realized I could see that stats associated with my account, and I discovered that thousands of people have visited the pages where I’ve attempted to edit out prejudice and mis-information in the past. My hope is that these are new wine lovers, new wine journalists, looking for unbiased information about these grapes. Maybe by learning about these grapes without the slant of a vinifera-centric perspective they will be part of the generation that actually deals with the problems that cause the problems.

“The earth is alive. The earth is intelligent. The earth is having a crisis because of us. The good news is: we are the earth ourselves, and we can be much stronger in our activism if we remember that we are acting on behalf of, we are living agents of, we are part of, this living being called the Earth.

Earthelujah!”

That’s a quote from Reverend Billy of…

My guest for this episode is ​Lore McSpadden-Walker. Lore (they/them) is an embodiment navigator and neuro-spicy hedge witch who has dedicated their work towards helping people who have experienced systemic denial of access, disability, and/or traumatic experiences learn about their physical selves through education, facilitated conversations, movement coaching and somatic awareness, Reiki, herbalism, and earth-based relational healing. Their current projects also center aspects of food access, and include the literal sharing of foods as well as education related to growing, foraging, preparing, and preserving edible and medicinal plants.

Information about their background and certifications can be found at https://www.positiveforcemovement.org/about, and you can find them on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/TheWildWithinHealing.

This episode talks about wine from multiple perspectives. Wine as food, wine as a healer for our troubled hearts, wine as psychoactive sacrament, wine as mentor. As I think Lore would put it, we uncover how wine contains multitudes. Along the way we explore the vital role that wine can play in overcoming our alienation from the community of life, and how much hope we can derive from the more-than-human world where even death is part of the cycle of abundance.

Lore shares several things that move me even more now because of their uncanny timeliness. Lore implores us to learn to fall out of love with the violent narrative of human supremacy over the more-than-human world, and the incredible value of diverse and inclusive communities. They bring in an analogy from cannabis culture and discuss the potential of an Entourage Effect in wine, and I’m still thinking about how this applies to human cultures as well. This episode is a bit out of the ordinary in the best way, and you’re in for a treat.

Here’s a link to the Earth Medicine Gathering we mentioned in the episode.

The last episode featured a 110 acre biodynamic chateau in one of Washington state’s famed AVAs. This episode features a 1 acre organic and regenerative vineyard of hybrids and vinifera with a straw bale winery and an underground house in a part of Washington that isn’t known for wine. I point out this contrast not to say that one is better than the other, but because in our dominant culture I’ve noticed that one is taken more seriously than the other. And I’m not saying that a 110 acre vineyard is really big and I’m definitely not saying it represents the same values as “Big Wine.” It’s just bigger than the vineyard we visit in this episode, and I use this comparison to look at this thought that we need to be able to scale the ideas that our wine embodies or they are dismissible, unimportant.

This is a big area of critique of the small-farm regenerative ag movement by Chris Newman, of Sylvanaqua Farms. He makes important points and we need his voice. And there are some real challenges to consider: the issues we face in regenerating our wine cultures are unavoidably systemic, and the systems we live in are massive. But I recently heard the question posed, what if we focus on spreading rather than scaling? Could we look at regenerative viticulture as a viral meme, rather than as a business plan for a million acres of vineyards? Do we need or even want scale when it comes to wine?

Right now it looks like the answer to that is “no.” Big Wine, the kind that comes with a bar code and national distribution and isn’t really wine anyway but more like a wine flavored beverage, seems to be what’s losing the most sales right now. And my guest for this episode is doing just fine. He has a loyal customer base because he makes his wine for his community. He represents his community’s highest values in his wine, even if they only care that it suits their taste and doesn’t make them feel like the wines of Big Wine do. His neighbors can tell that he cares about them and the land that they live on.

My guest for this episode is Joe Barreca of Barreca Vineyards. Joe has been making wine for 50 years and lives in North East Washington state. Joe is a self-described back to the land hippie, and in recent years regional efforts to elevate the voices and perspectives of the native people of his region have exposed him to new perspectives that inform how he thinks about and lives on the land, and clearly inspire and move him. Over years of experimentation he has come up with some of the most fascinating approaches to winemaking that I’ve heard since I spoke with Peter Schmidt of Mythopia in Switzerland. And what I think is fascinating is that out in the remote corner of a place that isn’t usually thought of in relation to wine at all, by following ecological values and a desire to make wine for his community, Joe has sort of stumbled into making zero zero wines and orange wines and co-ferments like an ideological natty winemaker in the Loire or San Francisco Bay area.

Joe grows one of his hybrid grapes, Baco Noir, with 10 foot canes… simply because he observed it and saw that that’s what it wanted, and that was the balance it needed to have the appropriate light and air to optimize the grape development. He let a baco vine grow into an old pear tree and has some really interesting observations to share about this partnership (see the photo below). Joe had never heard the term “married vine” but said he could see how that made sense.

Joe also washes and reuses all of his bottles. This is something he couldn’t do without the relationships with his customers who know to bring the bottles back to him, as well as a small scale that makes this possible. While the rest of us spin our wheels trying to come up regional bottle reuse programs and find massive hurdles related to the inertia of habit and bureaucracy as well as apathy, even among those of us who should care the most about it, Joe has meanwhile set up his own local reuse system made possible by community scale winemaking… and is actually doing it. So… maybe we shouldn’t dismiss small. Maybe small is beautiful.

Here’s a link to the foliar spray recipe that Joe mentions to treat vine health and reduce leaf hoppers:

https://barrecavineyards.com/foliar-spray/

Check out the abundance of that Baco Noir…

Let’s take a trip to the state of Washington in the US. You know Washington… it’s that place where it rains so much on the coast that vampires can live there year round. It’s a land for volcano connoisseurs. Its largest city was named for a man commonly known as Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples, who is thought to have said:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

As well as:

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”

Here are some wine statistics about Washington state: it’s the second largest producer of winegrapes in the US after California. It also has the second most organic vineyards after California.

But the organic acreage basically didn’t increase much over the 10 year period from 2005-2015, while the total vineyard acreage increased from 54,000 to 70,000 acres… meaning the percentage of organic vineyards dropped by over half a percentage from 3.7 to 3.1 percent. Washington has such an incredible climate for growing grapes organically that the only commercial no-spray vinifera vineyard in the world that I’m aware of – Paradisos Del Sol - is in Washington, yet the percentage of organic vineyards is unchanging to decreasing.

Meanwhile just across the border, Oregon has a greater percentage of biodynamic vineyards than Washington has organic, and Oregon’s percentage of organic vineyards is the highest in the US… all while Oregon’s main wine growing regions in the Willamette Valley are rainier and largely growing varieties of vinifera that are some of the most sensitive to mildews and rots.

So what does this tell us? This tells us that choosing to farm organically, biodynamically, regeneratively or better is not a matter of what is possible. It IS possible. It’s a matter of deciding to do it. It’s a matter of choice. How do we get people to choose better farming? There are a lot of answers to that, but I think many of them involve establishing trust by listening, including them in our community, trying to understand them genuinely without ulterior motives… or, if I had to express this in one word, love.

For this episode we are visiting one of the only organic and biodynamic certified wineries in Washington State: Hedges Family Estate. My guests are Sarah Hedges Goedhart, the Director of Winemaking and Winery Operations, and Reid Wilson, the Vineyard Manager. Hedges sounds like a fascinating place. A biodynamic family winery with around 110 acres and a honest to god Chateau in the Red Mountain AVA.

I hope I’ve set up that what they are doing is pretty special in their region, and Sarah and Reid have the passion and excitement to match the work. They bring up some of the less talked about aspects of biodynamics, including the responsibilities of farmers with regard to their employees. This led me to look up the Biodynamic Farm Standard for Demeter US. Read the Environmental Statement. Read the Biodynamic Principle of Social Responsibility. Cow horns are sexy, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing, but there are some substantive elements to biodynamics that are often overlooked or completely ignored. While some of these principles, like the social responsibility guidelines, seem to be little more than values statements, at least they create a culture that gives attention to them. Try this on for size:

“Agricultural land occupies 50% of the earth’s habitable surface, about 41% of U.S. land. In the U.S., food production contributes 34% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns of climate change cannot be successfully addressed without addressing agriculture’s contribution to it but, conversely, agriculture can be a potent solution. Because the underlying theme of the Biodynamic Farm Standard is to generate inputs out of the life of the farm system itself rather than importing them from outside, the heart of a Biodynamic farm’s fertility system is the sequestering and recycling of carbon… Demeter’s vision is to heal the planet through agriculture.”

Does this force me to abide by certain rules or else? No. But it sounds like a culture, and agri-culture, that I’d like to be part of.

This conversation is full of juicy moments, but one that sticks out to me is when Reid says, and I’m paraphrasing, I want the land to remember me in a way that it’s almost like it has forgotten me.

My guest for this episode is Pascal Baudar. For many of you he needs no formal introduction, so I’ll introduce him informally. I think he’s the Monet of wine. He has given me the inspiration of thinking of wines as impressionist paintings, capable of expressing more than just a landscape or regional distinctiveness, but also the tastes of individual sea…

What seeds are you sending out into the world with your wine? What systems, or economies, are you building with the energy you exchange with the plants? Absent the physical seeds, are you helping disperse the vine’s metaphysical seeds, the stories and ideas the plants embodied, or something else?

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What seeds are you sending out into the world with your wine? What systems, or economies, are you building with the energy you exchange with the plants? Absent the physical seeds, are you helping disperse the vine’s metaphysical seeds, the stories and ideas the plants embody, or something else?