185.5K
Downloads
193
Episodes
Organic Wine is the gateway to explore the entire wine industry - from soil to sommeliers - from a revolutionary ecological perspective. Deep interviews discussing big ideas with some of the most intriguing people on the cutting edge of the regenerative renaissance, about where wine comes from and where it is going.
Episodes
Wednesday Jan 10, 2024
Wednesday Jan 10, 2024
My guest for this episode is Regine Rousseau. Regine is the the founder & CEO of Shall We Wine, and she’s also the communications director for The Veraison Project… one of the best named programs in wine. Regine explains the work of Veraison Project, and she offers some really important insights into how we can help make wine more inclusive. I’ll be honest, I got a little choked up as I relistened to her describe why someone might get involved in wine, as it has been narrowly defined, despite it not being friendly to people who look like her. Here’s a hint… it’s about love. Ultimately, I hope Regine helps you, as she helped me, fall even deeper in love with wine.
https://www.theveraisonproject.com/
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
When we say the word "wine" we most often express a system of unquestioned assumptions that excludes the fruit fermentation traditions of everyone throughout all time who has made "wine" from anything besides Vitis vinifera. As we head into 2024, I'm asking us to begin to question those assumptions. Whose definition of wine are we using? Who and what is included and excluded from the dominant definition of wine?
This is a journey through history, enslavement, genocide, marriage, archaeology, culture, love, and truth. This is a journey to discover the soul of wine.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Monday Dec 18, 2023
Monday Dec 18, 2023
My guest for this episode is Cameron Clark. Cameron just finished a masters program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. As part of completing his masters he spent several months working on an Biodynamic farm and the wrote a thesis titled: Spiritual Agriculture, Wellness, & Sustainability: A case study of Biodynamic agriculture in South Tyrol, Italy
Last week’s episode with Garett Long about Biodynamics asked us to reconsider what questions we haven’t asked of our farming systems. In this episode, we discuss the central claim of Cameron’s that a spiritual approach to agriculture is not just an optional add-on for farmers who happen to have that bent, but it is an essential part of the most efficacious and productive forms of agriculture and will be necessary as we navigate the transition away from anthropocentrism and economically motivated values systems.
Cameron’s definition of “spiritual” may not be what that term normally conjures for you, so hang in there to hear how he defines "spiritual agriculture." We also discuss, as Cameron does in his thesis, the conflicts that arise from trying to practice spiritual viticulture in an economically driven world, and the compromises, complexity, and nuance that result. These are the tough decisions we all face daily – whether we are directly involved in agriculture or not. And that’s why I think you’ll find this discussion with Cameron so relevant. As he says in his thesis:
"We have no choice but to use land--our existence requires food procurement and energy usage, tying all of us into inextricable relations with the world that leave a wake in the lives of others (Heldke, 2018). We are only left, then, with a choice of how to engage with our land--in a life-diminishing or life-promoting way."
Read Cameron's full Spiritual Agriculture thesis here.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
https://www.centralaswine.com/
Robin Wall Kimmerer's Three Sisters Essay
Monday Dec 11, 2023
Monday Dec 11, 2023
This episode is a special how-to exploration of a year of biodynamic viticulture. The more I’ve learned about biodynamics, the curiouser and curiouser I’ve become. and the more I want to learn. So this episode is a practical exploration of biodynamics from both a practical and a philosophical perspective. 2024 is the 100 year anniversary of the start of Biodynamics.
My guest for this episode is Garett Long. Garett is the Director of Agriculture at Troon Vineyards. Troon Vineyard is a Demeter Biodynamic® Certified and Regenerative Organic Gold Certified™️ farm in Oregon’s Applegate Valley. They are only the fourth farm in the world to achieve Regenerative Gold Certification, and they are creating a beautiful culture in southern Ofregon. I had a great conversation with Troon’s General Manager, Craig Camp, over a year ago for an episode that I highly recommend finding in the Beyond Organic Wine library.
Garett takes us through an entire year of biodynamic practices at Troon, so this episode is information rich. One of my favorite things about talking to Garett is that while I intended this to be a step-by-step instructional for practicing biodynamics, he made it so much more. We get the practical how-to, but we never get very far from the relevance of the spiritual aspects of agriculture to those practices. This is in part due to Garett’s deep sense of the importance of the spiritual aspect of farming to farming itself, and in part due to biodynamics, which is unique as a farming practice in its embrace of spiritual perspectives. Garett talks frankly about some of the ways that biodynamics is often dismissed, but he also offers alternative perspectives and interpretations about what these things may arise from.
One note to keep in mind is that I ask Garett to talk quite a bit about the requirements of Demeter Biodynamic certification, and I just want to point out that while he’s extremely knowledgeable about this, he isn’t a BD certifier and isn’t speaking for Demeter. So please do your own research and talk to the folks at Demeter if you want to get certified. Having said that, this Garett is a wealth of information, and I think everyone will find this conversation to be incredibly valuable whether or not you plan to get BD certified. Most valuable of all, I think, are the questions about whether we have been asking the right questions about biodynamics, the questions that ask us to consider what we don’t yet know.
https://www.troonvineyard.com/
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Tuesday Dec 05, 2023
Tuesday Dec 05, 2023
For a dose of hope and imagination and a vision of beauty and permanence, for this episode I bring you Ron and Monique of Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands. Ron and Monique are doing so much cool stuff all at once I don’t know where to begin. They are the largest commercial no-spray vineyard that I’m aware of, at 6 hectares or 15 acres, and they’re doing this in Holland… That means that the vines they grow are resilient to some pretty bad, wet weather… trust me, I spent a year there. And 2 hectares or 5 acres of that vineyard is a younger vitiforestry planting that will use trees as living trellis posts.
When you hear about how and why they use a high cordon trellising system, how and why they mow very sparsely, how and why they don’t need to add fertilizer, how and why they’ve chosen the tree partners in the vitiforestry block, and how this system lends itself to expressive wines… and so much more, you will see how incredibly caring and thoughtful they are about the ecology of every element of their system… and why I’m so thrilled to share this with you!
While there are folks doing pieces of what Ron and Monique are doing, I have yet to find anyone doing all of this in one vineyard… and they are doing it in a place that doesn’t even have a wine tradition, mostly because of the bad weather! I guess what I’m trying to say is… if they can do what they are doing where they are doing it… the rest of us have no excuses. Let your imaginations run wild!
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
We at the Stoke wanted to sponsor the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast because of the importance of the message that so many of these conversations bring. Our future generations depend on us, and education is the key to a change in our concepts of how we could and should be farming and treating our soils. It doesn’t matter your level of education with these topics, as long and you are willing to learn and your heart is in the right place, YOU will make a difference and it doesn’t matter the size as it all adds up. Keep pushing and please keep chatting. Let’s do this.
Mentioned in the intro:
Tags: vitiforestry, no-spray vineyard, biodynamic vineyard, piwi grapes, hybrid grapes
Monday Nov 27, 2023
Monday Nov 27, 2023
This episode is sponsored by Stoke Wines.
My guest for this episode is Jason Haas. Jason is the partner and general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles California. I hope that you’ve heard of Tablas Creek, but if not, let me give you a short list of their environmental leadership in the wine industry. Tablas Creek was the first Regenerative Organic Certified winery in the world. They’ve been farming organically since their start in 1989, certified organic since 2005, and certified biodynamic since 2015. They employ a full-time shepherd to manage a year-round flock of over 250 sheep that rotationally graze their 270 acres of vineyards, as well as the woodlands around them. Their winery is 100% solar powered, and they use their wastewater to feed a native species wetland. They are leaders in reducing glass bottle weights and bringing awareness to the many downsides of heavy glass bottles, and they are pioneering alternative packaging for ultra-premium wine. And this is just a short list. We talk about all of this, as well as get into the technicalities of no-till and low-till considerations in regenerative viticulture. We talk about how Tablas Creek has brought every grape from Chateauneuf du Pape to the US through the rigorous and time consuming process of quarantining that can take over a decade… and it’s likely if you’ve drunk a wine from the US made with a Rhone variety of grape, you can thank Tablas Creek.
Behind all of this, I hope you get a sense of the timeline of the vision for this winery. It extends beyond Jason’s, or any single person’s lifetime. It’s a vision of continual, incremental improvement, of regeneration, over centuries. It’s a vision that I hope inspires the way we think about wine.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
We at the Stoke wanted to sponsor the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast because of the importance of the message that so many of these conversations bring. Our future generations depend on us, and education is the key to a change in our concepts of how we could and should be farming and treating our soils. It doesn’t matter your level of education with these topics, as long and you are willing to learn and your heart is in the right place, YOU will make a difference and it doesn’t matter the size as it all adds up. Keep pushing and please keep chatting. Let’s do this.
Tuesday Nov 21, 2023
Tuesday Nov 21, 2023
I heard a great quote that went something like this: when you’re a child, you think your parents are gods. When you become an adolescent, you realize they’re human. When you become an adult, you forgive them for being human. When you become wise, you forgive yourself for being human.
My guest for this episode is Nick Dugmore. Nick is a winemaker in South Australia for his winery The Stoke. Nick listened to the episode I recorded with Jeff Lowenfels about the soil microbiome, and he’s been traveling down the regenerative viticulture rabbit hole ever since. In 2023 he was named Australia’s Young Gun of Wine, and then four months ago he was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer. He’s 39 years old.
When you hear Nick’s positivity, humor, and joy, keep in mind that he’s in the midst of the following treatment schedule: 5 x 3 week rounds of chemotherapy with 1 week of intravenous followed by 112 tablets over two weeks and then a week break. Then 6 weeks of radiotherapy which is 5 days a week at the hospital for 45 mins. Then a 3 month break and then surgery to remove what’s left.
We talk frankly about his cancer and the fact that his alcohol consumption may have contributed to it. Yet Nick is incredibly grateful to work in wine, and he loves the winemaking community. Both Nick and I can thank wine for the most important relationships in our lives – our spouses. But if his cancer was caused by alcohol, there’s a chance that alcohol could take his life. Both are parts of wine, and there are many more. Nick talks about the wine community that has come to his aid, and he talks about the spirituality of wine, and the beauty of Kangaroo Island where he converted 12 acres of conventional vineyard to a thriving regenerative ecosystem. He makes some profound connections between soil health, physical health, and mental health. And at least twice he mentions how busy we all are, and how this leads us to make thoughtless decisions… because we don’t have the time to be thoughtful.
It reminds me of the famous quote from Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual: "The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature, of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action."
As I think about regenerating wine, Nick has made me think about how important time is. The speed of our lives is completely antithetical to the complexity of life. Look how patiently nature grows an ecosystem, look how it builds complexity and diversity layer by layer over centuries. I want to make wine this way. I want to think about wine this way, and let this perspective inform the decisions I make for this vintage. I want to stop rushing to buy things when I don’t know where they came from or how they were made. I want to take the time to observe and learn about complex things carefully. I want to take the time to be grateful.
If you’re moved by Nick’s story, he mentions a go-fund me campaign that his wine community set up for him and his family, and you can link to that here.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Tuesday Nov 14, 2023
Tuesday Nov 14, 2023
AKA - How to make wine from everything besides grapes!
It seems to me that what we have called wine and revered as wine and created certifications and diplomas about, is not actually wine. It’s one perspective on one kind of wine from one region of the planet. And I think the first step, the lowest hanging fruit if you will, to having an authentic local wine culture is simply using local ingredients. Put another way, culture grows out of the earth. If it is imported and forced onto the land, it is neither sustainable nor is it culture. Do we even know what American wine, or Australian wine, or Chilean wine actually tastes like? Or do we only know what French wine tastes like when you make it in various places around the planet?
My guests for this episode are the gentlemen of Hermit Woods Winery in New Hampshire: Ken Hardcastle, Chuck Lawrence, and Bob Manley. They have an incredible story of asking these questions and beginning a journey of discovering and creating their local wine culture. These guys are exploring unexplored territory in wine, and they have a lot of knowledge to share about what they are finding.
The wines of Hermit Woods Winery are well-aged, dry, textured, complex, with great mouthfeel and nuanced aromas, but they aren’t made from grapes. They’re made from blends of things like quince, day lily, kiwiberry, black raspberry, honey, and rhubarb, and many other fruits and plants, herbs, flowers, and spices that thrive in New Hampshire. They make about 35 different wines, at least, every year, and they have been at this for over 15 years. They started by asking “Does it have to be a grape?” and I think they’ve answered that question with an emphatic “Absolutely not.”
We cover their philosophy and their unique approach to winemaking, and this conversation has an inordinate amount of practical and helpful ideas for anyone who might want to consider joining this local wine movement. These guys are an incredible resource, whether for technical advice on navigating the particular challenges of fermenting things like tomatoes and how long you need to wait before Japanese knotweed wine stops smelling like baby wipes, or for how to reconstruct a metaphoric grape.
Though this should be obvious, I think it’s very important to point out that the diversity of ingredients that Hermit Woods uses supports, honors, and generates more biodiversity and more diversity of wines. There are many practical advantages to not relying on a single variety of fruit for your entire production, and in the bigger picture it also leads to a healthier, more resilient, and more beautiful wine culture. These three friends are changing the world of wine as we know it, and they seem to be having a lot of fun doing it.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Monday Nov 06, 2023
Monday Nov 06, 2023
My guest for this episode is Zac Brown of Alderlea Vineyards in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Zac grows an array of grapes in his vineyard, some that he has to spray multiple times every year, and some that he doesn't really have to spray but chooses to once per year. Zac grows resilient wine grapes (some PIWIs), side by side with more common vinifera, and he has direct comparisons between their resilience and performance in many ways. His findings are striking: the resilient hybrids out-perform vinifera in every measure, including fungal resistance, drought resistance, recovery from extreme heat and cold, and productivity... and the hybrids don't need to be sprayed to do this.
In addition to talking about the viticultural advantages to growing resilient grape varieties, we discuss wine making techniques for working with specific resilient grapes. Like any grape, they can make beautiful wine but each variety requires its own specific care in the winery to elicit its best flavors. Zac had some great insights for making wine with the varieties he grows.
Zac is at the forefront of a revolution - the dawn of the ecological era of viticulture, guided by biology. His mixed vineyard provides a great example of a way that the larger wine industry may begin to transition to a kind of wine that can withstand climate change... and be interesting, indigenous, and delicious.
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
If you'd like to sponsor an episode, please contact Adam at:
connect@organicwinepodcast.com
Friday Oct 13, 2023
Friday Oct 13, 2023
My guest for this episode is Nan McCarry, and she’s no exception to the exceptional people I’ve been fortunate to get to know because of this podcast. Nan is an ethnobotanist by passion and trade, and she has had a focus on the native grapes of North America over the last few years. What we might call “native” grapes, Nan refers to as “crop wild relatives.” She talks about the importance of preserving the biodiverse gene pool contained in these crop wild relative, and the work she has helped with to catalog and inventory these North American vines. One of the most famous incidents demonstrating the importance of the biodiversity contained within crop wild relatives is the rescue of the entire European wine industry from phylloxera.
The term “crop wild relatives” of course refers to the genetic ancestors of our current domesticated wine crops. But by the time Nan gets done explaining the process of domestication from an evolutionary perspective, you may begin to think of that term in a different way. You may begin to step away from your human-centric perspective and see yourself as a relative of the grapevines that you tend.
This idea was introduced to me, actually, on a podcast called The Land You’re On, which I highly recommend. It’s a podcast that interviews members of the Onondaga and other nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy… the oldest currently functioning democracy on earth, and the inspiration for our current society here in the US and other western democracies. If you’ve heard of the three sisters in gardening and farming – corn, beans, and squash – this came from the people of the Haudenosaunee. Like strawberries? You can thank these folks for those as well. And in one of the episodes about an incredible living library of seeds, an Onondaga Seedkeeper talks about how her culture sees food as a relative. The crops collaborate with the people who farm them to help each other survive, have sovereignty, and provide for 7 generations to come. If you’re going to listen to just one episode from this podcast, let it be this one… I never would have thought that a seed bank could make me cry, but wow.
And I began to think about how I could see wine as a relative. What would that mean? How would I work differently with vines? How would I work with fermentations if I took this perspective?
Nan and I talk about a presentation she created which is one of the most unique and impactful combinations of science and psychology that I’ve seen. Nan sees wine, grapevines, and everything from an evolutionary standpoint. And like many of you, and myself, cares deeply about what humans are doing to the environment. Because of this, she partnered with a local organization dedicated to mindfulness – imaginebeingwell.org - to explain the Cosmic Evolution Story and how this helps deal with eco-anxiety. I’ve definitely experienced eco-anxiety, and I found Nan’s presentation to be one of the most helpful things I’ve ever seen, which actually speaks to me from a scientific perspective that I found refreshing and more compelling than many other things I’ve seen. We only touch on a small part of her presentation here, but Nan has generously allowed me to post the entire presentation on her episode page at BeyondOrganicWine.com. Also at BeyondOrganicWine.com you’ll find a link to Nan’s talk about the importance of native grapes, and you can learn more about Nan and her other projects at:
Ethnobot.org and on Instagram at @successionalforest
Enjoy!
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
If you'd like to sponsor an episode, please contact Adam at:
connect@organicwinepodcast.com
(310) 663-3542