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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Saturday Sep 30, 2023
Saturday Sep 30, 2023
In the intro to this episode I introduce the new name of the podcast: Beyond Organic Wine Podcast. I also talk about the three weeks I've spent working with the crew of La Garagista, including Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber, and Camila Carrillo of La Montañela, and Anna Travers of Lilith Wines.
Should you get a chance to come to Vermont, you could not be more fortunate than to meet this crew – maybe coven is a better word – who make up the team here at La Garagista. Deirdre and Caleb, Camilla of La Montanuela, and Anna of Lilith Wines, I’ve had the honor to work alongside and learn from these lovely folks, both in the vineyard and winery, and I can’t say enough here to do justice to the amazing work that they are doing. Their commitment to an ecological approach to growing grapes and making wine is beautiful, inspiring, and delicious. If you haven’t listened to my previous interview with Deirdre Heekin, it’s pretty special. But also, her wines, and the wines of Lilith and La Montanuela are transformative. The wines are informed by deep passion and a seemingly preternatural ability to intuit what kinds of wines these grapes in these conditions want to become, all without any inputs other than cosmic energy and probably a little magic.
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Monday Sep 04, 2023
Monday Sep 04, 2023
My guest for this episode is Mireia Pujol-Busquets, and she’s breeding the future of Catalonian grapes at her family’s estate vineyard just outside of Barcelona, Spain, called Alta Alella.
27% of the organic vineyards globally are in Spain, making Spain the country with the most organic vineyards in the world, by area. Mireia grew up on a vineyard that was organic from its inception in 1991, but she wanted to go her own way and follow her fascination with science. So instead of viticulture and oenology, she studied Biology at university, and then had two unique experiences working with agriculture in Thailand and Switzerland.
In Switzerland she got introduced to resistant hybrid grapes, piwis, and saw that if grapevines were allowed to reproduce sexually, instead of through cloning, they could evolve and adapt to the changes of nature. In contrast to the traditional vinifera grapes that her family grew organically – that needed to be constantly sprayed with copper and sulfur – she saw that grapes could be bred to need no sprays at all. As she looked to the legacy and the land that she would leave not only her children, but generations to come, she realized she needed to start the process of making viticulture something that improved the land, and as a farmer she saw the increasing need for more resistant and resilient vines that could survive in a rapidly more extreme climate.
So Mireia has started a project to breed the traditional vinifera varieties of Catalonia to produce resistant varieties that preserve the culture of her land, but that can be farmed without sprays of any kind, and that can withstand the increasingly extreme weather conditions. Her project is called the Resistant and Autochthonous Varieties Adapted to Climate Change (VRIAACC, acronym in Spanish). With resistant varieties of grapes and the elimination of the need to spray, she will reduce compaction, reduce emissions, create a healthier environment for humans and animals working in and around the vineyard, and reduce losses due to fungal infestations.
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Wednesday Aug 30, 2023
Wednesday Aug 30, 2023
This episode is a special update on the 2023 vintage at my "estate” winegarden - Crenshaw Cru - in Los Angeles, where we lost essentially the entire crop to powdery mildew this year despite regular organic treatments and canopy management.
But more than that, this episode is a call for an honest assessment of the vine species upon which we base our global wine industry: vitis vinifera. The truth is that it is inferior in almost every way possible, and can no longer even claim superiority of flavors, to other grapes that have been hybridized in recent years. It has become a drag on our resources, our creativity, and our joy, and it’s time to explode the narrow box - the coffin - that we’ve put wine in for far too long. It’s time to eradicate prejudice and bring wine back to life with a diversity of wine cultures.
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Sunday Aug 27, 2023
Sunday Aug 27, 2023
My guest for this episode is Gizem Duyar of Kerasus Wine. Gizem lives and makes wine in Turkey solely from “married vines" that are over a century old. A married vine is a vine that has been wrapped to a tree, grown with the tree, and lives symbiotically with a tree as its support structure. It is likely the most ancient form of viticulture because it simply mimicks how vines grow naturally without human intervention. This was the original vitiforestry. Because of this relationship with its partner tree, the vine gets many benefits that Gizem discusses.
There’s something so special about this relationship that Gizem has committed to making a very traditional form of natural wine in amphora that she has altered to include a unique technique for keeping the wine amber or orange wine while including both white and red grapes. She adds nothing and removes nothing to the wine so that it can reflect that special expression of the relationship between the vine and tree. She calls the wine Melez, which is the Turkish word for hybrid. It describes her winemaking process, but it also takes on a much more literal meaning when you discover that the red grape she blends with is a hybrid grape from America that has been living in Turkey for over 100 years.
Turkey has an ancient winemaking tradition that has fallen out of popularity lately for social and political reasons. It is home to thousands of indigenous varieties of vitis vinifera, and it has also lost thousands of acres of vineyards in recent years. Turkey’s neighbor, Georgia, gets a lot of attention in US wine circles, and it should, but once you start digging into Turkey you’ll find as much as three Georgia’s worth of wine culture… It’s incredibly rich in wine history. After all, both countries have been at it for about 8000 years, from times before the borders or the names Georgia and Turkey meant anything.
A special thanks to Gizem and her translator Elif for conducting this conversation in English!
@kerasuswine
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Monday Aug 21, 2023
Monday Aug 21, 2023
My guests for this episode are my friends, my neighbors, and my bosses, Khalil Kinsey, Teron Stevenson, and Justin Leathers. Collectively they are known as the Westside Winos, and they own Offhand Wine Bar where I work a couple nights each week, and we talk about why Offhand is special, and why it shouldn't be. Offhand serves only West Coast (of the US) natural wine, meaning almost every wine by the glass is both organically farmed and from California. It is unique in this sense in Los Angeles, and extremely rare in the US. But why is there so seldom a focus on local wine in America?
During this conversation I introduce the guys to six very special wines from all over the US as we try to answer that important question, and they talk about how they are re-writing the script at Offhand.
https://www.offhandwinebar.com/
Wineries represented:
https://www.centralaswine.com/
https://www.fingerlakesciderhouse.com/
https://www.dearnativegrapes.com/
https://www.wildtexaswines.com/
https://kesselringvineyard.wordpress.com/
And after recording:
https://redbyrdorchardcider.com/
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