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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 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/
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Monday Aug 14, 2023
Monday Aug 14, 2023
My guest for this episode is Etelle Higonnet. Etelle is a graduate of Yale Law school and she spent her early career working on some war crimes tribunals, and with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. She then shifted focus from human rights to environmental protection and worked with Green Peace focusing on, among other things, ceasing global deforestation. She continued her focus on stopping deforestation as Campaigns Director at Mighty Earth, and ultimately began to shift her attention from just stopping deforestation to beginning to rebuild global forests through agroforestry. She is a founding member of the Sustainable Wine Roundtable, and has become a vitiforestry enthusiast and is compiling an online vitiforestry library, for the SWR, of every publicly available peer-reviewed study published about vitiforestry as a resource for anyone considering the possibility of introducing agroforestry into their viticulture. She has graciously allowed me to link to this library – while it is still in development - from the episode page on Organic Wine Podcast.com.
Etelle discusses the many benefits of vitiforestry, and the many ways trees can be incorporated in and around vines.
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Monday Aug 07, 2023
Monday Aug 07, 2023
My guest for this episode is Gelert Hart of AmByth Estate in the Templeton Gap region of Paso Robles. Implicit in the idea of permaculture is the idea of "forever." It contains the goal of building a culture that can last. AmByth is two Welsh words that mean ForEver, and this adds another dimension to the term. What if we thought of our actions, our creations, as gifts for the future? How would that shape the way we grow and make wine? What would that mean for the kind of viticulture we would practice?
In the case of AmByth, it means that their vineyards are head-trained & dry-farmed on steep hillsides since planting, certified organic and biodynamic, and biodiverse with inter-plantings of olive trees in the vineyard and chickens and sheep (with a protective llama) rotating through their land. AmByth is the first winery to make Demeter certified biodynamic wine in Paso Robles, and to respect this farming they make all of their wines without adding to or taking away anything away from the grapes. This is natural wine that starts with natural farming... the kind of farming where the term "natural" came from.
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Monday Jul 31, 2023
Monday Jul 31, 2023
My guest for this episode is Deborah Parker Wong – the co-editor, with Pam Strayer, of Slow Wine USA.
Centralas, my winery, is honored to be listed in the Slow Wine guide. I say honored, because Slow Wine is unique in the entire realm of wine scoring or recommendation guides in that it takes into account the ecological context of the wine that they recommend.
All other wine scoring and recommendation guides reflect the problem that plagues wine in general – that is the problem of disconnection. When wine reviewers and guides give a 100 point score to a wine, what does that tell you about the way that the fruit was grown? What does it tell you about the way that winery conducts it business, treats its employees, manages its land, or interacts with its community? It tells you nothing about these things. Yet aren’t these things vitally important to the “greatness” of a wine? Can a wine be great if it tastes amazing yet poisons children in nearby schools? And I use this example of poisoning children because it is an actual example from both Napa and Bordeaux. Our disconnection from the context of wine is the only reason we revere 100 point scores that are based on the flavor of a wine, rather than think them ridiculous.
I tried to point this out at one point by creating the Ecological Wine Score, as a comprehensive, yet satirical take on giving a wine a score that is actually meaningful, and all that would have to be considered. You can see this at EcologicalWineScore.com
Slow Wine and the Slow Wine Snail of Approval reconnect wine to it context in a human community and living ecosystem, and Deborah walks us through how it does this. We talk about the Slow Wine Manifesto, which I’ll make available on the episode page at OrganicWinePodcast.com, and we talk about the research that is required to get behind some of the green façade that wineries rely on, and understand the complex practices that no one certification can capture. So much more goes into a wine than just its sensory evaluation or a biodynamic certification.
Just for fun we talk about Drops of God which we don’t spoil if you haven’t seen it, and we talk about how the common idea of wine – you know, the Euro-centric monoculture that has been spread around the globe through capitalist imperialism – is actually not going down so well among young folks. Crazy, right?
A big thanks to Deborah for this fun and engaging conversation, and for letting us know about Slow Wine.
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Monday Jul 24, 2023
Monday Jul 24, 2023
My guest for this episode is Dave Carr of Raging Cider and Mead, and he’s helping to redefine what cider can be and where it can come from. Dave makes cider in San Diego County… and for those of you unfamiliar with California, that’s south of me. We often look north for great cider cultures, and I’ll admit that’s why it took me so long to have Dave on the podcast, but it turns out there’s an old, very special, and pretty outstanding cider culture just over an hour south of Los Angeles… in fact, once you hear Dave’s description of growing cider here you may begin to see it as one of the BEST places to grow cider.
I don’t want to give too much away but you’re going to find out about a unique population of banana slugs, the rich apple and pear history of gold rush town Julian, CA where Dave is helping rebuild and regenerate old, historic and neglected orchards, a seedling pear name Screaming Weasel, a perry named Perry Feral, the Quest for the Palomar Giant, sweet meads, cysers, and pyments, Dave’s approach to orchard polyculture including cover cropping with collards, composting with mushrooms and mulching with spent mushroom substrate, alley cropping with asparagus, beans, and squash, as well as looking on the bright side of orchard pests and how to manage them.
In addition to renewing legacy orchards and farming his home orchard and other local orchards in a beyond organic way, Dave is caretaking old, historic orchards for a local tribe council that preserves land from development, and he’s trying to develop locally adapted seedling apples and pears to create a uniquely Southern California cider culture. You’ll hear about all this and more, and how you can taste his diverse array of natural, regional ciders, meads, and co-ferments at his taproom in San Marcos.
https://www.ragingcidermead.com/
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Monday Jul 17, 2023
Monday Jul 17, 2023
This is the second part of the special in-person, on-site conversation that I had in June of 2023 with Mike Biltonen of Know Your Roots. Please check out part 1 for Mike’s full bio, and for a fantastic episode about holistic orchard culture within a biodynamic context.
On this episode we leave Mike’s Apostrophe Orchard and enter the forest that surrounds it. We leave the realm of the known, the controlled, the cultivated, and enter the realm of questions, of curiosity, of the unexplored. The pace changes, the energy shifts, and the conversation evolves. I invite you to take this walk with us, but I have this suggestion: Don’t enter the forest. Become it.
The forest is the source of the orchard, the source of the vines and vineyard. It is also our source. Our bodies and lives, our cultures, grow out of nature, out of the wild. When I speak of developing a more ecological wine culture, I’m essentially talking about ecomimicry, biomimicry, or just emulating the forest ecosystem more closely with our cultures.
Along this walk we discover amazing wild vines and talk of wineforests and vitiforestry. We speak of the need for further research into plant communication and energetics. We observe the values that the forest manifests in its multiple diverse and interconnected forms, and how these differ from and could be better incorporated into our production-oriented farming. We ask how to embrace beauty in our viticulture and pomiculture, along with ecological integration and economic viability.
At a time when we now see the effect that the industrial food and beverage production system has, not just on what we eat and drink, but on the human psyche, and on gaia, Mike asks us to begin to consider the integration of secular and esoteric science. While he affirms the importance of data and statistics, he asks how we can marry those with our observations of nature that often give us better intuitive insights. Mike suggests that the more time we spend in nature, on our farms, in our vineyards and orchards, without the intentions of productivity and economic extraction, the better our observations become and the better our science becomes.
Enjoy!
https://knowyouroots.com/index.html
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Monday Jul 10, 2023
Monday Jul 10, 2023
My guest for this episode is Mike Biltonen.
Mike is the co-owner, with his wife, of Know Your Roots, an orchard and vineyard consultation and management business in the Northeast US. Mike has spent almost 40 years working with orchards, vineyards, and other specialty crops. He’s farmed in Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, California, and New York. Over the past 20 years his passion for sustainable agriculture has evolved into a profound dedication to the principles and practices of ecologically focused, biodynamic agricultural. He serves as the president of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. For the last 15 years Mike has consulted for orchardists and farmers while also operating his own biodynamically enlivened orchard and mushroom operation in central New York. He keeps alive the legacy of his friend, the late Michael Phillips, and helps maintain Phillips’ Holistic Orchard Network.
This was a very special conversation for me for many reasons, not the least of which was because it was the first in-person interview I’ve done on location. Mike was gracious enough to spend a morning guiding me through his newly established Apostrophe Orchard. As we walk through the trees and other plants, Mike gives us an incredible tour of an orchard established and maintained ecologically with the principles and practices of biodynamics, and a permaculture perspective. You’ll hear the sounds of birds and orchard life all around us in the background as we talk. Since this happened within the context of the freeze event that left no fruit on the trees of Apostrophe Orchard, we discuss what the future of pomiculture and agriculture might look like from both a big perspective and a technical holistic orchard care perspective. The conversation culminates in a discussion of “high frequency beverages” and how human energy has a vital impact on the farm environment and its products.
And this is just part one! In part two, to be released soon, we leave the orchard and walk into the forest… and the conversation becomes influenced by things more ancient, primal, mystical, and even magical by the end… So stay tuned, and … Enjoy!
https://knowyouroots.com/index.html
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Sponsors:
Oom - recycled bottles for wine
Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.
Monday Jul 03, 2023
Monday Jul 03, 2023
My guest for this episode is Brent Mayeaux of Stagiaire Wines. Brent makes zero-zero wines with a lot of heart and hard work on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. This year Brent also organized and held the Wine From Here wine fair, with help from several other people of course. I’m very impressed with the humility that he embraces with the name of his winery: Stagiaire – the Apprentice. WE never really if we continue to seek and follow our curiosity and passion to make better wine. We will always have more to learn, and I love that Brent owns that with his brand. I also love Brent’s desire for and commitment to honesty and bringing the highest level of integrity with his wine making. And I of course value his promotion and support of making wine a local, farm-to-table experience.
Now this episode has a back story. We recorded an entire episode before this which I decided not to release. I thought I had done a disservice to you and to Brent by drawing him out about some of the discouraging and frustrating aspects of being a winemaker today in California, and elsewhere. However, in addition to those negative elements, there were some good and practically helpful things too, and tons of information and a fun conversation. So I’ve released this original conversation on patreon as “subscribers only” content. If you’d like to support this podcast and listen to that previous conversation, here's the link to our patreon channel where you can subscribe, and visit the "support" page at OrganicWinePodcast.com.
https://www.stagiairewine.com/
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Oom - recycled bottles for wine
Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.
Monday Jun 19, 2023
Monday Jun 19, 2023
My guest is Marcelo Castro Vera of Octágono, one of a few natural wines in Mexico and the only winery nationwide that ferments in clay vessels buried in the ground. They don't have electricity in the winery, so the whole winemaking process is done by hand. They add zero sulfites to their wine. They also produce artisanal mezcal. The agaves are cooked in earth pits using fallen wood, crushed with a stone tahona using spring water to extract sugars, fermented naturally with no yeast or additional sugars added in wooden vats, distilled in copper stills. They also produce beer, mead, cider, and distilled prickly pear alcohol.
I love Marcelo's thinking about how doing all the winemaking by hand creates jobs for more people, and that he sees this as the goal of the winery rather than getting rich. I hope you are inspired by him to think about what wine could become by eliminating some of the things we take for granted.
@octagonomx
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Sponsors:
Oom - recycled bottles for wine
Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.
Monday Jun 12, 2023
Monday Jun 12, 2023
My guest for this episode is Dan Durica, and when I asked him about what inspires the work he does, he essentially credited limitations for his inspirations. What if we couldn’t throw fossil fuels at our problems? What if we eliminated the easy solutions we’ve relied on for the past 80 years? What if you couldn’t use fossil fuels to make or sell your wine? No driving, no electricity, no chemical sprays and fertilizers or diesel farm equipment? Answering these what ifs would inevitably cause us to arrive at a very local wine culture in both scale and reach. Putting these limitations on ourselves would make us more resourceful, creative, ecological, and adaptive in our thinking.
Dan lives in a unique community called Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri where he also farms a no-spray, poly-culture vineyard built on the principles of permaculture. He also produces and hosts the Hardcore Sustainable Youtube channel where you’ll find a lot of helpful info about living and growing vines without fossil fuels and get to see what Dan is doing.
Dan also mentioned how far our understanding of what the best agriculture is has grown so much in the last twenty years that the idea of “organic” is kind of outdated. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve joked multiple times about changing the name of this podcast, and that may actually happen soon… when I have a spare minute to redo the entire online infrastructure that it relies on. So… for now it will stay the Organic Wine Podcast… but know that in my heart, and in everything it stands for, it is so much more.
After recording, Dan and I spoke a bit longer and he also proposed the idea that, historically, vineyard establishment has probably taken much longer than it does now. Vineyards were likely integrated into a local ecosystem over decades, rather than years, and thought of as an intergenerational project. Finding vines and other fruit that thrive without sprays can take years of selection, and even breeding. Building fertility and resilience into a vineyard takes years of ecosystem enhancement. I hope to be able to reach back out to Dan in a few years and see how the development of his vineyard has come along.
Also, we both talk about how the future we face will require us to stop thinking of ourselves as grape growers or apple growers or any single vineyard or orchard system managers, and start becoming polyculture farmers who grow a diversity of dozens of crops, and who build a business plan based on much less than 100% production. In California we have just lived through one of if not the wettest winters on record, and that’s following one of, if not the, driest years on record. The northeast US just had the awful combination of an unseasonably warm April followed by a multi-day freeze in May, which devastated the vineyards and orchards.
What Dan is doing, even though on a smaller scale, is an example of what is possible in even the most difficult growing conditions, when you approach wine with a different mindset.
https://www.dancingrabbit.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@HardcoreSustainable/videos
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Oom - recycled bottles for wine
Let them know you heard about them through the Organic Wine Podcast.