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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
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Tuesday May 30, 2023
My guest for this episode is Xaime Niembro, of Vinos Barrigones. Vinos Barrigones translates to “Paunchy Wines” in English, though Google will translate it to “Pot-bellied wines.” And you’ll hear Xaime’s hilarious story of how the name Barrigon became the name for their wines and aesthetic.
Xaime is using his Vinos Barrigones to regenerate his family’s 6.5 hectare or 16 acre vineyard near Queretaro, Mexico. Queretaro is just a bit more than an hour north of Mexico City, and quality viticulture is possible here at this southern latitude because of the high elevation 1800 meters or close to 6000 feet above sea level. Of course that brings some unique challenges as well, and Xaime gives us a great explanation of how he makes wine with the climate to fit his culture and cuisine perfectly.
We also talk briefly about the ciders Xaime is making, and Mezcal, which is where Xaime got his start in fermented beverages. One of the insights Xaime offered that has made me appreciate Mezcal much more than I did was its possibility to express terroir. Unlike grain spirits, which are made with an annual crop, Mezcal is made from a perennial plant that lives in the soil for years – sometimes decades – before harvest. This new way of seeing and appreciating Mezcal has strangely affected my pallet, and I've found myself actually enjoying it for the first time. I have a decent bottle at home, of course, this is Los Angeles, but I’ve neglected it in my cabinet for years. After this interview I immediately poured a glass for myself … and loved every drop, and mezcal has been the only liquor I’ve ordered at a bar since. So there you go… a little mind pallet connection magic was made possible thanks to Xaime.
So a big thanks to Xaime for expanding my world, and for being the first Mexican wine producer on the podcast. There’s an old and vibrant and growing wine culture in Mexico, and I hope to share more producers with you soon.
https://vinosbarrigones.com/es/
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 May 22, 2023
Monday May 22, 2023
This is a special episode. More than an episode, it’s a direct request to all of you listening right now. Here’s the request: let’s solve the glass bottle problem right now.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast recently, the name OOM should be familiar to you. They’re a sponsor of this podcast, and they are a company based here in my fair city that is tackling the bottle re-use challenge head on. They have begun collecting, de-labeling, cleaning and sanitizing wine bottles to re-sell. They’ve encountered some problems that they can’t solve on their own… they need you. Or really, we all need each other. As you listen to this conversation with OOM co-founder Amy Lee, you’ll see what I mean. Amy wants OOM to help eliminate single use packaging across all industries.
The scope of this conversation is mainly focused on California, but this is a conversation that needs to happen and is happening everywhere. The reason I wanted to get this conversation out to you is because any of us trying to do this anywhere will encounter the same problems, and sharing these problems and their potential solutions as a global community of winemakers and wine lovers will move all of these efforts forward toward solutions much more quickly.
The main issues come down to two things that all of us listening can help make happen: first, we need to use label materials that can be removed without chemical processes, and second, we need to agree on just a handful of standard bottle shapes and colors that we all use if we buy new glass.
Why do we need to do this? Why is this conversation not only important, but urgent? Because glass is far and away the biggest source of emissions for the wine industry, and re-using bottles can drastically reduce the emissions associated with producing and using new glass.
Also, most wine bottles do not get recycled in the US. Those of you listening in Europe do much better with your recycling, but in the US we recycle less than 31% of our wine bottles. And the bad news about recycling glass is that it produces a lot of emissions to heat glass to close to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit so that it can be re-molded.
My hope is that those of you listening now can choose to alter your bottle and label purchasing behavior immediately to begin to facilitate a transition to a re-use system. If you’re not a wine producer, tell your favorite producers about this opportunity. Let them know you’d like them to embrace these bottling choices and that you’d not only be okay with it, you’d love it. If you’re a wine maker, get everyone at your custom crush onto the same bottles and labels. Spread this podcast and this message to everyone you know in wine. Because it will take all of us, and we’ll need to work with the glass producers too.
I was at a local wine fair yesterday here in Los Angeles for natural wine producers. I think every producer and supporter there was philosophically receptive to this kind of change, but what was lacking was a moment in the center of that event where someone called everyone in attendance to attention and rallied us all together as community of like-minded individuals who have a lot of power to make that change happen, and appeal to us to take action to make this happen. This is that appeal.
And if you are hosting or organizing an event or know someone who is, please consider structuring that moment into your festival. Whether it’s to instigate action to create a bottle re-use program, or a three-minute appeal to make any other change happen that we desperately need to make, I’m beginning to feel like these festivals are missed opportunities to do something important.
We have linear systems in place right now. Linear systems can only exist if we assume the earth’s resources are infinite, if we assume that we can continue to take without giving back. We all know this assumption is tragically wrong – linear systems all have dead ends, and so it’s time to set up a new circular system based on the assumption that our world and its resources are precious and finite and require us to give back on the same level at which we take. This conversation is about how we start to do that.
Resources, bottle skus, and label specs for a re-use system at:
To help make this positive change happen, please join our patreon community.
Monday May 15, 2023
Monday May 15, 2023
Prepare to go on a magical, and at times hilarious, journey to a special place on earth.
Your guide on this journey is Jess Hopwood, and she has a lot of experience spoiling voyagers with amazing trips. She has been, among other things, a flight attendant on private jets, a butler on luxury yachts, and now runs Farm to Glass Wine Tours in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The Okanagan is that special place on earth. The furthest north location on the planet with a hot Mediterranean climate, the Okanagan centers on a lake that runs 81 miles north to south and is surrounded by beautiful towns, towering mountains, Mediterranean blue lakes, and wine. I have to admit that I was woefully ignorant of this area, but it has jumped to the top of my list of wine regions to visit thanks to Jess.
Jess guides us through the climate, the scenery, the history, and some of the amazing people, farming, and wines that can be found in the Okanagan. This is by no means an exhaustive accounting of producers who are doing great farming and making amazing fermentations. The Okanagan is a large and diverse region with much more to be discovered, but I think you’ll be enchanted even by just this short day trip.
Jess visited me on a recent trip to LA and brought some unique wines from the Naramata sub-region of the Okanagan, and we discuss these wines and their producers, and the beauty of this place where vines grow on benchland cliffs over the lake, and the land was named for a famous smile. The Okanagan is at the forefront of organic, or better, agriculture, in Canada, and Jess focuses on small, local producers who do great farming. At the end of the day, before a final refreshing dip in the lake, Jess takes us on a quick trip up the Similkameen – a river valley with sheer mountain walls that flows into the Okanagan and is known as the organic capital of Canada.
https://farmtoglasswinetours.ca/
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 May 08, 2023
Monday May 08, 2023
After years of bartending and working in hospitality between operatic gigs, David took his first sommelier course with the Court of Master Sommeliers in 2010 and decided to make the career change. David was named one of Food & Wine’s Sommeliers of the Year in 2016, and passed his Master Sommelier exam later that year, making him the 149th American Master Sommelier and the 233rd in the world. He was awarded the StarChefs Rising Stars Restaurateur of the Year award in 2019. He has presented seminars for the Court of Master Sommeliers, GuildSomm, Vine Society, and numerous other educational organizations, as well as being a featured presenter at events such as the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, Pebble Beach Food & Wine, Nantucket Food & Wine, and many others. He is a sought-after wine judge for competitions both nationally and abroad.
Since going full-force into the hospitality field, he has worked in every aspect of the beverage industry: He has opened restaurants, wine bars, honky-tonks and retail shops, worked as a sales rep. and directed wine programs for distribution companies, and now farms a vineyard and makes wine with hybrid grapes in the mountains of his home state, Vermont, under the label Stella 14 with his partner Lauren.
https://www.stella14wines.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 May 01, 2023
Monday May 01, 2023
My guest for this episode is Clark Smith. Clark has been making and studying wine since the 1970’s. He’s had a huge influence on the wine world through his wine consulting business, and in 2013 he published the book Postmodern Winemaking. Ten years later, that book is still groundbreaking.
Clark knows more than you do about the chemistry of winemaking. In addition to that, he’ll tell you he has a bit of an ego. He may say some things that rub you the wrong way. He may say some things that you find hard to believe. He may say some things that contradict everything you know. But he may also say some things that enlighten you and revolutionize your winemaking. There really isn’t a way to pigeon-hole him. Clark is candid, transparent, a bit of a pot-stirrer, and in pursuit of the most soulful wine he can make.
In the past he has been the whipping boy for the natural wine press, partly for his embrace of new technologies, and partly for his willingness to confront hype with science. Depending on your convictions, you can fault him or thank him for introducing reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation to American wine, but you cannot fault him for concealing his use of techniques or technologies in his winemaking… which is more than I can say for some who claim to make natural wine. You may disagree with him, but make sure you understand him before you dismiss him.
We cover A LOT of ground in this conversation, including:
What wine really is – the googe-ness of wine
Minerality comes from living soil
Why brix has nothing to do with ripeness, and how determining ripeness takes a personal relationship with a vineyard
Why watering back must increases a wine's aromatic and color intensity
Why he makes his best wines without sulfites, and how everything that’s common knowledge about sulfites in wine is wrong
Why Brettanomyces is a hospital disease, and why a living wine with good structure beats it.
Wine Diamonds
White Wine making
Sweet Wine making
And Much more.
Buckle in… maybe grab a note pad… and
Enjoy!
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 Apr 24, 2023
Monday Apr 24, 2023
Drew Herman – Assume Superiority, Farm Scared, and Pretend Like You Know What You’re Doing While Killing Your Plants
Imagine if you were a thousand foot tall giant. How successful would you be at helping a 5 foot tall farmer collect her chickens eggs? Drew Herman is back for a second episode jam-packed with information and laughs. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode with Drew, I highly recommend checking it out first. It was episode # 74, published back in July of 2022 and was titled Microbial Democracy for a Healthy Vineyard and World. In this new episode, Drew discusses the game changing discovery of rhizophagy and what that means for the way we farm wine… and he manages to crack me up with memorable quips about once a minute. Drew wants to impress upon us how each new discovery about the soil microbiome and the way plants function with it shows how little we know. We discuss plants’ incredible genetic intelligence and the need to start assuming that they know vastly more than we do about how to take care of them.. We discuss recently discovered fallacies about fallowing and soil pH. We talk about the desperate need to reintroduce breeding new vines as standard practice in wine, and the stunning genetic potential in a seed, including a full arsenal of microbiology that actually teaches it how to grow. Given our deepening understanding of our ignorance, Drew beseeches us to stop blundering around with fertilization and pesticide programs, the impacts of which we really don’t understand. The vines we farm, as it turns out, are much better farmers than we are… and our efforts to help them usually just get in their way. Like a mushroom foraging expedition, there are non-sequitur delights scattered throughout this conversation all the way through to the end when Drew discusses the importance of voles and how to manage them in the vineyard. He also offers numerous free resources to deepen your knowledge and learn how much we have to learn.
Drew is vineyard manager at JK Carriere wines in Oregon, but I think his true gift may be in making deep soil science as fun as playing in the dirt… hopefully playing in the dirt sounds fun to you. If not… well, just think of something fun, and then associate that with Drew.
Enjoy!
Support this episode by subscribing via patreon.
Sponsors:
Centralas Wine - delicious, ecological wine
Catavino Tours - amazing, wine tours
Oom - recycled bottles for wine
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
When I think of Vermont, I think of slanted light and moody skies, wildflowers and rosy cheeks, small farms and big forests. And because of my guest for this episode, when I think of Vermont I also think of hardy vines and delicious wines. Deirdre Heekin is the person behind La Garagista and Domaine de la Foret, along with her husband Caleb, and what seems to be a continual stream of young winemakers who help and learn and have become the next generation of Vermont wine.
Deirdre is a restauranteur, vigneron, writer, photographer, mentor, gardener… and more, and that means we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about the magic of the forest and why grapevines are integral to the forest edge ecology that we aim to replicate with holistic, regenerative agriculture. We talk about Deirdre’s approach to farming Brianna, which involves not pruning it. She also shares some of the unique approaches she has developed for making cider and wine and co-ferments and other things that don’t have names, by gleaning from ancient techniques and by learning from nature and the opportunities it presents to work with it to create one-of-a-kind fermentations.
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 Apr 10, 2023
Monday Apr 10, 2023
My guest for this episode is Hans Peter Schmidt. He goes by Peter Schmidt, and he is a director and faculty member for the Ithaka Institute, an international network for carbon strategies and climate farming, and he farms and makes wine from the amazing Mythopia wine-ecosystem in Switzerland, which he also uses as a research vineyard for the Ithaka Institute. He’s also involved in other winegrowing projects around southern Europe, and has a pretty big reputation for his approach to wine.
In this interview we cover viticulture, winemaking, and the philosophy of wine. Peter may be the most non-interventionist – or natural or naturalistic – winemaker I’ve ever encountered. You may think him strange for some of the things he does with wine, and you may think him mad for some of the things he doesn't do. You’ll hear how these things are even possible. Hint: it has to do with mindset as much as ecology.
Peter makes wine in a way that, once you hear its simplicity, could revolutionize your own winemaking. If you end up making wine in the way that Peter does, Peter only requests that you send him a bottle to thank him for the idea… a sort of intellectual property royalty payment. I for sure at least want to try a batch of wine the way Peter makes – or really doesn’t make it.
Peter ends the conversation with a perspective, or really a meditation, or how wine fits into the human story. Like so much of this conversation, it merely scratches the surface and gives a glimpse of many beautiful things that we can begin to explore.
Enjoy!
https://www.mythopia.ch/mythopia/fe/de
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 Apr 03, 2023
Monday Apr 03, 2023
My guest for this episode is Virginia Samsel. Virginia is a unique kind of vineyard, or orchard, consultant. She provides energy work and consultation using a synthesis of biodynamics and reiki. She translates the the messages she receives from a site into helpful advice for the people who care for it, and that can help farmers build a spiritual connection to their land.
Much of this conversation is at and beyond the limits of our language to express. So it’s important to be open. You may not be able to go along with Virginia on everything, and that’s okay. I think you will find that she doesn’t subtract from anything you already know, and she can add some new ways of seeing and knowing your landscape.
She gives us some really important tips on how to begin to connect with the land and the things living in it. She talks about spending Non-transactional time with your vines and or trees. Developing a relationship with your site that includes being vulnerable and allowing it to get to know the other parts of you beyond just your farmer side. She offers ideas about how to relate to the land and develop it as more than just a production facility. She reminds us that tending our vineyards is synonymous with tending ourselves.
Ultimately, this interview is full of resources for turning this Anthropocene, or capitalocene, into an Ecocene of renewed connectivity.
Enjoy!
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 Mar 27, 2023
Monday Mar 27, 2023
One of the sponsors for this episode is actually the guest for this episode: Stephen Wilson of Vermont Vineyards. I met Stephen at the Vitinord Conference, where VT Vineyards was also a sponsor, and I admired him and his approach to viticulture enough to suggest that we have this conversation… and I guess the feeling was mutual because he simultaneously suggested sponsoring the podcast. The result is that you can go to VTVineyards.com/owp and hire Stephen to install a vineyard for you, and that vineyard installation will support this podcast.
If you’ve considered planting your own vineyard, or even just putting in a few vines for landscaping features, like over a pergola or fence, then you’ll find this conversation helpful. Since both Stephen and I plant vineyards in backyards or even larger landscapes – or front yards in my case – and since we do this in the very different contexts of Southern California and Vermont, we have a wide range of perspectives and approaches to compare and discuss. We don’t get highly technical, but we do get to some of the dirty details and realities of being a vineyard caretaker. So there’s some very valuable information for potential vineyard owners and some important ideas for everyone to consider. And both Stephen and I find tending vines to be very rewarding work on multiple levels. Stephen’s idea for VT Vineyards was born during the pandemic, and grew from a desire to heal and enrich other people’s lives with a reconnection to the natural world through vines.
Stephen and I talk about the Vermont wine scene, and we both want to acknowledge that we couldn’t talk about everyone. There are, and have been, many winegrowers who we didn’t mention by name who have done much important work for Vermont wine. Since this was not a conversation about the history of Vermont wine, we inevitably omitted lots of people who deserve mention and respect.
Enjoy, and Happy Spring!
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.