My guest for this episode is Simon Naud of Vignoble La Bauge. La Bauge is the first Canadian vineyard to be Regenerative Organic Certified by the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Knowing what I now know about Quebec it doesn’t surprise me that the first certified Regenerative Organic vineyard is here.

Simon is also a past recipient of the best winemaker or vigneron for Quebec.

When you see the trellising style of these cold climate, high fungal pressure areas, the integration of grazing animals seems common sense… and because I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and have worked in a one of the first of these vineyards that was designed specifically for sheep integration, I forget that it is still kind of a revelation when that connection is made between animals and the understory of a vineyard trained to an elevated trellis. But the development of this system happened organically, so to speak, at La Bauge, and that makes it all the more impressive. We talk about some of the really inventive ways they integrate sheep, and I was especially impressed for the first time about how llamas might be a great alternative to livestock guardian dogs.

We talk about a new trial block they’ve planted where every third row is not grapes but native plants and berry shrubs as a potential way of reducing fungal pressures. And there are several handfuls of insights and ideas for better winegrowing and zero zero winemaking.

But of all the things that impressed me at La Bauge, I was most impressed by the fact that Simon and some of the other Canadian team visits the home of their Mexican workers in Mexico during the winter to visit and help with the coffee harvest for a couple weeks. I don’t want to over-hype this, but I’ve never heard of any other winery owners who go visit their workers and their families in their country on vacation, let alone lend a hand with some of their farm work. This kind of action means that you actually have a relationship with specific people, rather than just fulfill your labor needs with some placeholder and replaceable migrant worker. We may work and live in a world that devalues certain people and types of work, but we don’t have to let that shape our own values. Within an imperfect system, this shows there are ways we can profoundly shift the way we think about our relationship with our community and who we include in it and how we can deepen our lives and relationships by being more inclusive… more human.

Enjoy.

https://labauge.com/en

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