Beyond Organic Wine

My guest for this episode is Alder Yarrow. Alder writes and does everything for the blog Vinography, and I’ve been receiving Alder’s weekly email for several years. He gives a list of links of articles he’s been reading, and I always enjoy scanning this list to see what’s going on in the wine zeitgeist.Alder’s Vinography.com blog has been published daily since 2004, and was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2013.Since 2011, Alder has also been a monthly columnist for Jancis Robinson where he also contributes wine reviews for American wines. Alder has been judging competitions for many years, and spent nearly a decade as a judge for the World of Fine Wine’s annual Global Restaurant Wine List awards, and for the James Beard Restaurant awards.His coffee-table book of essays and photographs, The Essence of Wine, was named one of the best wine books of 2014 by the New York Times and won the Chairman’s Prize at the 2015 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers Awards.In 2013 Alder was inducted into the Wine Media Guild of New York’s Wine Writers Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with only 24 other living wine writers. He is also a member of the Circle of Wine Writers.Alder was the architect of and serves as the day-to-day manager for the Old Vine Registry, the world’s first and most authoritative public database of old vine vineyards around the globe.I reached out to Alder for this conversation because of a comment he made about the recent Eric Asimov article about hybrid grapes. I gave Alder questions in advance, so he knew I wanted to challenge him on several ideas. To his credit he still agreed to the conversation, and you’re about to listen to the results. Though I think we share most of the same values and agree about a lot, we don’t agree about everything, and that’s why I wanted to talk with him. I hope that makes sense. You have to get out of your own echo chamber if you want to learn, and if you care about truth. And more and more you have to actively seek the company of those who disagree with you if you want to break free of the control of algorithms… if you want to cultivate diversity. So I’m grateful to Alder for being game and taking the time to have this conversation/debate.And if you listen until the end, I’m also including as an epilogue the verbatim exchange that we had via email after the conversation. As I re-listened to a specific part of the recorded conversation while editing, I realized I wanted to make a comment about something that I had let slide, but I wanted him to be able to respond to that comment. So stay tuned at the end if you’re interested in hearing more.Please join Beyond Organic Wine on Substack.Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday I spent the afternoon editing Wikipedia entries about hybrid grapes because they were either factually wrong, omitted important and relevant information, or pushed prejudiced perspectives… and sometimes did all of this.Sometimes the edits were small but important. In the entry on Hybrid Grape, a contributor thought it important to mention that they “exhibit a mix of traits” from their various parentages (this is true and relevant), and that hybrids with Vitis labrusca in their parentage “have a strong ‘candied’ or ‘wild strawberry’ aroma.” While I applaud this description (which isn’t the negative description I’ve found in other labrusca mentions), I changed this entry to read “can have a strong ‘candied’ or ‘wild strawberry’ aroma depending on many factors.”Labruscana have come a long way since the original 50/50 crosses (200 years ago), and Concord (with its 75% labrusca parentage) is very different from, say, Marquette, which has labrusca in its parentage but is the result of many, many crosses including quite a few species. The similarities of flavor between Concord and Marquette are extremely minimal, and they do not share a “candied” aroma, despite both having labrusca in their parentage. Additionally, I’ve had labruscana that were picked and made in a way that none of these “characteristic” aromas were present. But it’s true that labruscana “can” have those flavors, depending on many factors.Of course that begs the question of why even mention these things if you have to qualify them so extensively? Would it be relevant to say that “grapes with Vitis vinifera parentage can have aromas of cat piss and tar, depending on many factors”? This is factually true, but… does it matter to understanding vinifera? Or does it actively confuse people who haven’t been exposed to the wide variety of vinifera cultivars?This double standard results from wine writers – likely MW’s or other “experts” – who have had very little exposure to anything but Vinifera Culture and see the world through the prism that limits “fine wine” to only European “pure” vinifera grapes (and usually only a select few of those). Several of the most egregiously prejudiced lines in some entries about the flavors hybrid grapes were actually cited, and the citation linked to entries in the Oxford Companion to Wine. So it seems more than just Wikipedia needs to be edited. While Vinifera Culture has been navel gazing for the last half-century or more, the rest of the world has continued to adapt and change, and… surprise! Vinifera Culture finds itself completely out of touch with the current realities in wine.But more than lack of awareness permeates entries about hybrids. I edited the entry on the grape Kyoho, which started with the line: “Kyoho grapes (巨峰葡萄, Kyohō budō; lit. 'giant mountain grape'") are a fox grape (Concord-like) cross popular in East Asia.”The term “fox grape” is, again, outdated, and also inaccurate. “Fox grape” is the term given to the crop wild relative (Vitis labrusca). The children of the sexual reproduction of labrusca with other species of grapes can no longer be called the fox grape. This might be semantic. I know many people have called grapes with labrusca parentage fox grapes, even if not entirely labrusca. But it might also be a dog whistle. What they seem to want to imply, strongly, is that Kyoho is a “foxy” grape, for those of you who know what I mean, wink wink.What troubled me most was that the writer felt the need to put this piece of information as the first line in the entry about Kyoho. So someone coming to Wikipedia to learn about Kyoho now must see it through the lens of “fox grape” and what does that mean and how should I feel about that? How relevant to its existence and importance in the world of grapes is the fact that it has similar parentage to Concord and is a “fox grape”? I’m relatively sure that’s a designation that neither its breeder nor the billions of people who love it would ever apply to it.So I changed the entry about Kyoho to read: “Kyoho grapes (巨峰葡萄, Kyohō budō; lit. 'giant mountain grape'") are the most planted grapes in the world by area.[citation added] They are a variety of hybrid grape popular in East Asia.” Isn’t that a more accurate, helpful, and unbiased introduction to a grape you might be trying to learn more about?Then there were the really big changes. The “History” section of the entry for Hybrid Grape in Wikipedia read:“During the first half of the 20th century, various breeding programs were developed in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the Phylloxera louse, which was responsible for the destruction of European vineyards from 1863 onwards. After extensive attempts, grafting European varieties onto North American rootstock proved to be the most successful method of dealing with the problem.”I changed it to read:“During the first half of the 20th century, various breeding programs were developed in an attempt to deal with the consequences of globalization, which resulted in Europeans and European-Americans bringing the Phylloxera louse from North America to Europe, as well as several North American parasitic fungi - like black rot (Guignardia bidwellii), downey mildew (peronospora), and powdery mildew (oidium). Phylloxera devastated European vineyards throughout the late 1800's. While many hybrids were able to successfully resist Phylloxera, as well as the novel fungal pressures, European producers chose to graft their susceptible traditional, single-species European varieties onto North American resistant rootstock.”I spent a lot of time re-writing to choose this wording and version of history-telling, and I won’t go into all the details. But one of the things that I think is worth noting is the line ending the previous version saying that grafting “proved the most successful method of dealing with the problem.”What bothers me about that line is that I don’t think grafting actually dealt with the problem. The problem wasn’t Phylloxera. The problem was an unwillingness to adapt. The problem wasn’t with the world, out there, it was with our prejudices and perspectives, inside us. If phylloxera was the problem, hybrid grapes did and do deal with that problem and the other “problems” of grape-loving fungi. But Europeans instead chose not to adapt, but rather employed a technique that allowed them to continue to grow their susceptible varieties of vinifera: i.e. grafting. However, this left the problem of the fungi, which they dealt with by using new chemical pesticides. Again… this didn’t deal with the problem, actually. It kept their viticulture stagnate an enabled them to avoid adapting.What this wiki edit, and really all of the edits I’ve done, shows is that the problem was never dealt with. The real problem continues to shape the thinking of those who have come to know wine through this culture, and it comes out in the way they write about wine and grapes on Wikipedia. Until we free our minds from the prejudice of Vinifera Culture, we’ll continue to kick this problem down the road for someone else to deal with… for someone else to try to edit.After spending a couple hours editing, I did find a bit of encouragement. I realized I could see that stats associated with my account, and I discovered that thousands of people have visited the pages where I’ve attempted to edit out prejudice and mis-information in the past. My hope is that these are new wine lovers, new wine journalists, looking for unbiased information about these grapes. Maybe by learning about these grapes without the slant of a vinifera-centric perspective they will be part of the generation that actually deals with the problems that cause the problems. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com“The earth is alive. The earth is intelligent. The earth is having a crisis because of us. The good news is: we are the earth ourselves, and we can be much stronger in our activism if we remember that we are acting on behalf of, we are living agents of, we are part of, this living being called the Earth.Earthelujah!”That’s a quote from Reverend Billy of…

My guest for this episode is ​Lore McSpadden-Walker. Lore (they/them) is an embodiment navigator and neuro-spicy hedge witch who has dedicated their work towards helping people who have experienced systemic denial of access, disability, and/or traumatic experiences learn about their physical selves through education, facilitated conversations, movement coaching and somatic awareness, Reiki, herbalism, and earth-based relational healing. Their current projects also center aspects of food access, and include the literal sharing of foods as well as education related to growing, foraging, preparing, and preserving edible and medicinal plants.Information about their background and certifications can be found at https://www.positiveforcemovement.org/about, and you can find them on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/TheWildWithinHealing.This episode talks about wine from multiple perspectives. Wine as food, wine as a healer for our troubled hearts, wine as psychoactive sacrament, wine as mentor. As I think Lore would put it, we uncover how wine contains multitudes. Along the way we explore the vital role that wine can play in overcoming our alienation from the community of life, and how much hope we can derive from the more-than-human world where even death is part of the cycle of abundance.Lore shares several things that move me even more now because of their uncanny timeliness. Lore implores us to learn to fall out of love with the violent narrative of human supremacy over the more-than-human world, and the incredible value of diverse and inclusive communities. They bring in an analogy from cannabis culture and discuss the potential of an Entourage Effect in wine, and I’m still thinking about how this applies to human cultures as well. This episode is a bit out of the ordinary in the best way, and you’re in for a treat.Here’s a link to the Earth Medicine Gathering we mentioned in the episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Barreca, a winemaker at Barreca Vineyards and self-described back-to-the-land hippie, shares his 50 years of experience in organic and regenerative viticulture. He contrasts small-scale practices with large-scale production, discussing the deeper values of nurturing local ecosystems. The conversation dives into the intricacies of natural winemaking and the importance of native grape varieties. Joe explores building an underground wine cellar and integrating sustainable home design, emphasizing harmony with nature and community engagement.

Let’s take a trip to the state of Washington in the US. You know Washington… it’s that place where it rains so much on the coast that vampires can live there year round. It’s a land for volcano connoisseurs. Its largest city was named for a man commonly known as Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples, who is thought to have said:“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”As well as:“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”Here are some wine statistics about Washington state: it’s the second largest producer of winegrapes in the US after California. It also has the second most organic vineyards after California. But the organic acreage basically didn’t increase much over the 10 year period from 2005-2015, while the total vineyard acreage increased from 54,000 to 70,000 acres… meaning the percentage of organic vineyards dropped by over half a percentage from 3.7 to 3.1 percent. Washington has such an incredible climate for growing grapes organically that the only commercial no-spray vinifera vineyard in the world that I’m aware of – Paradisos Del Sol - is in Washington, yet the percentage of organic vineyards is unchanging to decreasing. Meanwhile just across the border, Oregon has a greater percentage of biodynamic vineyards than Washington has organic, and Oregon’s percentage of organic vineyards is the highest in the US… all while Oregon’s main wine growing regions in the Willamette Valley are rainier and largely growing varieties of vinifera that are some of the most sensitive to mildews and rots.So what does this tell us? This tells us that choosing to farm organically, biodynamically, regeneratively or better is not a matter of what is possible. It IS possible. It’s a matter of deciding to do it. It’s a matter of choice. How do we get people to choose better farming? There are a lot of answers to that, but I think many of them involve establishing trust by listening, including them in our community, trying to understand them genuinely without ulterior motives… or, if I had to express this in one word, love.For this episode we are visiting one of the only organic and biodynamic certified wineries in Washington State: Hedges Family Estate. My guests are Sarah Hedges Goedhart, the Director of Winemaking and Winery Operations, and Reid Wilson, the Vineyard Manager. Hedges sounds like a fascinating place. A biodynamic family winery with around 110 acres and a honest to god Chateau in the Red Mountain AVA.I hope I’ve set up that what they are doing is pretty special in their region, and Sarah and Reid have the passion and excitement to match the work. They bring up some of the less talked about aspects of biodynamics, including the responsibilities of farmers with regard to their employees. This led me to look up the Biodynamic Farm Standard for Demeter US. Read the Environmental Statement. Read the Biodynamic Principle of Social Responsibility. Cow horns are sexy, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing, but there are some substantive elements to biodynamics that are often overlooked or completely ignored. While some of these principles, like the social responsibility guidelines, seem to be little more than values statements, at least they create a culture that gives attention to them. Try this on for size:“Agricultural land occupies 50% of the earth’s habitable surface, about 41% of U.S. land. In the U.S., food production contributes 34% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns of climate change cannot be successfully addressed without addressing agriculture’s contribution to it but, conversely, agriculture can be a potent solution. Because the underlying theme of the Biodynamic Farm Standard is to generate inputs out of the life of the farm system itself rather than importing them from outside, the heart of a Biodynamic farm’s fertility system is the sequestering and recycling of carbon… Demeter’s vision is to heal the planet through agriculture.”Does this force me to abide by certain rules or else? No. But it sounds like a culture, and agri-culture, that I’d like to be part of.This conversation is full of juicy moments, but one that sticks out to me is when Reid says, and I’m paraphrasing, I want the land to remember me in a way that it’s almost like it has forgotten me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comMy guest for this episode is Pascal Baudar. For many of you he needs no formal introduction, so I’ll introduce him informally. I think he’s the Monet of wine. He has given me the inspiration of thinking of wines as impressionist paintings, capable of expressing more than just a landscape or regional distinctiveness, but also the tastes of individual sea…

What seeds are you sending out into the world with your wine? What systems, or economies, are you building with the energy you exchange with the plants? Absent the physical seeds, are you helping disperse the vine’s metaphysical seeds, the stories and ideas the plants embody, or something else? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

"What do you think, you higher men? Am I a prophet? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams? A midnight bell? A drop of dew? An odour and scent of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it? My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun..."That’s Friedrich Nietzsche as quoted on the label of a bottle of wine made by my guest for this episode. My guest for this episode is Alejandro Fargosonini. With his partner Andrea Spaziani, he farms and makes wine as Chateauneuf du Fargonsonini in the center of California’s central valley. Alejandro lives off grid on his vineyard site at the foot of the Sierra Madres where he grows a mix of a I think he said around 70 varieties of grapes. He’s a philosophy PhD student, an artist, and in addition to grape wine he received a grant to make wine from upcycled fruit that would otherwise be wasted. His wines are imaginative and fun and liberated from any pre-conceived ideas of what wine is supposed to be, while also being deeply thoughtful and reflective of his unique land. I think you’re going to like him as much as I do.https://www.chateauneuf.xyz/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest for this episode is the matriarch of a Mendocino winery that has been organic since before there was organic certification. Martha Barra runs Barra of Mendocino which includes the Girasole brand, one of the few wineries with both vineyards and winery certified organic. Barra is a family business that her late husband Charlie started by purchasing Redwood Valley Vineyards in 1954. They were essentially farming organically from the beginning, even before there was organic certification. She describes a bit of what this entails in the winery, and their experiment using old vines to produce biochar when they replant… or don’t replant as the case may be now due to the state of the CA wine industry.. In this candid conversation, Martha describes the current challenges to being a winery in California, and she gives details of the significant costs of H2A visa labor for vineyards in California for wineries like Barra who abide by or exceed the requirements. this is such an important discussion at this time of evaluating the importance of immigrant labor in the US, and I think gives some valuable data for us to consider. And Barra is one of the few wineries of this size – approximately 250 acres of vineyards and 20,000 case production – who uses H2A labor, mainly because of the costs and regulations. From a migrant worker’s standpoint, it seems a very positive program, and while Barra is in a unique position to take advantage of it, and it obviously has some benefits for them, I respect how they’ve embraced it, and I respect Martha’s comment that what brings her joy is signing payroll checks and knowing that her employees are able to make a living for them and their family from this work. And I think this is important to contrast with the recent news coming from Champagne about the appalling exploitation of workers from Africa and Ukraine. Once again I’m reminded what goes into a bottle of wine, and what the cost represents, and how difficult it is for good actors like Barra to make it make financial sense, and could they even afford to be in the wine business if they hadn’t owned their land for several decades, and how silly we are to have wine tasting evaluations and competitions that don’t take into consideration the context of how a wine is produced so that we could have a gold medal, 95 point champagne made with essentially modern slave labor.  And look, don’t take my advice on marketing and sales, but maybe educating wine drinkers about the context of wine and how important it is to have a quality context and not just quality flavors in the glass will help with the perception of well-produced wine’s value and price.We also hear the strains Martha notices on the wine industry, and that she is experiencing personally at Barra, as California goes through what I would call the diminishment of vinifera culture. While Martha is optimistic that California wine will adapt, she definitely thinks there are some big changes ahead. Barra is one of California’s legacy wineries, and through our conversation I came to really like Martha and hope she’s right… I’d like to see Barra and other wineries like it be able to adapt and have a future where the business is good for the land and the people who live and work in it.https://www.barraofmendocino.com/If you like this podcast, please subscribe & leave a great review. You Can Support this podcast by subscribing via patreon.Or by donating or taking action at:Beyond Organic Wineor just spread the word... thanks!  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe