There are others who farm organically simply because they don’t like the idea of using industrial products in the vineyard. Jean-Pierre Margan of Château La Canorgue in the Côtes de Luberon (Peter Mayle country) told me he was taught in his viticulture courses which synthetic fertilizers to use and what and when to spray. “I never liked the idea,” he said. “My father and grandfather had made good wine in the traditional way, and when my wife and I started to revive her family’s dormant vineyard, I decided to do the same. It wasn’t an act of defiance.
“But confronting nature directly means you have to be vigilant. You must look ahead—mistakes are difficult to correct organically. You become more efficient because you have to stay on top of every detail of every vine—and perhaps that’s why the wine is better.
“Though the ‘organic’ aspect of the vineyard is simply the way we work, I put it on the label to allow those who want wine from organically grown grapes to find us. But there should be no need for me to say anything. Organic cultivation is and should be the norm. It’s those who use chemicals that should have to identify themselves.
“I’m not alone in the way I work. There has been a tremendous awakening among winegrowers in France. Usually it starts with the growers getting involved with a program of reduced reliance on synthetic sprays and fertilizers and the reintroduction of more benign techniques—but they soon see the difference in their vineyards and move increasingly toward the freedom that organic cultivation allows.”
That awakening has been greatly accelerated by the work of Claude Bourguignon, whose highly influential book, Le sol, la terre et les champs (The Soil, the Land and the Fields), is now in its third edition. Almost every French winegrower I’ve talked to in the past several years has at some point introduced Bourguignon’s name into our conversation. Now he’s one of the leading French experts in soil analysis—his client list includes Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Chatêau Latour and reads, in fact, like an honor roll of French viticulture. Much of what he has to say comes down to the essential role of microorganic life in the soil. He expresses regret, in the introduction to his book, that the issues involved have become noisily politicized.
In the second edition of his book Burgundy, Anthony Hanson describes a visit to Bourguignon’s laboratory, north of Dijon. Having collected a random sample of earth from a flower bed, Bourguignon shook it with water, added a coloring agent, then put it under his microscope for Hanson to look at. “I shall never forget the sight,” Hanson writes. “Tiny specks of solid particles (clays and other inanimate matter) were bathed in liquid which teemed with swimming, turning, thrashing, pulsing little organisms—bacteria, yeasts, microbes of all sorts.”
In an ounce or two of healthy soil, Bourguignon will tell you, there are billions of such microorganisms. They transform mineral elements in the soil to make them available to plants that could not otherwise assimilate them. They attach iron to acetic acid, for example, forming the iron acetate that a plant can absorb. This symbiotic relationship allows a plant to function properly, to capture the energy in sunlight. That’s where the energy-into-matter-and-matter-into-energy food chain starts. Soil bacteria need no human presence to flourish and do their work. It’s sobering to be reminded that our lives depend on them.
Biodynamic farming takes organic cultivation one step further by paying special attention to soil bacteria and to harnessing the rest of the energy in the cosmos in ways that strengthen the vine. It has developed from theories expounded by Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian social philosopher, in the 1920s. Those who practice it are used to the skepticism, even the mockery, of others—there’s an air of both New Age mysticism and Old Age witchcraft about it. But it works.
Robert Sinskey, who is heading toward biodynamic certification for all his vineyards, got interested because of a specific problem with one vineyard in particular. “The soil was as hard as rock,” he told me. “It was dead. It was planted with Chardonnay, and the wine from those vines was always green and lean. We put in a cover crop and began using biodynamic sprays to encourage the development of microorganisms in the soil. Gradually we brought that vineyard around, and the wine is now so appealing and distinctive that we will soon be bottling it with a special designation.”
Robert Gross, a physician whose interests include alternative medicine, is also moving toward biodynamic certification for his vineyards at Cooper Mountain. “It brings the vines into harmony with their environment,” he told me.
Two of the biodynamic sprays—500, a very dilute solution of cow manure that has been aged in a cow horn placed underground through the winter and then stirred into blood-warm water with a motion calculated to maximize its effect; and 501, a similarly dilute solution of powdered silica—are basic to the system. Other sprays, mostly homeopathic teas of herbs and flowers, are used by some and not by others. Working in accordance with phases of the moon and reserving certain days for spraying, pruning, or planting to take advantage of propitious movements of the planets are ideas that some accept and others reserve judgment on.
Farming with due provision for the gravitational pull of the moon is ancient wisdom. Jim Fetzer—who started the program of wines made from organic grapes at Fetzer and is now owner of the Ceago Vinegarden, a fully accredited biodynamic vineyard estate in Mendocino County—said he never has to explain any of this to his Mexican workers. “They’re used to the idea that various aspects of agricultural work should coincide with the phases of the moon,” he said. “It makes sense: If the changes in atmospheric pressure associated with the moon’s waxing and waning can affect the rise and fall of oceans, you can be sure it affects the position of the sap in the vines.” As for the special days, Alan York, Ceago Vinegarden’s biodynamics consultant (and consultant to Joseph Phelps and Benziger, among others), put it to me this way: “We don’t know why or how the plant responds to the changing positions of the planets. It’s like surfing. There’s this force and you try to ride it.”
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