One of the greatest aspects of my old job leading wine tastings in San Francisco was that I got to peer into the mind of the wine consumer, both amateur and professional, to examine why they wanted the things they wanted. I could watch trends rise and fall like the tides of the bay, consumers bobbing on the surface of the water like so many buoys in the harbor outside my window, not realizing that their occasional pitches and dips have nothing at all to do with them and everything to do with the motion of the ocean. In the past year, if there was a lot of hoopla from Consumer Harbor over one thing, it was biodynamic wine.
Why? I would ask. Why biodynamic?
Because it’s good for you, they would say. It’s the new organic.
Typically, there was not much further the conversation could go. This is not to call the consumer uninformed—I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the practice of biodynamic farming. It is simply that the way wineries implement the practice and the way it is marketed to the public are two very different things. If ever a wine trend was shrouded in mystery, it is biodynamics.
Unbeknownst to many, biodynamic farming has its roots in the occult. The method was delivered to the world in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and clairvoyant who founded a spiritual movement called Anthroposophy, in which he tried to, among other things, synthesize science and mysticism. As the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association puts it, biodynamic farming is “a unified approach to agriculture that relates the ecology of the earth-organism to that of the entire cosmos.” The soil and the vines and the bugs and the flowers are viewed as interdependent living organisms, each with its own life-force and interconnected with the phases of the moon and the alignment of the stars.
This approach includes a series of ‘preparations’ which are intended to enhance the life-force of the soil. These preparations, which read like a witch’s book of potions, are considered the most important part of the biodynamic process (the “yeast in dough,” as the BFGA puts it). They are also the aspect that is most guarded from the general public: cow manure fermented in a cow’s horn, buried and left underground over winter to be unearthed on the spring equinox; ground quartz mixed with rain water, also packed in a cow’s horn and buried; yarrow fermented in a stag’s bladder; oak bar fermented in the skull of a domestic animal…you get the idea. All of these ‘preparations’ are diluted and then ‘activated’ by a special hand-stirring process called ‘dynamization,’ after which they are most often sprayed directly onto soil or plants.
There is more to it than the preparations, of course, and all of these far-out practices go hand-in-hand with unquestionably sustainable and organic farming methods. The greatest argument in favor of biodynamic farming is that you can hardly go wrong with all this added attention being given to the vineyard. By encompassing all of the environmental factors of the vineyard, biodynamic wines are said to acutely express the individual characteristics of a vineyard—the terroir. By keeping the farming methods 100% au natural, even taking into account the phases of the moon, the oats-and-granola crowd has flocked to biodynamic wine like hippies to hacky-sacks (although I’m not sure how strict vegetarians and vegans may feel about consuming a product that is derived by way of animal slaughter for horns and bladders, regardless of how ‘holistic’ it may be).
For me, it is a question of the product itself. Enter the Patianna Vineyards Fairbairn Ranch Syrah, Mendocino, Sonoma County 2006, biodynamic through and through.
To Be Continued…
