Common Ground: Moonstruck

February 2005

Moonstruck

Biodynamic Agriculture Takes Root Among Napa Valley Winegrowers

by Traci Hukill

In a small shed at the edge of a vineyard on a warm December afternoon, Ivo Jeramaz, vineyard manager of Grgich Hills Winery, lifts the lid from a large crock and extracts a dark, velvety handful of compost. This tiny portion dissolved in three gallons of water, he says, will fertilize an entire acre of prime Napa wine grapes.

The idea sounds preposterous. “In conventional farming this wouldn’t be enough for a single plant,” he concedes. “But it’s not quantities. It’s force.”

Witchcraft or Husbandry?

Jeramaz is a practitioner of biodynamics, an agricultural discipline that embraces organic precepts and moves beyond them into a realm of mystery and ritualistic tasks that, at first blush, look more like witchcraft than responsible husbandry. He and a growing number of California viticulturists, along with their brethren in the broader field of biodynamic agriculture, say these practices produce healthier, stronger plants better able to withstand drought and other stressors. They claim the soil is more fertile and that crops grown from it are more nutritious and flavorful.

Jeramaz gestures to other crocks housed in low-lying bins. Each contains preparations made from dandelion, chamomile, stinging nettle, yarrow, oak bark and valerian. Poured in tiny quantities into a mountain of compost, Jeramaz says, each of the mixtures will, as if by magic, introduce crucial properties to the whole pile, rendering the compost so nourishing that any soil to which it’s applied will find its balance, produce its healthiest plants, yield its finest fruits, and do the same again next year.

The soil’s unique characteristics — its singular mix of clay, sand, minerals, microorganisms and trace elements, as well as its doses of sun and fog — will then come singing through the grape, the soundtrack to an Old World vintner’s dream.

It is biodynamics’ intrinsic compatibility with the French notion of terroir — the idea that when you drink a wine you are tasting the place it was grown — that really has the winegrowers sold. It is the farmer’s job to help the land naturally become the best version of itself, the thinking goes. If the farmer succeeds, that individuality will express itself in the flavors of the carrot, the apple, the grape.

“I will not say biodynamic wine is any better than conventional wine; no, I am saying it has more character,” Jeramaz says. “We are hoping the wines will be the pure expression of the soil they come from.”

A number of highly respected French wineries, including Chapoutier and Domaine Leflaive, have recognized the kinship between biodynamics and terroir and now farm by biodynamic principles.

The movement is still small inside the United States, but it is rapidly attracting adherents. Demeter, a biodynamic certifying organization based in Oregon, lists 12 certified growers of wine grapes in California, including the familiar names Benziger and Bonterra. That number may seem insignificant, but Demeter has certified only 60 farms in 20 states in the U.S. And the list does not include growers who practice biodynamics but are not certified — an expanding group that includes Grgich Hills, Robert Sinskey, Araujo Estates and others.

K.C. Burke, who with Patti Fetzer Burke (of the famed California organic wine family) owns the Demeter-certified Patianna Organic Vineyard in Mendocino, says he was stunned by the turnout last January at a biodynamic wine conference in New York.

“I thought it would be a big hippie New Age fest, you know, hobbyists, but these guys are serious,” he says. “I was blown away, not just by how good the wines were but by the fact that this is really big.”

Patianna’s first biodynamic vintage, a 2003 sauvignon blanc, made the San Francisco Chronicleªs Top 100 Wines list this year. So did a 2003 sauvignon blanc made by Patti’s brother, Jim Fetzer,of Ceago Vinegarden, another Demeter-certified grower.

“I think maybe five or 10 years from now, people won’t ask, why do you farm biodynamic,” says Burke. “They’ll ask, why donªt you farm biodynamic?”

Cow Horn Boogie

One answer to that question might be, “Because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m crazy.” Biodynamic practices carry more than a whiff of New Age kookiness. The best known, the preparation and application practice of horn silica, illustrates why biodynamics has not become commonplace in the U.S., in spite of its widely purported benefits. It’s just too weird for a lot of people.

First, fill a cow horn with silica, or quartz. Then, bury it in a precise spot in a field. This must be done on the spring equinox so the silica will properly align with the planetary forces during the coming rhythm of darkness and light. On the fall equinox, dig the horn up. Just before dawn on the days it’s to be used (two weeks before bloom, two weeks after bloom, two weeks before the grapes soften and two weeks before harvest), add the horn silica to water, one tablespoon for every 10 gallons. Stir for an hour, reversing direction at regular intervals; this creates the “chaos” necessary to activate the mixture’s properties. Spray over fields within an hour of finalizing the preparation, just as the sun is rising. Doing all this, practitioners believe, brings light into the field and enhances fruit flavors.

“You’re out there on a cold night, going down the row and putting this mist on the field at two-and-a-half gallons an acre, and you’re questioning your sanity,” says Burke, who describes himself as “not a tree-hugger.” “And your thumb’s cramping because you’re trying to hold the nozzle just so. No wonder people roll their eyes.”

In a similar practice, manure is buried in a cow horn on the fall equinox, unearthed at the spring equinox, blended into a preparation and sprayed on the field to stimulate root growth.

Such a system could only have been dreamed up by a man like Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian father of Waldorf education. In the 1920s, Steiner formulated biodynamics as part of his wider system of anthroposophy, which views mankind and everything else on Earth as intimately connected to the cosmos. Biodynamics is based on the notion that plants and minerals respond to the light and influence of the heavenly bodies. If all is humming in tune with the cosmos, the plants will grow strong and attract the earth’s best nutrients, including trace minerals, providing vital, highly nutritious food for people and other animals.

The intensity of the engagement with the land appeals to some people. If the watchword in organic is “no” — no to synthetic fertilizers, no to pesticides and herbicides — then biodynamic is “no” followed by a string of “yeses”: yes to carefully tending the compost; yes to putting in cover crops to finesse soil nitrogen levels; yes to bringing sheep, chickens or other “animal elements” onto the farm to make it self-sufficient; yes to doing things that look bizarre because you believe they work, even if you can’t explain why.

“The deeper you get into it, the more you want to do,” says Burke. “It’s kind of like falling in love.”

But even farmers in love are obligated to get tangible results. If some fancy farming method doesn’t end up as potatoes or hay or plums, they won’t do it anymore. One thing biodynamic farmers agree on is that their system works.

Burke remembers the first time his vineyard manager, Horatio Ortega, sprayed horn silica into a field of vines. His field assistants grew worried that their boss was spraying chemical fertilizers, because within hours the leaves in the vineyard had deepened in color and grown inexplicably glossy. In the same field, Ortega saw a chronically poor patch of soil turn rich and dark brown after he had applied biodynamically prepared compost.

Grgich’s Ivo Jeramaz says he saw the proof last September. Despite five consecutive days of 100-degree heat, his vines were unfazed. “These plants can withstand heat. Their roots go 10 feet deep,” he says. “They can get moisture all the way down there.”

Meanwhile, his neighbors were frantically irrigating their own shallow-rooted vines, which receive regular doses of water and fertilizer through irrigation and have “forgotten” how to survive adversity. “They are like invalids,” Jeramaz says of the neighbor vines. “They wait for food.”

Astral Projection

Ask one of these viticulturists why biodynamics works and the answer is usually a helpless shrug followed by a half-hearted stab at a plausible theory. Kirk Grace, vineyard manager for Robert Sinskey, which has been farming sustainably for 12 years and biodynamically for the last few, has pared his take on it to a pithy soundbite:

“It’s as simple as the moon influencing tides,” he says, “and there are subtler forces than that.”

Many of the more mundane practices of biodynamics, like farming according to the astrological signs, Grace thinks of as forgotten knowledge. “Farming skills have been supplanted by technology,” he says. “If you think about third-world technology, it’s totally in line with the way people have been farming for centuries.”

The Farmers Almanac, that sturdy bible to generations of soil-tillers, contains endless references to planetary influences. Root vegetables are best planted when the moon is in an earth sign, leafy vegetables during a water phase. Likewise, cattle should be bred and castrated only during certain astrological signs. My great-grandfather, a Missouri farmer, saw no contradiction between his strict adherence to the almanac — right down to the best time to clear brush along his fences — and his life as an upstanding citizen, businessman and churchgoer. Biodynamics may not have seemed bizarre to him at all.

The biodynamic agriculture taking root in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino is not for the purist. Vineyards are, by definition, monocropped, because vines are a valuable investment that live for anywhere from 20 to 100 years. This means the soil must do the same work year after year without the variation afforded by crop rotation. As for the required animal element, some viticulturists own chickens or sheep; those who don’t, rent them at certain times of the year. This is probably not what Steiner had in mind.

Doctrinally sound or not, biodynamic viticulture has the potential to change American winemaking for the better. A stronger sense of terroir can only enhance the experience of drinking wine, not just by influencing the flavors but by connecting us to the cosmos. With biodynamics, we get the sun, the moon, and the stars with a little magic thrown in at no additional cost. What a bargain.

Traci Hukill is a freelance writer based in Monterey.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: