Is Love The Most Important Tool For Making Great Wine?

For the past couple days I’ve been hugging vines, and now that I’ve started I don’t think I’m going to stop. I have to thank Hanna Carrick, who I work with, for encouraging this. The vines here at Paicines Ranch are as tall as me and taller, so they’re the perfect height for hugging. We’ve been training and leaf pulling, and I’m not hugging every vine. But every few vines, before I start to work with it, I hug it.

When Hanna suggested this I was immediately open to try it. I mean I have hugged a few trees.

The first vine was easy. But the second and the third vine started feeling awkward. It was a public display of affection in a work environment. It felt too intimate, which made me a bit embarrassed. I was thinking, “Am I going to be a vine hugger? Is this me now?”

But I kept hugging that day, and I kept hugging today.

It’s not a brief, perfunctory hug that I give either. I wrap my arms around them and hold them to my heart. I close my eyes and lay my straw hat-covered head against the leafy cordons. I don’t let go until I feel that feeling you get from a good long hug.

“They need it,” Hanna said, and I agreed.

The vines have been under constant attack for months by one of the most adorable armies you can imagine, a vole army. Say what you will about the destructiveness of gophers and voles, they are so friggin cute I wish I could adopt them all… and you probably wish I could too if you have them in your vineyard. Alas, the voles have girdled many vines - some young vines are already dead - and so we must discourage them with extreme prejudice. 

While the vines have been dealing with this stress, the weather has been beastly. We left the vineyard when it was 101 degrees Fahrenheit at noon today, but it got up to 105. This has been going on for a couple weeks now. As Olivia Rodrigo would say, “It’s brutal out here.” If any vines ever needed a hug, these vines do.

When I’ve hugged trees in the past it has been a little different than hugging these vines. I’ve had the honor of hugging the largest tree in the world, here in Sequoia National Park, and several of its siblings. I’ve hugged some breath-taking coastal redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains... trees older than me by orders of magnitude measured in millennia. Hugging these trees felt like an expression of my utmost respect and admiration, of gratitude of course, but of star-struck, awe-filled wonder.

Hugging these vines on the other hand felt like hugging a dear friend when you or they are weary and weighed down by the burdens of life: thankfulness and compassion and deeply felt care and commiseration, leaning on each other and letting go, resting and acknowledging.

In his book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, the late Stephen Harrod Beuhner discussed what we’ve discovered about the minds of plants. And if that phrase itself - “the mind of plants” - makes you stiffen, you better buckle up and read Beuhner’s book. As it turns out, we have a nearly identical neural network to plants. Our minds function in almost exactly the same way. The major difference is that our neural network can grow no larger than the limits of our body, while the neural networks of plants can keep growing.

Not too far from where I am right now vines live that have been growing their neural networks since the 1800s. That seems really special to me, like something I should respect and learn from.

When people would assert to Buehner that humans are the most intelligent of lifeforms, he would joke, “How many humans have you met? Do you not watch the news?” His point wasn’t necessarily to belittle human intelligence as much as to combat human exceptionalism.

Human exceptionalism is a pernicious and deeply held belief that is embedded in our language and culture here in the US and elsewhere, and I can’t help but think that some of the awkwardness of hugging a tree or a vine for the first time comes from this.  Yet this is a very new belief, and, despite its overwhelming dominance in our culture, it is merely a belief. And like many of the beliefs that underpin our culture, it is being revealed more and more to be out of touch with the ecological realities of the world.

A much older human belief, the oldest worldview actually, is that the earth and everything on it is alive and aware and sentient and capable of communication, and that the human is just one of the kin that sit in the circle of life. Transitioning to this perspective may be a lifetime process of decolonizing the self and maybe even learning, or creating, new language for the way we farm.

If you want to challenge your human exceptionalism, check out Beuhner’s book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, and if you haven’t read Thus Spoke The Plant, by Monica Gagliano, I want to tease you with some ideas from it.

We all know that trees and plants communicate in the soil via the wood wide web of mycorrhizal networks, and we know that they communicate through the air using biochemical compounds. But in Thus Spoke The Plant, Gagliano describes her study that shows that plants can still communicate when completely isolated from each other, sealed in separate boxes, and have no way of transmitting chemical signals. Gagliano astonished the scientific world with an experiment in which she gave the sacred corn plant, maize, the opportunity to demonstrate its voice… and it did.

Here’s a passage from Thus Spoke The Plant:

“In the midst of the rich symphony of nature, plants appear utterly silent. Because we are designed to believe our own perceptions, our human experience of their silence is so obvious and undeniable that we forget to question whether plants truly are as voiceless as we perceive them. Admittedly, without offering some proof of the plant voice – assuming we agreed on the definition of voice – we may rightly deem the question itself to be nonsense. However, to forget to ask the question, in effect, dismisses any chance of the proof to emerge. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what colonial ideologies of domination and manipulation have succeeded at; by scorning traditional knowledge as unsubstantiated and fanciful and erasing our ancestral memories that spoke of other possibilities, humanity has found itself locked inside the experimental box of a restraining sociocultural view.”

She’s talking about so much more than plants, of course. She continues:

“Like the plants in my experimental boxes, we are besieged by a barrier of emptiness designed to block any possibility of communication. From this viewpoint, of course, plants do not speak! The good news is that by simply asking the questions regarding vegetal speech, we are free to move away from the self-righteous slumber we have numbed our mind with. By merely asking the question about plant voice, we set ourselves free from the preconceived notion that construes plants as inevitably voiceless, and we open ourselves to observing plants as they actually behave and to discovering the reality we share. That’s right, because voice is an inter-subjective affair. Voice exists in the place of relation, the space between the self and the other, and it is what we bring to our encounters with plants that defines the quality of our communicative rendezvous – those we allow to speak (or those we silence).”

What questions are we overlooking, or refusing to ask, in our wine cultures, and what do those unasked questions keep us enslaved to? Is it possible that hugging a vine is like asking the question of whether and how a plant communicates? Is a hug powerful enough to set ourselves free from our pathologically dissociated reductionism? Based on the way I started feeling as I hugged the vines, I think it’s at least a start.

As I was recently speaking with Kelly in the vineyard here at Paicines Ranch – and I should say that’s Kelly Mulville and the vineyard here is his brainchild and baby – he was talking about how we’ve noticed some soil health indicators in the vineyard that we don’t see in the rangeland around the vineyard. Kelly mentioned that there, of course, may be a lot of practical reasons for why this is happening. He planted cover crops and added compost when he first planted a section of the vineyard in 2017. We irrigate the vineyard, we grow plants here that we don’t grow in other parts of the ranch, namely thousands of grapevines, and these actions have many cascading results.

But maybe there’s more to it than just the practices, Kelly suggested. Or maybe there is a different way of seeing those practices. Maybe we are beginning to see the cumulative effect of a concentration of positive human intention. We invest a lot of human time and energy here towards good ends. We shower the vines with hands-on expressions of desire for their greatest health and vitality. Maybe the plants, maybe the whole ecosystem, he said, responds to what we might call love.

Now, I think we know at this point that everything we see and think of as the world of forms around us is actually all various manifestations of cosmic, or electromagnetic energy. Our world is a vast quantum entanglement of unpredictable, unreducible complexity. Another way of looking at it is that the physical is merely a façade over the metaphysical. Those practical things we do in the vineyard are inescapably spiritual. Our actions express our intentions and motivations and feelings in large and nuanced ways.

So I am beginning a journey of exploring the question of whether our intentions and motivations in farming have measurable outcomes on ecosystem health, and even on productivity? In other words: does farming with love make better wine? My theory is that it does, or could.

And therefore, love is a really important and necessary part of the best farming. Love for the land, the plants, the human and non-human community that engages with the farm. Not love of the money they can make for you. Not love of the status they can confer to your ego. But love of them in themselves as beautiful, interconnected, diverse expressions of the underlying stuff that we all grow from.

So much of what we do in vineyards and orchards can feel like work, like a means to a necessary end, even like obligations. Of course we want good things for our plants, but in the day-to-day of pruning, canopy management, pest management, etc, the actions we take can feel mechanical, clinical even, and unfeeling.

But it’s important to remind yourself that we are not just fruit producers. We are plant raisers. We are ecosystem builders.... we are, if you will, passionate lovers of green, non-human entities.

There’s the old story about the two masons working together laying bricks who were asked what they were doing. The first one was working quickly but making mistakes and swearing a lot. He said, “I’m building a wall.” The other was working a bit more slowly, but her craftswomanship was immaculate. She said, “I’m building the most beautiful cathedral in the world.” They worked side by side.

The way our mindset and perspective changes us and the way we act in the world can be profound, and if that’s all that we get out of a perspective shift on our farm practices… well great. But what if that perspective shift is applied to other living creatures and not just bricks? What if our intentions impacted the things that we grow as well as ourselves? Is it possible that love may be the most important tool we have to improve our farming?

A recent study in Australia discovered that when researchers lightly touched the plants in the study it caused the plants to change the expression of thousands of genes - a dramatic physiological cascade that started within minutes of the stimulus and stopped within half an hour. That is, the plants sensed and responded to touch.

If I haven’t lost you yet, then I hope you won’t think me too crazy for suggesting we all consider doing a little more vine and tree hugging. We might find that our wine starts tasting better than ever. 

Wine’s F-word

Listen to this article on the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast:

Wine’s F-word is the word Foxy, and I have been on a journey over the last few years to discover the truth about this word. It has been a surprising and surprisingly impactful journey because it turns out that this word is tied up with almost everything that is currently and perennially relevant to the wine industry because it has to do with deeply held prejudice. And that’s why I believe it’s important to understand what’s going on with this wine term. I don’t know of any journey that is more important than freeing ourselves of prejudice. Liberating our minds from the tyranny of misinformation and our own psychological hang-ups may be, I think, the only way that we will be able to adapt, evolve, and survive on a planet that is wired with a nuclear self-destruct button that has been entrusted to the care of chest beating apes.

 Free your mind, and life will follow.

Part 1: Does Foxy Even Exist?

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, a grapevine grew in my backyard. I’ve since confirmed with my father that we did nothing to care for that vine. We neither pruned nor sprayed it. Yet every year it produced an abundant crop of deep purple grapes with green flesh inside. My mother made a green jelly with them from time to time by pressing the pulp through a sieve, leaving the seeds and skins behind. The first time she made it she worried that my sister and I wouldn’t eat it because it was different from the usual store-bought purple jelly, so she called it “monster jelly.” We ate every last bit of it and loved it.

I’m now pretty sure it was a Concord grapevine, but at the time I didn’t know or care for its name, even less so its genus and species. I snacked on the grapes in late summer, and they linger in some of my earliest and fondest memories of timeless days and seasonal connections – bursts of flavor and sweetness that were real and free and part of the joy of being alive.

I’d mostly forgotten this grapevine when I started this podcast and began learning more and more about hybrid grapes and their wine. The ecological values that fueled my inquiries led me to see how valuable these hardy grapes are and could be to building resilience, adaptability, and diversity into the global wine monoculture. But I heard enough rumors of the F-word to know I would have to face this question, this reason for the lack of success of hybrid grapes, eventually, and so I began to seek it out. I wanted to confront the big bad fox in all its foxiness and embrace whatever truth I found there.

Strangely… I couldn’t find it.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard the term “foxy” applied to wine. It has largely fallen out of use, mainly because the global wine industry has achieved peak vinifera saturation, and never discusses wine as wine unless it fits a very narrow vinifera-centric definition. In fact at first I was afraid that even discussing the f-word might act as a kind of revival of a dead idea.

When I asked a Finger Lakes winery owner if he considered any of his wines to be foxy, he said “Do people still use that term?”

But what I’ve discovered is that anytime hybrids get discussed by professionals in the mainstream wine culture, 9 times out of 10 the f-word rears its ugly head. And I believe that hybrids are on the brink of being talked about a lot more by everyone in wine.

So Foxy – just in case the term is strange to you – has been used to describe the aroma and flavor of some wines. What is usually implied, and what you may assume to be implied by this descriptor, are aromas and flavors that are animalistic, scent-gland or piss-tinged muskiness, rank and unpleasant. This descriptor has been used to describe hybrid grapes and their wines. In fact it has grossly incorrectly been attributed to ALL hybrid grapes and wine… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

With this flavor expectation in mind, I went looking for it in wines made with the hybrid grapes that supposedly imparted a foxy flavor. I tasted many of these wines, but again and again was confused to find nothing animalistic and funky musky. Instead, I actually found flavors almost opposite this. I found candy-like fruitiness and, for lack of a better word, grapey-ness.

I began to believe that foxiness was a slanderous myth, meant to discredit hybrid grapes.

It turns out I was mostly right.

Part 2: What Really Is Foxyness?

The problem is with getting to the truth about the f-word is that it has been so tied up with deep prejudice and vinifera-chauvinism for so long that most of the information you’ll find for it if you search online is actually straight up falsehoods, misinformation… lies. If you do an internet search for foxy wine, pretty much every page 1 through 10 results are negative and provide incorrect information.

I recently read the book The Wild Vine, by Todd Kliman. In it he tells the story of one of the oldest and most widely acclaimed hybrid wine grapes in the world, Norton, which resulted from an accidental cross between Vitis vinifera and Vitis aestivalis. As an example of how deeply entrenched the misinformation about the f-word is, he makes factually false references and implications about it multiple times. In referencing the Catawba grape, he says, “There was still the foul, musky taste to contend with, the foxiness intrisic to all native grapes…” [emphasis added] (chapt 10, p 101)

And when he discusses the discovery of the new grapevine, devoid of the foxiness he claims to be inherent in all native grapes, he seems to suggest that the lack of foxiness was a random result of the hybridization with vinifera that caused this, rather than what is actually true, that Vitis aestivalis as an entire species, does not have this flavor.

The Oxford Companion to Wine's entry on "foxy" says that foxiness is "the peculiar flavour of many wines, particularly red wines, made from American vines and American hybrids.” This isn’t that bad, despite the gross generalization, but it gets worse. It describes the Concord grape – my childhood vine – as the most well-known foxy-tasting grape, by saying, “The Concord grape, widely planted in New York state, is one of the most heavily scented, reeking of something closer to animal fur than fruit, flowers, or any other aroma associated with fine wine, although the `candy'-like aroma is, incidentally, quite close to that of the tiny wild strawberry or fraise des bois.” [emphasis added]

I won’t yet go into the chauvinism implicit in the use of the F-word here. Does this description even make sense? How can a grape “reek of something closer to animal fur than fruit” and also have a “’candly’-like aroma… close to that of the tiny wild strawberry”? Apparently I’m not the only one confused about the f-word… and I’ll come back to whether the aroma described by the f-word can be associated with fine wine.

For now, let me clear something up once and for all: there is no connection between a grape being a hybrid, and it having foxy flavors. None whatsoever. In fact, of the 25 known species of grapes native to North America, only two are known to have flavors referred to as foxy, and those species are Vitis labrusca and Vitis rotundifolia or muscadines. But if the guy who wrote one of the most comprehensive books on one of America’s most historical hybrid grapes got this wrong, you can begin to see how unquestioned the misinformation caused by this prejudice actually is.

In addition to many samples of Norton, I’ve specifically sought out samples of wines made from both labrusca and muscadines.

I tried a sparkling Concord, that grape known by the OWC as the most reeking of foxiness, made by Chepika, Pasqueline Lepeltier’s winery, and discovered zero animals, only fruity fruits, like, again for lack of a better word, grapey alcoholic grape soda. I may not want that with a steak, but I found it perfect with a salad and sandwich lunch.

I had a sweet white muscadine from Arkansas and shared it with many who can attest that it was like drinking candy. My first muscadine wine is still my favorite. It’s a wine called Grapes Have Feelings from Botanist and Barrel in Asheville, North Carolina. I think the grape juice was blended with apple juice and the result was a fizzy delicious thing that I still crave. Zero musk. Try some and see for yourself.

I’ve had wines from Niagra and Catawba from Dear Native Grapes, Brianna from La Garagista, and others, and all of these grapes had labrusca in the parentage… but no fox in the bottle. Or, at least, not what I expected fox to taste like… and probably not what you would expect either. Each of these has unique flavors to be sure, but nothing “foul” … nothing unpleasant even.

It turns out many of the earliest hybrid grapes in the US come from v. labrusca. (As an aside, muscadine is used mostly as a pure native, not a hybrid because it has a unique genetic structure that makes it less likely to cross.) In trying to determine where the term “foxy” even comes from, it’s important to know that the first name given to Vitis labrusca when European settlers found it growing wild on the east coast of the US, was “the fox grape.” Was the grape named because of the flavor? It’s actually unknown. It’s actually just as likely that the term “foxy” was applied to the unique flavor of the grapes because the vine was known as the fox vine. In other words, the f-word might have nothing to do with trying to describe the flavor and only have to do with associating the novel flavor with its source.

There are actually many theories about why labrusca was named the fox vine, and where the term foxiness came from in the first place. In his book, A History of Wine In America, Thomas Pinney lists at least eight theories, only one of which is related to the odor or flavor of the grapes. I’ve given a link in the notes so you can read these if you’d like. For now I’ll just mention that the term foxy has been used in many different ways with many different meanings throughout its history, and there are more uses of it meaning something like wild and pleasantly intoxicating (think Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady) than there are pejorative uses.

And it’s important to understand that while many of the early hybrids were crosses that included labrusca, many of the modern hybrids don’t include labrusca at all and some hybrids have such huge family trees that even though they contain some labrusca somewhere in their parentage, they don’t display any of their flavor characteristics.

But I still wasn’t convinced that foxiness in labrusca or muscadine wine – as in a rank odor that is a turn-off - doesn’t exist. I just began to think I’d needed to seek outside of the excellent producers with great winemaking ability that I’ve mentioned, if I wanted to find these foxy flavors. At this point in my journey, after tasting all of these wines I had only found one common flavor – that thing I keep referring to, for lack of a better word, as grapeyness.

Well, it turns out I keep referring to it this way for a reason.

In attempting to isolate the cause of the f-word in grapes, scientists have discovered at least three separate compounds that account for the aromas and flavors referred to as “foxy:” methyl anthranilate, o-aminoacetophenone, furaneol. If you search online for these chemicals you find the following about aminoacetopheonone at the National Library of Medicine (PubChem):

“Ortho-aminoacetophenone has an odor similar to that of methyl anthranilate and is chemically (structurally) similar.”

And you find the following on Wikipedia about methyl anthranilate:

“Pure, it has a fruity grape smell; at 25 ppm it has a sweet, fruity, Concord grape-like smell with a musty and berry nuance.[3][4]

Dimethyl anthranilate (DMA) has a similar effect. It is also used for part of the flavor of grape Kool-Aid. It is used for flavoring of candy, soft drinks (e.g. grape soda), fruit (e.g. Grāpples), chewing gum, and nicotine products.[5]”

Wikipedia On furaneol says:

“Furaneol, or strawberry furanone, is an organic compound used in the flavor and perfume industry…

Although malodorous at high concentrations, it exhibits a sweet strawberry aroma when dilute.[2] It is found in strawberries[3] and a variety of other fruits and it is partly responsible for the smell of fresh pineapple.[4]  “

What you don’t find in the wiki entries is any reference to the term “foxy.” Concord grapes are even mentioned, in conjunction with the chemical that has been isolated as the origin of the infamous “foxy” flavor of these grapes, yet the only mention is a “sweet, fruity… grape-like smell with a musty and berry nuance” or, for furaneol, a “sweet strawberry aroma…” I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me… In fact, it sounds really good. Like something that people around the planet would love.

As it turns out… they do.

Part 3: What if Foxy is not a flaw but a Feature?

               Two weeks ago, my friend Ryan Opaz, who you may remember as the co-author of the books Foot-Trodden and Amber Revolution, and former sponsor of this podcast through his company Catavino Tours in Portugal, came to visit me here at Paicines Ranch and poured two wines for me that were like the treasure at the end of a long quest. He poured quite a few incredible wines, actually, and you should probably go visit his shop in Porto if you want to have your wine mind blown.

One of those two wines was from the Azores, an archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic ocean where the viticulture is some of the most extreme I’ve ever heard of. The other was from Kerasus wine, in Turkey. I interviewed Gizem, one of the partners of Kerasus, for this podcast not too long ago, and they are making wine only from married vines, or vines growing with living tree trellis partners. The tree/vine partnerships they harvest from are over 100 years old. Both of these wines were made with a really special grape known as Isabella.

The Isabella from the Azores was tried by more than just me, so you don’t have to rely on my sole testimony. It was like a bright, deep rosé in color, with what I associated with a strawberry candy aroma and flavor, and something a bit deeper and non-fruity too, that made it incredibly compelling, like the sear on a grilled salmon.

               Isabella is a hybrid of vinifera with labrusca from the US. So how did it get to the Azores and Turkey over 100 years ago? This question led me to do a bit of research to discover that Isabella is actually a global grape. It’s the most planted grape in Brazil and Columbia as of the last accounting. Believe it or not, the French are likely responsible for it being in Turkey today. They exported so many of the vines through the Black Sea that Isabella became locally known as Odessa, the port that it came through. It was honored by poets, planted and vinified in every culture around the Black Sea. And then it was ultimately made illegal in France and prohibited from being used for French wine since 1934. I’m no historian, and there’s a lot of history in just this one grape, so I encourage you to do your own research. It’s a fascinating history.

The authors of the Wiki on Isabella exhibit the prejudice of the f-word supremely. They go to great lengths to malign the grape in the very first paragraph of a quite lengthy entry, saying, “ The Isabella, Vitis x labruscana, being of hybrid parentage, imparts a "foxiness" to the wine and because of this is thought to be objectionable,[1] therefore, it is not seen as a grape capable of making fine wines. For the table, the flavor is good, though the tough astringent skin and "foxy" aroma are objectionable to some tastes.”

There are several issues with this paragraph. First “Vitis x labruscana” doesn’t make sense. Vitis is a genus, while labrusca is a species. This betrays the “vinifera” prejudice behind the author of this as much as anything.

Second, the clause “being of hybrid parentage” – which leads to its “objectionable” character – is so bigoted as to be alarming. Imagine speaking about people this way. It’s both ugly and inaccurate, because it implies that the fact of being a hybrid imparts a negative quality to a grape, in this case “foxiness”, and which, as I’ve already mentioned, is completely and even maliciously false.

With these slanders of Isabella as a foxy grape, I began to wonder why a grape like Isabella, with such widely touted objectionable aroma/flavors, managed to spread around the globe?

Again, I’m no historian, but could the widely accepted maligning of Isabella have anything to do with France’s ban on hybrids in 1934? Could it be that prejudice was used to support a political and economic agenda? Could it be that France and the English who facilitated the French wine cultural exports, as the sources of our modern wine monolith, might have had some influence on the telling of wine history?

Further, does it seem reasonable that the French would export huge numbers of vines that they thought tasted terrible? Sure, it is prolific, hardy, and resilient, and made vinifera look like a sickly, weak, temperamental prima dona… but would it have been adopted so readily in so many diverse nations if its flavor reeked of foulness?

When you look at the history of Isabella, a reputed foxy grape, and the way it swept the globe, and still persists, doesn’t it make more sense that its success was because of its flavor rather than in spite of it?

I’ll just add one more bit of trivia for the record. The most planted grape on earth right now is a hybrid grape with labrusca in its parentage, known as Kyoho. I’m sure the most popular grape in the world must taste terrible.

Part 4: Sense Perception Is Neither Simple Nor Objective or Chauvinism Coup De Grace

So what if foxy is real? What if it’s not just a product of vinifera chauvinism? Much evidence suggests that there really is a musky aroma that was at some point in history associated with the f-word, and one of the compounds that may be responsible for foxiness can be found in the scent gland of a weasel… which, while not a fox, is pretty evocative. But even if we assume we can find some musky scent in some of the so-called foxy wines, so what?

As my wiccan friend said when she was called a witch by a fundamentalist: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

How different is the term foxy from the terms “gamey” and “leathery” which we apply to Syrah? How different is it from the mushroomy, humus aromas we associate with Pinot Noir? Why is foxy Isabella bad, but tarry Nebiollo good?

The more we learn about how we perceive aromas, the more it becomes clear that most of what we think we know when we taste wines is, to put it scientifically, complete horse shit.

At a molecular level, we know that a wine can contain hundreds of flavor molecules, close to 1000 actually, that we know of. We also know that between any two people there’s an average of a 30% difference in our receptors for these aromas. That means that a whole chunk of things that you perceive, I actually can’t perceive, and vice versa.

We also know that the same molecules make up very different smells. Remember my mention of one of the foxy compunds – furanone? It is a compound that makes up both strawberry and pineapple aromas, and others. Our cultural associations, like whether your grandmother served you a bowl of fresh strawberries, or a chunks of fresh pineapple for a snack, can determine what flavor you identify in a wine… and both can be correct, or incorrect because you’ve only identified your association with one molecule in that aroma and not the majority of other molecules that make up what you smell as pineapple… or strawberry.

In a room of 20 different people, if you give them all the same unfamiliar scent molecule to describe, you’ll likely get 20 different scent descriptions. And if you blend two scent molecules that people can identify, they won’t be able to determine, from sniffing the combined aroma, what either of the original aromas are.

And we know that your mood, your level of hunger, what you just had in your mouth, your biochemistry, and your memory associations all change what you smell and tastes. And we know that what you perceive with your other sense has an immense impact on what you smell and taste as well, from the kind of music you listen to while drinking a wine, to the setting in which you drink the wine, to your awareness of its price, to the look of the label and the color of the wine.

The color of wine study is one of the most damning of our ability to produce anything beyond, again scientifically speaking, horse shit when describing the taste of a wine. In this simple study, repeated multiple times, tasters are given a red wine to blind taste and describe…. Only after they finish describing the wine as jammy and full bodied and red fruited and plummy is it revealed that it wasn’t a red wine at all… it was a chardonnay died red. Try this on your unsuspecting wine friends yourself. It works every time.

All that is to say that what we know is that we don’t know much at all, and that our judgment is extremely suspect in matters of taste and smell. So when someone describes a wine by saying, “This smells like x,” whether that X is fruity or foxy, the statement requires a lot more investigation to understand than we have commonly thought. Tasting and smelling are incredibly complex sensory experiences that are tied to our personal histories, psychologies, values, beliefs, cultures, and what the person we just kissed had for breakfast. And we know this, yet we still use a tasting wheel and believe it when someone critiques a wine for being foxy.

The problem, as I see it, is that as long as we cling to the assumption of objectivity in the assessment of wine flavors and the values attached to them, we will continue to be susceptible to being used as tools in someone’s political, economic, or personal agenda. If we don’t embrace complexity, we will continue to make choices that are influenced by prejudice.

One other finding relates directly to my personal quest to understand wine’s f-word.: the perception of a smell changes with the concentration of the responsible molecule. For example, one of the odorants that causes the smell of grapefruit starts to smell sulfurous in larger concentrations.

As an aside, is the word grapefruit the stupidest word ever? It’s redundant and it isn’t what it says it is. Can we all just shift to using pampelmousse or something instead of grapefruit?

Anyway, This change in perception based on the amount of an aroma compound may be part of why “foxy” aromas have been so elusive to me. The Wikipedia entry on furaneol does mention “malodorous at high concentrations.” This may give some insight into how these grapes could have both a very positive and very negative reception, depending on the specific levels of the compound in a specific instance as well as, it’s important to note, the sensitivity of person smelling it. The same molecule can be responsible for very delicious and very repulsive aromas, simply based on concentration. That means that even grapes that have strong aromas that some may consider malodorous could have the potential to make incredibly yummy smelling and tasting wine simply through winemaking techniques. This has clearly been proven to be the case with many hybrids with labrusca parentage,,, if foxy is a real thing.

If I’m honest, It’s entirely possible that the Concord vine I grew up with conditioned me to the foxy aroma. My psychology was formed with fond memories of all of the sensory experiences that vine gave me, and that could have pre-disposed me to love foxy wine.

And so what if it did? That vine is entwined in the forest of my memory. It wound through the culture that helped to shape me. It provided an integral part of my family connection. Those flavors have become part of me. Should I now hate them because they don’t fit some bigot’s definition of “fine wine?” Should I now think of my tastes as unrefined, as course? Should I refer to myself as having an uneducated pallet? And whose education, whose culture shall we determine is valid and exclusively worthy of value?

The reality is that most of the people talking and writing about the f-word have never grown or made wine with the v. labrusca family of grapes or other grapes referred to as foxy. Most have never even drank a wine made from these grape, and so they merely parrot the f-word because it has never been questioned before. They’ve never actually tasted “foxy” before or they might be just as confused as I was.

If you haven’t tried these wines, I hope you will. Don’t be afraid of the anti-foxy propaganda. Maybe you won’t like them, maybe you will… vive le difference. I just hope you’re now armed with a strong dose of inoculant against prejudice.

Because it is definitely time to stop incorrectly claiming that all American native and hybrid grapes have the same flavors. And it may be time to start seeing the f-word as ignorant at best, and start reviewing our sacred wine texts for chauvinism disguised as assessment. It’s possible we need to re-examine our use of this word with a careful eye to how much unconsidered prejudice it embodies.

But it’s also possible, when we’ve actually started tasting some hybrid grape wines, that we may discover that “foxy” is a compliment.

The End

The No-Spray Viticulture Revolution

Winegrowers around the globe have made it their goal to grow grapes without sprays. Not only are they succeeding, they are reshaping the way we think about wine.

By: Adam Huss

I knelt in the middle of my rows of Syrah vines in my home vineyard in South Los Angeles, and turned over a bunch of grapes. What I saw made me feel sick. The cluster had been ruined by powdery mildew, as had every other cluster I’d examined that morning. Frustrated, I thought of how much work I had invested in these grapes for the 2023 growing season. In addition to hours of canopy management by hand, I had sprayed four different organic fungicides over a dozen times, on a maximum ten-day schedule since just after bud break. All for naught. At least 90 percent of the crop was lost.

For the last 80 years or so this problem has been solved by most grape farmers by spraying more — and more potent — chemicals than what are organically allowed. We’ve built modern viticulture on sprays, and if we removed those sprays we wouldn’t be able to have wine anymore in most cases.

My viticultural failure in 2023 didn’t lead me to chase the spray dragon and reach for a stronger substance to put into my backpack sprayer, though. Because of the examples of some brave winegrowers I had gotten to know, it made me ask: What if I decided not to spray at all? How would I farm wine grapes without sprays?

As I looked out from my rows of spoiled grapes, I noticed the lemon tree and prickly pear cactus growing directly beside the Syrah vines, and the pomegranate, mango, and macadamia nut trees just a short distance away. They looked vibrant, glistening in moisture from the marine layer that was just burning off, and laden with ripening, abundant, and perfectly healthy fruit. I hadn’t done anything but neglect these fruiting perennials all season, zero sprays or canopy management, yet they thrived with bumper crops.

This observation penetrated through my frustration and became a revelation about my own prejudices. My home vineyard can serve as a microcosm of the broader viticultural industry. Maybe we don’t need new sprays. Maybe we need new ways of thinking about viticulture.

On the East Coast of the US, it is almost a mantra that you cannot grow wine grapes organically. This is mostly true if you define wine grapes as the single species, Vitis vinifera. If wine can only be the fermented juice of this species, then the widely held belief that spraying with chemicals is necessary is right – despite the significant expense for winegrowers and drinkers, degradation of the vineyard ecosystem, and cost to the environment and human health. But some winemakers are showing there’s an alternative.

Matt Niess, the winemaker and owner of North American Press in Sonoma County, California, farms or sources grapes from over nine acres of vines from the Russian River Valley to Nevada, none of which are sprayed, and he’s getting from two to four tons per acre of immaculate, delicious fruit, which is right on par with Napa’s average yield.

At Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands, winemakers Ron Langeveld and Monique van der Goes farm approximately 15 acres of vines with zero sprays. They estimate their production at about a minimum of a liter of wine per vine. “We could produce more grapes, but we’d have to do more,” says Langeveld. “We spend less time and still get a good amount.”

And Mike Appolo, the owner-winemaker of Appolo Vineyards in Derry, New Hampshire, grows one and a half acres of vines that he hasn’t sprayed since he planted them over ten years ago. He grows multiple varieties of grapes, but calculates that he harvests what would equate to six tons per acre of healthy clusters in his best varieties in a good year.

These winegrowers, and others, eschew sprays for many reasons, including: cost savings, better fermentations, human health, soil health, emissions reduction, environmental protection, and because they think it creates wine with a greater reflection of terroir. As compelling as these reasons may be, they’re in an extreme minority in the wine industry. The use of sprays is so common and unquestioned that these vineyards are not only unusual, they are revolutionary.

The Prevalence of Spraying in Viticulture

Ask any grape grower about their spray program and you might be in for a long conversation. To learn viticulture is, in part, to learn what, when, and how to spray. Niess says that most growers don’t believe him when he tells them he doesn’t spray and still gets a healthy crop of grapes. “They don’t know what to say because they’ve never considered it an option,” he says.

The economic cost of spraying is not just in the price of the pesticide and fungicide products. There’s also the labor cost, the time spent training workers and applying the chemicals, diesel fuel, and regular tractor maintenance. These direct costs can total hundreds of dollars per acre, and then there are the indirect costs: soil compaction and degradation, pollution of groundwater, and decrease in biodiversity both above and below ground. And don’t forget the costs of the supply chain: whether it’s organic or conventional, a winegrower’s purchase of fungicide supports the fossil fueled industry behind the production, marketing, distribution, use, and regulation of pesticides.

Then there are the health costs. A new study shows an increase in the risk of acute leukemia in children who live in areas of high viticulture density in France, and poisoning of children by vineyard sprays continues to make the news. Another study discovered a possible link between exposure to vineyard sprays and respiratory issues like asthma and rhinitis. That’s just in and around vineyards. A 2021 study concluded that 44% of farmers globally suffer from unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually. The European Environment Agency’s (EEA) report on the impact of pesticides on human health found “strong or suspected links have been established between exposure to pesticides and increased risk of several chronic diseases.” Despite continual reassurances of the relative safety of the products, commonly used pesticides continue to be banned as better studies uncover their toxicity, while the US continues to allow the use of many pesticides that have been or are in the process of being banned in China, Brazil, and the EU,

When Mike Appolo got his pesticide applicators license – a requirement for any commercial winegrower who uses any kinds of sprays – it reinforced his decision to farm organically. “Learning all the safety risks was a huge lesson for me about why I didn’t want to spray [conventional fungicides and pesticides],” he says. In two years of holding his license, he only sprayed one grape variety one year with organic materials. So he got rid of that variety to become completely no-spray—and let his license expire.

Some former grape samplers for large California wineries have confided to me that after watching the required safety videos about vineyard sprays, they chose not to taste the grapes, despite the urging of their employers, because they were concerned for their health. One explained why she didn’t return for a second season as a grape sampler by saying, “I mean, I want to have kids someday!”

Grapes don’t get washed before they’re made into wine. But even if they were, systemic fungicides and pesticides are the most efficacious of conventional sprays. These sprays can penetrate and move around inside of plant tissues. That means they can’t be washed off.

The grapes that those informed grape samplers didn’t want to put into their mouths become the wine that uninformed consumers drink. “Most consumers have never considered that every wine they ever drank was most likely [from grapes] sprayed with something,” says Niess.

Rebuilding Resilience in the Vineyard

The majority of winegrowers consider sprays to be necessary because we’ve built our wine industry on a select few European grapes that are seen as superior to grapes from anywhere else in the world—and all the problematic thinking that embodies. Starting in the 1930s, France and later the entire EU made hybrids and grapes native to other parts of the world illegal, despite, and even perhaps because of their success. This set the tone of prejudice for the foundation of our current wine industry. By cloning the same few varieties of grapes for generations, we’ve had to substitute natural resilience with bottled solutions.

“This entire system is based upon unquestioned assumptions about what varieties of grapes we have to grow for wine,” says Nicholas Kimberly, a winegrower in New Hampshire who has experimented with eliminating sprays in one of the vineyards he tends under his label Nok Vino.

The important reality that the no-spray winegrowers show us is that a mindset shift can free you from many of the burdens of a dysfunctional approach to viticulture. Wine doesn’t have to be a continual reproduction of a handful of fashionable grapes. It can be a process of adaptation, achieved by ongoing breeding and selection, that embraces the one constant of life: change. 

Climate change has caused intense and extremely variable weather, as well as new pests and expanded territory for old pests, revealing the shortcomings of Vitis vinifera. This is a main reason the EU has relaxed its laws against hybrid grapes, and why you can now find hybrids in Champagne and Bordeaux blends.

One of the reasons for my grape crop failure last year was that Los Angeles experienced one of its wettest ever growing seasons. Not only does the climate demand a new approach, but data shows that younger consumers care less about—and buy fewer—Vitis vinifera wines. The wine industry could face a sea change in the fundamental understanding of what wine is and could be.

“If you eliminate sprays, it causes you to think more ecologically about what fruit is suited to your climate,” says Dan Durica, the founder of Hardcore Sustainable YouTube channel, who farms an acre of no-spray vineyards at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, by continually trying new varieties and only keeping the ones that do well.

This approach fits with the pursuit of wines of place. “A lot of farming is focused on getting more—extracting the maximum amount of any crop—whereas our farming is focused on getting the best,” says Appolo. “The best quality, and the best taste of a place, of terroir, by not using outside inputs.” Of course, at six tons per acre in a good year, he can also get above-average production.

The commitment to making wine without sprays may also lead us to explore other fruit besides grapes. It currently may seem like an insane proposition to re-define wine to include any fermented fruit beverages, but there is no universal law saying that grapes are the best and only way to express the soul of a land and its culture. Producers like Austin Glasscock of Wild Texas Wines show us what’s possible when we seek to truly express terroir. He makes wines only with unfarmed (or wild) foraged native fruit. This moves his wine way past “no spray.” His location is Sonora, Texas, so there are no grapes used in his wines because no grapes grow on his land.

Is a No-Spray Wine Industry Possible?

Ecological viticulture works practically and economically as well. Zac Brown, the winegrower and proprietor of Alderlea Vineyards, grows over three acres of vines on Vancouver Island in British Columbia that he only sprays once per year with an organic oil, as a precaution rather than a necessity. He gets an average of five to six tons per acre. These acres grow next to another five acres of grapes that he must spray at least six times every growing season. The difference is simply in the genetics. His resilient vines also produce 40 to 90 percent more grapes, withstand early and late frosts, and can go longer without water stress during times of drought.

To test this, Brown turned off the irrigation and evaluated the vines using pressure bomb tests. “We were able to see that the hybrids could handle an extra 10 to 12 days between irrigation intervals than the vinifera could when it was showing the same sort of pressure bomb stress indicators,” says Brown. The main reason he sprays the hybrids at all is to protect his five acres of non-resilient vines, which grow directly beside them. “I absolutely believe that you could get away without spraying these particular hybrids,” Brown says. “I’m doing it once to protect everything else around it.”

No-spray vineyards are able to be successful by growing resistant modern grape varieties with diverse parentages. There are delicious grapes that have genetic resistance to nearly every plague that affects vinifera from Pierce’s Disease to powdery mildew, and grape breeders continue to develop more and better ones every year. 

Brown’s vineyard is a great example of how the wine industry could transition to a more resilient model of viticulture. As we move away from the cringey yet strangely persistent idea of European genetic supremacy in wine, and begin to re-indigenize our local wine cultures, we will need to transition the market for these wines as well. As of 2021, over 40 percent  of the global wine production comes from only ten grapes, all Vitis Vinifera, led by Cabernet Sauvignon.

Introducing Consumers to New Grapes

Ripping out all of your Cab Sauv and planting Marquette, however, might set you up for failure until more consumers become comfortable with great wines made from unfamiliar grapes. But replanting with 25 to 40 percent resistant grapes that you don’t have to spray could immediately save you money and provide a risk management strategy in the face of climate change, while allowing you to blend or present these wines side-by-side with their more familiar counterparts.

“Our ‘Matrix’ is a blend of Cabernet Foch, Cabernet Libre, and Merlot. It has become so popular that we took it off our tasting menu. People know it’s great. They’ve started asking for it in local stores,” says Brown.

In Spain, just outside of Barcelona, Mireia Pujol-Busquets is breeding resistant varieties of Catalonian grapes[17] [18] . Her goal is to transition the entirety of her family’s estate, Alta Alella, to grapes that preserve the traditions of her culture and withstand the extremes of climate change, which they have already begun to experience, without needing to be sprayed. “The objective at the end is that I don’t want to have to treat the plants. I want adapted plants. Healthy plants,” she says. Her vision was inspired by working on a farm in Switzerland  that grew PIWI grapes without sprays.

E. & J. Gallo also has its own grape breeding department. Given the acreage they control, if they bred grape varieties that didn’t need to be sprayed the cost savings could total in the millions of dollars annually. A mere $100 per acre saved in just their 23,000 acres of California vineyards wouldn’t hurt, and this may be on the low end of the potential savings.

No spray viticulture is much more difficult in wetter climates, and depending on the specific varieties of grapes that you grow. Some say that the challenges in these areas will eventually catch up to the no-spray growers there and make it a losing proposition commercially. Yet from Missouri to New Hampshire to Holland, these pioneers seem to be making it work and have made it through the first decade.

For no-spray growers in Mediterranean climates, on the other hand, the main challenges may be educating consumers about the benefits of this kind of viticulture and introducing them to new grapes and ways of thinking about wine. We may need to learn how to communicate a vision of wine as an adaptive process rather than as museum exhibit renderings of European wine cultures.

These no-spray growers represent the cutting edge of what could be the future of wine. As the 100-year experiment with spray viticulture and all of the biases and short-sighted perspectives from which it resulted limps toward its nauseating conclusion, a return to the fundamentals of how we farmed for millennia, in emulation of and cooperation with nature, just seems smart.[23]  You can only beat nature temporarily. For a truly sustainable wine industry we’ll need to re-join her.

As much as I love Syrah, I’ve ripped out my Syrah vines, and I’ve ordered ten varieties of modern (hybrid) grapes with which I’ll replant this spring. As heartbreaking as it was to cut down those vines, I’m excited that I’ll likely never have to spray these new grapes. This psychological shift in my thinking could be as important as the environmental benefits, and means more than saving time, energy, and money. I’m beginning think of growing grapes without a sense of obligation or fear driving me to spend time caring for them. They aren’t things I have to baby-sit, they are partners who bring me joy and who give me as much as, if not more, than I give them. I feel a sense of relief, a sense of freedom. I can’t wait to not spray this year.

Nightshine

“Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know.”
- Wendell Berry, A Small Porch

The word “grapevine” is a metaphor. The thing we call a vine is an entire ecosystem made of hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives, most of which we don’t notice.

I realized recently that I’ve never seen a tree, at least not the idea of an individual tree, in the real world. It took some really obvious examples in a forest on the Oregon coast to make me see this… or really to make me aware of something I’d always seen.

“Tree”

In the oak savannah on the hillsides around the vineyard where I’m working, the oaks are a collection of lives. Lichens and mosses and misteltoes and galls and mushrooms and more all grow on and with and are inseparable from the trees.

“Tree”

These are just the things we see, the things that are attached. There are detachable parts of the tree too. Birds, animals, insects…they may be able to walk or fly away from the tree, but not really. They could move from tree to tree, but they can’t leave all trees or they would die.

And as much as we want our grapevines to be clear of fungi and other lives, the truth is we can only keep those other lives at bay… “in balance” for our goals of harvesting grapes. Go look closely at an old vineyard. Every vine is covered from head to toe with lives. But also the soil teems with invisible lives which fuse with and become inseparable from the vine.

One of those interdepending lives in the vine ecosystem is my own. Maybe yours too?

The quote from Wendell Berry reminds us that to act with love in a world where we know so little may mean, initially, to refrain from acting. First, do no harm. We protect the myriad interconnected lives of which we may be ignorant by using restraint, patient self-control.

I’m not gifted with patience in most things. (Wendy is probably laughing at that understatement.) Winegrowing and making are great teachers of patience, however, and I wonder at times if I’ve been drawn into this field as a kind of purgatory from which I can’t leave until I work through my failings (ie for the rest of my life).

The solar eclipse filtered through Nightshine

NIGHTSHINE 2022

… is the carrot dangled by patience. We bottled this wine in October to go out in the fall wine club release. It was a plush, juicy, pleasure-ride of a wine going into bottle. A week later it tasted, to me, like orange juice.

Bottle shock is real. I had to strongly urge everyone in the wine club not to drink this wine for a while.

If you like waiting as much as I do, you probably ignored those urgings. But if you held out, or just forgot about that wine… I have good news:

The wait is over!

Nighshine has just come out of bottle shock and is becoming, once again, the delicious thing it promised to be.

Drink away!

Nightshine is essentially a zero-zero wine. But it’s better than that, so let me explain:

The grapes for this wine come from a vineyard that was planted over a hundred years ago. The vineyard has been stewarded for generations by the Galleano family, and is certified organic. The vines are not irrigated (that’s a pretty big zero in our climate), nor were they sprayed in 2022 (another huge zero).

Wendy stomped these grapes – following a foot-washing ceremony, of course – and they soaked for a day before pressing to barrel. In this sense they fermented off skins, like a rosé. But it looks like a red. So it’s not a rosé, but it isn’t a red either.

I actually got the TTB to approve the label to say “Red Wine (approx).” If you are unfamiliar with the TTB label approval process, let me just say that this was one of my greatest achievements in my entire winemaking career.

If you care about sulfites: I added about 10 ppm of sulfites midway through the aging process, due to a bit of excessive oxidation. That’s why you’ll see sulfites on the label. Other than this, nothing was added, and the wine was bottled unfiltered and unfined. If you tested for sulfites you would find zero, because that 10ppm was immediately bound up and it has been a year since they were added to the wine. They are long gone, but we believe in transparency.

The wine is still evolving, of course. Getting better every day. It’s out of bottle shock, and who knows how good it will get.

Last night it tasted like a dark chocolate filled with cherry liqueur. If you are someone who likes to engage in the frivolity of Valentine’s Day, it would be a perfect pairing with a box of chocolates and an over-priced meal. It also tastes great chilled, and keeps well for multiple days in the fridge.

The point is, patience has been rewarded… and the reward may be sweet enough to remind me to be more patient in the future.

GET SOME NIGHTSHINE NOW

Cheers!
Adam

What Is Wine?

What is wine?

This seems like a question with an obvious enough answer. It’s that liquid that comes in glass bottles and is made with fermented grapes that have French, or Italian, or sometimes German or Spanish names. It’s a fermented beverage that began in the Neolithic period around 6000BC, according to excavation sites in the Republic of Georgia. At least this is what I find When I do an online search of “earliest evidence of winemaking.”

More broadly than that, wine is a culture that began, new studies have revealed, with the domestication of the wild vine around 11,000 years ago in Western Asia. All you have to do is read the conclusive article, from Scientific American, about a study that “settles all disputes.”  The article is titled “Wine’s True Origins Are Finally Revealed.” The research on which this article reports is based on clever historical detective work accomplished by analyzing dozens of grapevines’ DNA.

Strangely, however, with a bit more digging online and some alternate search terms, you’ll find that actually the earliest evidence for alcoholic beverages that likely contain grapes is from China, and predates the next earliest archaeological evidence in Georgia by about half a millennium or more.

So why isn’t China even mentioned in the Scientific American article? Why isn’t China the number one search result for “oldest winemaking traditions”?

When I published the episode titled Is “New World” a Problematic Term? just under a year ago (worth a listen if you haven’t), I didn’t realize how big a debate the terms Old and New World would spark in 2023, culminating recently in the Court of Master Sommeliers’ decision to discontinue the use of those terms. That debate isn’t over, I’m sure, and there are some who concede that as wine style descriptors they are obsolete, but not as historical location identifiers.

I have an obvious bias, and I don’t want to misrepresent anyone’s arguments here, so I won’t go into the details of this debate. But my conclusion about it is the same as my answer to why Persia is so often left out of the discussion when it comes to “Old World” wines, despite being the oldest source of many of the techniques and styles of both wine and viticulture that were adopted and adapted by the Greeks and then the Romans and that therefore provided a foundation for what is considered to be the Old World of wine. It’s the same conclusion I come to when trying to understand why China isn’t credited when discussing the origin of wine.

I think behind these omissions, and all of these debates of terms and the upheavals that our industry is beginning to go through, is the question of the definition of wine. What is wine? Turns out not to have as obvious of an answer as it seems, especially when we also ask, Who gets to define it?

If you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you might have noticed that a little over a year and a half ago I published an episode about the history of winemaking in Los Angeles, my home… and then promptly took it down after only a week. I did this because I realized I’d made a mistake. Due to my guest’s definition of wine, that episode told an uncritical history of the arrival of Vitis vinifera in California with Spanish missionaries, and its later propagation by a continuing stream of Europeans to Los Angeles to become the US’s first large, commercial, exporting wine region.  

I’m no historian, but I do have a commitment to truth, and I’ve found that the truth is most often extremely complex. When we talk of Los Angeles, I think it’s important to remember that it was once called Yaanga. While it is oft repeated that there was no alcohol culture cultivated by the native peoples of this area, I wonder if that’s because there actually were none, or if maybe there were but they didn’t look like what European settlers defined as a fermentation culture? Because in much the same way the settlers described California as wild and uncultivated because they didn’t define agriculture in a way that would allow them to see the ecological landscape-level management of people who didn’t think about land ownership or property rights in the same way, let alone farming and gardening. Settlers did find wild vines grown in a vitiforestry style here in Southern California, and we know that many of the same ingredients are native to LA that were fermented in many other areas of the US SouthWest and North and Central Mexico for thousands of years into distinctive beverages with many cultural uses. So it would be actually kind of weird if the Tongva never made fermented beverages.

Additionally, part of the history of Los Angeles wine is that the missionaries and settlers took Tongva land by force to plant vineyards, and then essentially enslaved the Tongva, and other peoples, to farm them. Alcoholism was encouraged, and the workers were paid in alcohol to make them dependent and compliant. The thousands of acres of vineyards, and LA’s great winemaking history, wouldn’t have been possible without the theft of land and exploitation of the people of that land. And this happened all the way up the California coast. Many of the famous wine regions grew around the vineyards of missions and similar practices. So… I find it hard to take pride in this wine history.

I didn’t remove that episode to censor my guest’s take on LA wine history, though. I removed it because it was overly simplistic. I don’t want to repeat tales of great achievements; I want to question what we think is great about them, and what that says about how we define greatness… and I want to question if maybe we need a new definition of greatness that doesn’t include enslavement and genocide and the wanton exploitation of the earth in the name of economic gain.

I don’t think those of us with “Old World” heritage, or any other heritage, need to feel shame every time we look at history. But I think we should learn from the past, and the only way to do that is by being honest about it. And I think the best way to be honest about it is to let everyone who participated in it tell their story. If my married friend complains to me about their spouse, I listen because I know they need to vent and they just need me to be a friend. But both of us know that their spouse has a very different take on whatever it is they’re complaining about… so I never let those complaints influence the way I feel about my friend’s spouse because I know I didn’t get to hear the other side of the story.

History is the same… except usually there are a lot more than two sides to the story. To leave out those other sides without acknowledging them is dishonest, and I think leads to conceit, smug superiority, elitism, and corruption. We would never now think to define marriage as the story of just one of the participants… though not too long ago, and even now in some cultures, it would be accurate to describe marriage as a man’s story of property acquisition. And this one-sided story is similar to the idea that most people have in their mind when they hear the word “wine.”

If wine is only allowed to be defined as the fermented juice of Vitis vinifera, then it makes sense to exclude China from the history of wine. But are we happy with this definition? Certainly it seems that those who profit from this definition and the hierarchy it implies are happy. For those of us who farm and make wine with vinifera, even if the definition is wrong it benefits us… so why would we question it?

But even if we just dropped the specificity of the grape species from this definition and said that wine is the fermented juice of grapes, any grapes. Not any single species of grape.… and I think an extremely strong argument can be made for that definition… then suddenly the history of wine is much much larger than European history and the archeological evidence found in Georgia, and the DNA analysis mentioned in the Scientific American article.

And what if we expanded the definition even a bit more. I mean what about grapes fermented with other ingredients, as was most often the case historically? What if we said that wine is any fermented beverage that includes grapes? That opens up even more possibilities, like that ancient Chinese wine that also likely had rice and other ingredients. Or, further, What if we simply said that wine is fermented juice that includes any fruit. That would allow us to get rid of redundant terms like “fruit wines.” Is strawberry wine wine? Is blueberry wine wine? And if it isn’t, why not? Just because it gets too complicated? Because grapes are somehow superior? Because the Europeans whose language we’re using had never heard of a wine made from cashew fruit? Are these good reasons to limit wine to just grapes?

It’s funny how much room we give within the familiar realm of vinifera for wine to be diverse. We consider Champagne and Sherry to be wines, We think of Madiera and Sancerre as wine, We think of Tokaij and Tocai Friulano, Graves and Sauternes as wine. All of these beverages are very different. So why do we quibble about letting cider be a wine. Most ciders I’ve tasted have a lot more in common with a Prosecco than a Port does. Is prosecco the true wine, or is port? And maybe cider makers don’t want to be wine… that’s fine too. Ciders are a whole world unto themselves, and god knows I’ve had a lot of ciders that are significantly more delicious than the mass produced swill coming out of Champagne. But if cider makers wanted to say that they are making sparkling wines… how does that hurt anyone? What are the downstream disastrous effects of letting any fermented fruit be wine? If there are any, I’d honestly like to know. Please send me your thoughts.

I haven’t been able to imagine any. The pushback I’ve found to this seems to be psychological…. Because it represents a loss of control by the wine gate keepers.

Look, I’m not saying we change the definitions of words willy nilly to suit my love of fermented prickly pears. But I don’t think that the definition of wine is just an innocent word that never had a political agenda behind it. To bring up marriage again, there was a time, even more recently, when that word was allowed to be defined in only one way, as between a man and a woman. And just because most people never questioned that definition and were very happy with it just the way it was thank you very much, didn’t mean that it had no political agenda. And the voices of those who were marginalized and excluded from that definition were finally heard and included, and within a very short time, relatively speaking, we all became aware of how harmful and unnecessary the old definition of marriage was, and together with those who had been excluded from it, we all redefined it. And by being more inclusive, the new definition made marriage bigger, not lesser. I think it made us all a little bigger… where it counts, in our hearts.

And the stakes are much lower with wine… so what are we worried about?

I like to think about why I fell in love with wine. I fell in love with it because it was delicious in a way that resonated in my core. I fell deeper in love with it when I began to study it and discovered that it came from beautiful and interesting cultures that grew naturally out of their geography and environment, ultimately reconnecting me with something deep that I had lost… my sense of belonging to this earth. Do I then conclude that no other wine could be as delicious, or that no other wine cultures are as beautiful and interesting? Isn’t it the effect it had on me that was important, not the specific fruit or culture that produced it?

I’m going to quote someone who would probably disagree vehemently with me. Someone who was as squarely in the vinifera camp when it came to defining wine as a square can be, and who promoted many of the things that I think are the problems we’re currently trying to unravel in wine. Here’s one of Robert Mondavi’s famous quotes:

“Wine, to me, is passion. It’s family and friends. It’s warmth of heart and generosity of spirit. Wine is art. It’s culture. It’s the essence of civilization and the art of living.” 

What’s interesting is that I completely agree with his definition of wine here. Even though I know he meant fermented vinifera when he used the word “wine” there is nothing in his description of its essence that requires it to be vinifera.

It’s important to mention that I did fall in love with wine through vinifera because vinifera was what was defined as wine in my culture here in California, a state with a climate that we call Mediterranean (don’t get me started) in a society that is a result of English colonialism from whence we got our idea, our definition, of wine, and vinifera was therefore the most prevalent form of this experience that I could have… It was showered with resources and given the most care and attention and respect. And all of this did make it the dominant possibility for me to fall in love with wine. This is, I’m sure, true for many people. But to say that this dominance in my culture that led to my love for it demonstrates its superiority in value is absurd. Absolutely none of this had to do with the fact that it was a single species of grape any more than falling in love with and being thrilled to get to know Wendy, my wife, was because of her nationality or ethnicity although those factors likely played a part in how we got to meet.

What I’m saying is that you can’t defend the importance of defining wine as vinifera culture by saying it’s the most important and influential and therefore superior culture. If I defined my name, Adam, as Better than You, how would you be able to convince me that I’m not better than you without first convincing me to change the definition of my name? Maybe that’s a stupid example. Here’s a better one: what do you call that strip of ocean between England and France? If you speak English, you probably call it the English Channel. Do you think that’s what the French call it? If we insist on a Vitis vinifera-centric definition of wine, then the Eurocentrism and self-importance implicit in the dominant wine industry and the terms it uses are a given... by definition.

Why do I care about redefining wine? One really important reason is ecological. Because of the narrow definition of wine, wine has become a global monoculture. 10 vinifera grapes account for over 40% of what we have defined as “wine.” This represents millions of acres of land with very little biodiversity or cultural diversity. That isn’t healthy for the earth or therefore for us. Other factors played a part in this hegemony, including the commodification and industrialization of vinifera culture due to capitalist values. And that leads to my other reason for caring about redefining wine.

I don’t think there was a fair playing field, historically speaking. I don’t think vinifera culture triumphed over all others entirely on its own merits. Grapes from America were also brought back to Europe… but when they became so popular that they threatened the market for European pure vinifera grapes & wines, they were outlawed, and continued to be illegal until 2021. Take Isabella, a grape with American genetics. It’s actually globally popular still. It’s the most planted grape in Brazil and Columbia, found in every country bordering the Black Sea, a cult favorite in the Azores & Japan. It has even inspired poets. Yet it has been widely shunned by the dominant wine industry, never mentioned, dismissed. I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of it. You probably won’t hear it mentioned by the CMS or WSET, except perhaps to malign it, and it won’t show up on one of their blind tasting tests. Because… it threatened the hierarchy and was banned. It wasn’t singled out either. All grapes with American genetics were banned in France in 1934, and later in the entire EU. When prohibition wasn’t enough to eradicate these wines, Reefer Madness-style propaganda was used to spread fear and prejudice through lies and exaggerations about the non-vinifera grapes. Many of the lies and prejudices persist today.

That isn’t to say there weren’t good reasons to try to protect and preserve the vinifera cultures of Europe, but it points out that it wasn’t a fair exchange that gave us the dominant wine culture we have now … it was more of a European conquest.

I don’t think there is any mal intent now in the propagation of vinifera. In fact, I’d wager there’s something a lot more like love behind the way most of us engage with and perpetuate this definition of wine. But it seems to me that we arrived here through unfair advantages and even injustice at times. And I think it’s important to understand how the dominance of this culture necessarily excludes the myriad other cultures that could be wine whether we intend it or not.

For example, I recently sold an article idea to a large wine media company. The article was about No-Spray Viticulture, and the shift in thinking that is necessary to make this possible. Of course, the only way to do No-Spray viticulture successfully is to use more resistant, less popular modern varieties of grapes that have a diversity of genetics. When this became clear to the editors, they canceled the article. As disappointing as this was to me, I don’t think they did it because they hate grapes that aren’t pure vinifera and want to censor any pro-modern grape narrative. They canceled the article because their readership is a group of people who only grow and work with Vitis vinifera. I don’t think this publication has an agenda beyond economic stability. It’s not that they wanted to prevent the story, the just didn’t want to publish something that would upset their economic base or not be relevant to it.

The moral is not to think there is a conspiracy against alternative definitions of wine, but that the dominant narrative is perpetuated because of the self-reinforcing cycle that its dominance gives no incentive to offer alternatives and the lack of alternatives increases its dominance and importance.

So as we head into 2024, I hope you’ll begin looking at the unquestioned assumptions that are implied in every use of the word “wine” that you hear. Who or what has defined wine for you, and are you happy with that? Who and What is included and excluded when you hear about wine tastings, wine reviews, wine education, wine history, wine pairings, wine regions, wine varieties, wine bibles, wine atlases, and wine companions… and everything else “wine.” Is it fair to give the term “wine” to things that actively exclude a whole pantheon of, for lack of a better word, wines made by the global majority?

As I’m asking us to re-define wine, I realize that in most cases there isn’t some legal definition that we have to vote on. And I’m not suggesting we abandon the AOCs, DOCs, etc of Europe. I’m just suggesting that we stop thinking and acting like the entire world is an AOC. I don’t think there is a definition for wine other than the one in our heads. There is no court with any power to decide this for us. Wine becomes what we think, and say, and act as if it is.  As far as I can tell we’d lose nothing by thinking of wine more inclusively, and we have the world to gain.

Have a Complex Thanksgiving

Isn’t it time that we all grew up and acknowledged that most of life isn’t simple?

Maybe this question is especially pertinent for us Americans as we celebrate our very American holiday of Thanksgiving this week. This holiday embodies some of the ugliest and most beautiful aspects of our culture. On one hand, the Thanksgiving tradition is a lie that conceals the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the very people who taught their killers how to survive on this continent. It’s also a gluttonous feast of over-consumption and waste. On another hand, it is a uniquely secular holiday centered around the incredibly important idea of being grateful. It’s a time when we gather with family and friends when the only thing that we celebrate is the specialness of being alive and the fact that we have each other to share this life with.

I would argue that if you ignore the ugly part of Thanksgiving, you deny truth in your life, but if you ignore the beautiful part of Thanksgiving, you deny joy in your life. I wish we could have the one without the other, but I haven’t found many cases of that in my life. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from diving into a regenerative approach to wine it’s that the more you learn about something the more complex you realize things are, the more you realize there is to learn, the more you realize you don’t know…

I heard a great quote that went something like this: when you’re a child, you think your parents are gods. When you become an adolescent, you realize they’re human. When you become an adult, you forgive them for being human. When you become wise, you forgive yourself for being human.

Thanksgiving also officially marks the beginning of “the holiday season” in the US. This is a time of year when we consume frantically. We eat too much, we drink too much, and we often feel even more busy and stressed than during any other time in our normally busy and stressed lives. This busyness leads us to cut corners, to make quick decisions, to feel the necessity of not looking too deeply into things or we won’t be able to get anything done.

It reminds me of a famous quote from Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual: “The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature, of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action.”

As I think about regenerating wine, I’m reminded of how important time is. The speed of our lives is completely antithetical to the complexity of life. Look how patiently nature grows an ecosystem. Look how it builds complexity and diversity layer by layer over centuries. I want to make wine this way. I want to think about wine this way, and let this perspective inform the decisions I make for this vintage. I want to stop rushing to buy things when I don’t know where they came from or how they were made. I want to take the time to observe and learn about complex things carefully. I want to be slow to judge. I want to take the time to be grateful.

I just released a podcast episode in which I interviewed a young man of 39 years who has had a complex year. His name is Nick Dugmore, and he was awarded Australia’s Young Gun of Wine award at the beginning of the year. Then in August he was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer. His children are 2 and 5 years old. He’s terrified, full of joy, hopeful, depressed, grateful, and undergoing intense chemotherapy. He’s experiencing the full complexity of being alive and knowing how unexpected and fleeting life can be.

Wine is a big part of this complexity. He talks openly about how over-consumption of alcohol may have contributed to the cause of his cancer. Yet he has become even more grateful for the wine community of which he is part. In addition to knowing alcohol is a toxin, he has gained a greater appreciation for wine as a spiritual experience. Working in wine is how he met his wife, and therefore, in a sense, wine is why he has those beautiful young kids. He loves wine… maybe even more than he did prior to his diagnosis.

If we look at one side of his story, we may want to demonize alcohol and revive prohibition. This is a very simplistic approach to life.

When we look at all sides of his story it deepens our own lives, enlightens us, brings greater care and greater appreciation to our own experience with wine. Being okay with complexity, embracing the fact that we don’t have all the answers or that the answers aren’t simple, enriches our lives.

Maybe this is my way of preparing mentally for the political campaigning we’re sure to experience here in the US in the next year.

But mostly I want this to be my way of wishing you an incredibly rich Thanksgiving.

Adam

PS: If you’d like to hear Nick Dugmore’s story, it’s on the Beyond Organic Wine podcast.

Beyond Organic Wine

At the beginning of October I announced this name change on an episode recorded while picking Frontenac Gris grapes in Vermont with the crew of La Garagista. It's a special episode, and I highly recommend giving it a listen, but I also thought it might be valuable to post the text of this name-change announcement here, as it represents the values and thinking that inform Centralas as well:

Beyond Organic Wine

You may have noticed that I didn’t welcome you to the Organic Wine Podcast. That’s because I’m changing the name. It’s a simple change, but I think it better reflects what you can expect when you tune in. I’m just adding the word “Beyond” to the name, so that it’s now the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast. Welcome! Nothing else is changing. You can still go to OrganicWinePodcast.com, but you can also now go to BeyondOrganicWine.com… they both take you to the same place.

There’s some inside-wine lingo to the name change. I’ve heard it used, and used it myself, when talking to customers and wine drinkers as a short hand way of letting them know that the viticulture behind my wine, or another wine, is really thoughtful, ecological, biodynamic, regenerative, etc. We just say it’s “beyond organic” as a way of evoking this. Because, well, because what is actually beyond the limits of just organic is immense. It can get pretty complicated pretty quickly, and the average wine drinker isn’t interested in mychorrizal fungi or and rotational grazing… sadly.

I love the word “Beyond.” I loved the scene in the movie Click where Adam Sandler goes to the Bed Bath & Beyond store and discovers an entrance to the Beyond section, which is of course a magical and metaphysical realm that changes his life. With this name change, I’m hoping to do the same thing… go through the Organic portal and continue this journey of discovery of the wild and mysterious realm that is beyond.

I’ve become convinced that many of our biggest problems are systemic, culturally rooted, and we cannot talk about alternatives without questioning the frameworks we use to give meaning to our lives. How can we talk about re-wilding wine, for example, while using a language structure that came from the Romans and their cultural descendants who conquered and destroyed every wild and indigenous culture they encountered? I think we need to re-learn wild language to re-wild our ideas. Even the word “wild” can have problematic connotations, and may not convey the kind of nature-integrated thinking that I’m trying to talk about.

Beyond just introducing you to the new name, I wanted to use this to ask the big question lurking behind the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast. What actually is this vision of wine that I’m talking about?  I mean… why the heck am I doing this? Why do I care about these things?

Answering this question is part of why I came to Vermont. I’ve been working harvest for three weeks with the crew of La Garagista...

...I’ve loved every minute of my time here in Vermont, but I especially loved the discussions that we’d have while bottling or picking grapes. While Deirdre and I bottled her 2023 Grace & Favor pet-nat, listening to music and working quietly, I asked, “Do you like the term ‘natural wine’?” She said she did, but acknowledged it had its limits. Then she asked me what I thought. I admitted it bothered me a bit because I saw wine as a product of human culture, and that it couldn’t exist, no matter how we made it, without many human cultural interventions. I assured her that I didn’t mean to denigrate wine by saying this, but on the contrary wanted to elevate it to a kind of art form. I just thought that the term ‘natural’ was disingenuous. She agreed, but offered the insight that perhaps in the French ‘vin nature,’ from which natural wine derives, might embody some subtle differences that don’t convey when translated as ‘natural wine.’

As I thought about this, I wondered if in the French the term might lean more towards this sense of a nature culture. Wine that grows from a culture centered around nature. The root of cult and culture is to cultivate, to grow, but also to worship. If we worship nature in the way we cultivate wine, perhaps that is the essence of natural wine. To worship is to show reverence and/or adoration, often to a deity, and to honor with rites. Isn’t this the way to practice the best viticulture? Aren’t the soil and the sun and the rain and the seasons the source of us, our creators? Don't the fruits of our cultivation transmute into our bodies, and the strength and awareness that gives us life? When we create and spray a biodynamic prep, or prepare and spread compost, aren’t these rites that honor the land and the life force that brings forth our wine?

I want to make wine within a nature culture. To make wine that shows reverence and adoration for the natural world.

And these thoughts of nature culture brought me back to that question of… why am doing this?

When I started this podcast, Organic was important to me, and still is, because I didn’t want to harm the earth in the pursuit of making wine, or anything else for that matter. Organic for me meant “do no harm.” It still does mean this for the most part.

But it doesn’t challenge the culture out of which my idea of wine grew. Organic leaves intact the entire colonial idea and industrial model of winemaking. It allows us to swap out the sprays while changing nothing of the substance. The problem with organic, if I can sum it up, is that you can farm a vineyard or orchard organically even though you cleared old growth forest in order to plant it.

And what is my problem with the colonial industrial culture that I live in? I mean what is the problem with clear-cutting ancient forests to make way for our human needs and desires?

I guess the answer for me is that I’ve come to believe ancient forests are one of our greatest needs, and that we should align our desires with a way of life that preserves and even increases our ability to have a way of life. I’ve come to see the natural world as a literal extension of myself and my well-being, and having seen this, I can’t un-see the deep connections everywhere. This vision makes me want to know more, but it also exposes the shortcomings and unsustainability of our dominant viticulture.

Everything in our lives comes from the earth: our homes and everything in them, our cars, the roads we drive on, our clothes and shoes, our phones, our food, and our wine. We’ve created a system, though, in which the source materials for most of these things are never replenished. We take from somewhere and sell it somewhere else. We take until that somewhere has no more to give, and then we start to take from somewhere else.

Even if we take in nice way – which seldom happens – but even if we do take in a nice way, there’s still the problem of finiteness. When we take without giving back, we create a vacuum in the land and an emptiness in ourselves.  

I think I understand what motivates the taking. I mean of course there are the bad things like ignorance and greed and vanity, but even behind those, if we can be compassionate with ourselves for a moment, there are the very understandable needs and fears of being a human animal in a wild world. Behind the thirst for power, control, and profit is the need for safety and security and a desire for comfort and pleasure rather than pain and suffering. So strong is this motivation that we let other people and creatures experience insecurity, pain, and suffering, as long as we didn’t have to see it, if that means that we and our children don’t have to experience these things.

But we are beginning to reach the end of taking. We are beginning to reach a point where this system of taking and not giving back has created a poisonous world, an unstable world, an insecure and unsafe world. The machine we built in our desperation for security is eroding the possibility of that security. We’ve realized we can’t outrun death.

While all of this might have been inevitable in the trajectory of human development, our future isn’t inevitable. Throughout history, humans have joined together in communities to build large projects that were, by one understanding, completely impractical. Think of the Teatro Antico in Taormina, Sicily, or the Mayan Pyramids, or Notre Dame, or Stonehenge, or Angkor Wat. Each of these places whether they are monuments to a god or gods, storytelling and entertainment, love, or mystery, all tell a similar story.

That story is that we humans are not bound by what is expedient, convenient, practical, frugal, comfortable, or even necessary. We can do things for their beauty. We can build monuments that can only be understood by the thrill they bring to the eye, the way they quicken our heartbeat. We can embark on difficult and dangerous journeys because we know that we must feed some part of ourselves that food cannot satisfy. We can invest our energy and resources into the aesthetic side of life, knowing that the return we get is a reason to live.

A luxury is an unnecessary thing that we don’t need. I don’t think wine has to fit this definition. Wine, at its best, reminds us that life is about more than survival. Wine can be an unnecessary creation that we can’t live without.

When I think of wine this way, I feel a profound responsibility. I want to ask how to make wine be the greatest aesthetic expression it can be. As I’ve pursued this question via this podcast over the past four years, I’ve learned a lot about the harm we’ve done to the world as well as the ways we can repair that damage. To not share that feels irresponsible. I started these interviews because I wanted to learn more about wine, but I’m realizing the most important thing I’ve learned is how to listen better.

I think a listening is a key to a healthy community. I want encourage a community of people who see that our community can’t be limited to just humans. I want to ask how to build viticultures that are not based on extraction but based on showing reverence and adoration for the natural world and all the lives with which we share it.

Look, I know this is a small planet in a very large universe, and my life isn’t even a blip in the immense scale of time. I can use this as an excuse to be cynical and not care about anything other than my own whims. Do I really think I can make the world a better place? And what would ‘better’ even look like? And would it even matter if I did? 

I’ll admit these are powerful questions. Maybe nothing I do matters. But I personally prefer to live in a beautiful world, a just world, a world of health and wonder. And I know that maybe I can’t change human nature, or the world… but I can change myself, and the world that I touch. I know I can listen better and empathize better and farm better… and that will make my wine more delicious. And it may not matter in the grand scheme, but I’d like to drink more delicious wine while I’m visiting this magical wineforest.

As grandiose as it may sound, the ‘why’ that forms the basis of the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast (and Centralas Wine) is that I want to learn how to build a Notre Dame or Teatro Antico of wine. I want to ask what our viticultures could be when built from a spirit of worship rather than fear of this wild world. I want to ask how to build a system and a community, from the ground up, whose priorities are the things that make life worth living, despite our fears and our inevitable passing.

This is what’s beyond organic wine for me.

Cheers!
Adam

P.S. For another great perspective, and even counter-point to consider, on monument building, check out this incredible video of a presentation by the late permaculture teacher Toby Hemenway. 

Cultivating Life: A Call For A Diversity of Viticultures

This was one of the better clusters…

It looks like we’ll be harvesting only the wisdom of hard lessons this vintage. Our Crenshaw Cru front yard grapes have been almost entirely destroyed by powdery mildew.

The grapes were about 75% through veraison when Hurricane Hilary hit, dumping over 5 inches of rain in about 12 hours. I started picking through the grape clusters two days later to assess whether I should do another final spray of Cinnerate, the fungicidal spray I use last in the growing season. As I inspected the grapes, I began to feel sick. It was already too late. Nearly every cluster was so infected with powdery mildew as to be unusable for wine.

But this late season rain, and our changing climate, is not why my grapes were destroyed. It was just the final straw. The reasons behind the complete failure of this vintage are complex and deserve both a macro and a micro examination.

First, the powdery mildew life cycle actually begins in the early spring. Early season controls are essential to prevent late season issues. The winter and spring of 2022-23 is in the top eight wettest seasons on record for Los Angeles. In addition to this, we had foggy, misty, gloomy weather well into June, with some unusual, for LA, late spring rains to boot.

All of this created conditions both ideal for powdery mildew spore germination, and difficult for anyone trying to farm organically. Even with regular sprays of organic mildew suppressants, like oils and sulfur, the continually wet and humid conditions would have required extremely heavy application with much more frequency than normal. Normal spray intervals for organics are 10-14 days depending on conditions, which I followed all season (14 or more sprays this year). But I know one organic farmer in Santa Cruz, who had the same kind of winter and spring, who sprayed every 7 days and still found a significant percentage of his crop is now covered in powdery mildew.

The extra rain and moisture in the air also resulted in very moist soils. These moist soils caused increased vegetative growth in the vines. Basically the vines grew like crazy this year. The problem with all this growth is that it creates more shady spaces of still, moist air that are the perfect microclimates for mildew growth. I hedged and leafed and thinned my vines prior to every spray, so every 10 to 14 days, yet this wasn’t enough. The canopy would regrow and become an impenetrable pool of shade within a couple days.

These are the conditions that would apply generally to many people growing grapes in California this year. But I also have some specific conditions on top of this that exacerbate all of these problems.

The Crenshaw Cru soil is actually too rich. It is heavy clay, which holds enormous amounts of water, and I’ve been amending it for 11 years with organic matter and composts and regenerative, no-till farming. So it is a three-feet-deep incredibly fertile and microbially active sponge, which, of course, adds to the vigor and vegetative growth of the vines, which adds to the problems of a shady, moist microclimate.

Also, I planted the vines in the front yard in a one-meter by one-meter spacing because I wanted to maximize my small urban space. With the richness of the soil, this is just too close. I have 15 vines in space where I should probably have 5. All that excessive growth becomes an even bigger problem when it happens in close quarters and creates crowded, over-lapping growth.

In other words, if I was going to design a powdery mildew paradise, it would look something like the front yard vineyard of Crenshaw Cru.

Yet if I just focused on all of these complex and inter-related issues about a specific vineyard site and its soil and layout and changing climate and the life cycle of fungi, I might miss the bigger, more important causes of my total crop failure this year.

Farming is a dynamic enterprise. I talked to someone who had been farming his whole life, and he said, “I don’t have 40 years of cumulative farming experience. I have 40 completely different experiences – one for every year I’ve been farming.”

I adjusted to the extremely wet conditions this year. I had to hedge and leaf and trim much more than in other years. But it wasn’t enough. I farmed from a formula that worked in the past for me, rather than observing and listening – paying attention to the vines – and reacting to their changing needs. I should have hedged much more aggressively and more often. I should have shortened the spray intervals. Perhaps, now that the vines are maturing, I should have removed five of them to create more space for the remaining ones.

If we stop the analysis here, though, we would easily end up with the agricultural system we currently have. Because the next step, if you’re unwilling to look deeper, is to conclude that what we need are stronger sprays. If organics are so weak that you get mildew even with regular application, it must be time to bring out the big, chemical guns. Bad fungus this vintage? We have a fungicide that’s even worse! This is how we grow wine, for the most part, around the planet.

But the real issue isn’t with the ineffectiveness of organic treatments, or that I didn’t do enough, or that we had weird weather. The real problem is that I put what I wanted where I wanted it, instead of asking if what I wanted was what’s right for my land.

If I step out of my vines, I don’t find mildew or fungal issues anywhere else at Crenshaw Cru. The prickly pear cactus that’s six feet from the vines in the front yard, just across the sidewalk, is better than fine, with several plump fruits ripening beautifully. The lemon tree that some of the front yard vines grow into is perfect, with glossy, happy green leaves and another bumper crop of fruit forming. The avocado, pomegranate, and mango trees just a few feet from the vines are full, abundant, healthy, and mildew free. AND I didn’t have to spray any of them with anything. In fact, the main work I’ve had to do for these other plants has been thinning their bumper crops to prevent their branches from breaking under the weight of the fruit.

I will definitely take away some hard lessons from this vintage about viticulture, vineyard establishment, canopy management, spray regimens, matching all of this to soil and micro-climate, and the need to observe and adapt to changing conditions. But there’s a much more profound lesson that I’ve learned. You need to grow the right plant in the right place, and vitis vinifera is not the right plant for my place.

Why, when there are examples of other plants growing just fine all around vinifera, do we not think it strange to have to spray vinifera 14 or more times in a growing season in order to keep it healthy enough to harvest grapes? Why do we persist in growing vinifera even when we do those 14+ sprays, and almost the same number of days of canopy management, and then lose the entire crop to mildew? Why do we give vinifera a pass?

The main reason we do this is because we’ve believed a lie that is the basis of our entire wine industry. That lie is that there are only a few varieties of grapes – “noble varieties” – from which it is possible to make good wine, and all of those noble varieties are of the genetically superior vitis vinifera species.

This lie forms the foundation of every level of the wine industry, and is the cause of the global monoculture of a handful of the same grapes grown everywhere around the planet wherever it is possible to grow grapes, even if those places aren’t really the right place to grow those grapes. Given the horrific track record of all other theories (lies) of genetic superiority, why haven’t we questioned this one at the center of the wine industry?

Does no one else think it strange that all the wine we drink, whether in California, or Oregon, or New York, or Texas, or New Zealand is actually all the same wine made with French grapes? Does no one else  want to drink South African wine when you go to South Africa, rather than French wine made in South Africa?

As an aside, I use the term “wine industry” intentionally. I want to build a wine culture. A culture is something that grows locally from native or locally adapted flora and fauna. It can’t be commoditized and franchised around the globe, because it grows out of a specific place. A culture is like a local fingerprint, unique everywhere you go.

Bringing this back to Crenshaw Cru, and grapes, I think there’s one other confession that I need to make… one other part of this failure that I need to own.

Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about hybrid grapevines. I’ve met with and interviewed multiple grapevine breeders. I follow a grapebreeders group that includes some giants – scientists who have dedicated their lives to grape genetics, and who are responsible for pretty much all the new varieties of wine grapes that have been developed in the last 40 years. I’ve also begun to drink a lot of wines made from hybrid grapes.

What is a “hybrid?” A hybrid is a genetic cross of different species of grapes. For example, Baco Noir is a hybrid because it is an inter-species cross of vitis riparia and vitis vinifera. Cabernet Sauvignon is a “cross” rather than a hybrid because it was made from the combination of two grapes of the same species of vitis vinifera (Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc). Here in the US a hybrid usually refers to grapes developed by crossing a native American grape with vitis vinifera. Modern hybrid grapes are often multi-species, multi-variety crosses with big family trees . Hybridization is a common strategy in all fruit production, and many of our favorite fruits currently, in terms of popularity, are hybrids.

Hybridizing is merely rolling the genetic dice to try to get children who contain the best of both parents. Sometimes you roll snake eyes, and sometimes you roll sevens. When a hybridization results in a vine that has multiple desirable factors like cold-hardiness, fungal resistance, and delicious grapes, you’ve hit the genetic jackpot and can select that grape for clonal propagation.

I should mention that hybridizing fruit, grapes or otherwise, has no inherently negative or positive effect on the resulting progeny. But if you have a belief in the genetic superiority of one species, hybridizing becomes a bad thing that creates “impurity” and a “dilution of the gene pool” and “weakening of the species” etc. I probably don’t have to remind you that this kind of belief is associated with some of the worst parts of human history.

I’ve fallen in love with hybrids. I’ve tasted many delicious wines – yes many – made from hybrids. And not just delicious: sublime, exceptional, stunning wines… wines that need no caveats nor apology, and that can be judged against any other wine in the world and found as delicious, if not more so.

In other words, I’ve discovered that the lie that forms the basis of the wine industry is exactly that: a lie. The truth is that there are not only many varieties of grapes that can make good wine… there are many species of grapes that can make great wine. Not to mentions that wine doesn’t have to be limited to just grapes either!

As I’ve fallen in love with hybrids, I’ve fallen out of love with vinifera. And as my feelings for vinifera have diminished, I think I didn’t give these vines at Crenshaw Cru the attention they needed. That’s on me. But it’s on them for being so damn needy!

Could I have grown my vinifera grapes successfully this year? Yes, I think I possibly could have. But it would have taken twice the amount of time and resources than the significant amount I already spent. On the other hand, all the time I spent spraying and tending my vinifera this year, for naught, is time that I wouldn’t have had to spend if I was growing something like Petite Pearl or Baco Noir (two hybrids that can make incredible wine).

In fact, I know someone who farms Baco Noir in the Sonoma Coast AVA – a region that got even more rain than LA did this winter and spring, and known for moist maritime climate – and they don’t spray it at all. Zero fungicide of any kind. The fruit is pristine this year, while a few vines of vinifera that were inter-planted amongst the Baco Noir are completely destroyed by powdery mildew – a true side-by-side comparison.

(Do yourself a favor and get a bottle of Matt Niess’s 2022 Rebel - Baco Noir - under his North American Press label, when he releases it. In fact, buy a case… you’ll thank me. If you have lingering prejudices about hybrid grapes, due to growing up with the lie that undergirds the dominant approach to wine, the 2022 Rebel will change your mind.)

So on top of hybrids making great wine, they could save me a significant amount of time and money, and actually produce a bountiful crop in a wet year (for LA). If you took the time and expense that I spent trying to control fungus in Crenshaw Cru this year and multiplied it by 100  – to get to a commercial size vineyard – think of the potential savings!

These are practical and very important considerations. But there’s also the psychological component. With vinifera I can shower them with care but still have to worry whether I will have usable fruit at harvest. There’s a baseline of stress to this kind of viticulture. I could relieve that stress with hybrids while at the same time removing the extra work and expense.

Even more profoundly, growing vinifera – either organically or otherwise – means that I’ll be required to use outside inputs: fungicides of some kind. Where do those come from? How are they produced? How much fossil fuel gets burned to produce and ship them to me? What kinds of businesses and systems am I supporting when I buy them? What are these systems doing to our world and how long can they continue? With hybrids, these questions, and their at times unsavory answers, can be reduced and even, in a Mediterranean climate, eliminated.

Ultimately, though, the greatest psychological shift that hybrids allow for may be the elimination of the need to constantly think defensively. With vinifera I spend a lot of time and psychic energy thinking: how do I prevent, exclude, or kill the fungi or other pests that want to suck the life out of my grapes? When you relate to life from a defensive posture, it inhibits creativity, represses freedom of expression, and stifles joy. This aspect is hard to quantify of course, but could lead to things like thinking about how to build beauty into my vineyard, and having the time to actually implement the ideas that I come up with.

Does vinifera make delicious wine? It absolutely can. But just as there’s much more to a meaningful and joyful relationship than whether your partner is good-looking, I have higher expectations than just good flavor in the crops upon which we build our wine culture.

Think about this: the genetics of one species of grape from Europe and West Asia, tinkered with by humans for 8,000 years or more, resulted in thousands of varieties of winegrapes, a handful of which are the basis of the delicious wine that most of us know and love. That’s one species. In America we have at least 24 species. There are approximately 60 species of grapes around the planet. Think of the genetic potential, especially if we start crossing them. Actually you don’t have to imagine, we’ve already started crossing them and the results are phenomenal. And we’ve only been at it for a relatively short time. (And that’s just grapes.)

I hope it’s clear that I’m not anti-vinifera. Vinifera genetics should be part of the mix of genetics with which we continue to roll the dice. I’m pro-diversity and anti-monoculture. I’m anti-prejudice. I’m for the right plants grown in the right place. I’m against a kind of viticulture that is more like the curation of a museum exhibit of a single slice of history from a single place on the planet. I’m for acknowledging that the one constant of life, of nature, is change, and we had better get on that train if we want our viticultures to survive.

Losing my entire vintage is heartbreaking, but if I hadn’t tried to grow these vines, if I hadn’t put my heart into Crenshaw Cru, I might never have felt the consequences of believing the lie. If I wasn’t so intimately connected to the farming of my wine, I might have indefinitely ignored the real costs of an unquestioned belief in the genetic superiority of vinifera.  

I planted the front yard with vinifera because I never questioned that foundational belief, because I had internalized that lie. That lie led me to prioritize my ignorant flavor preferences without any consideration for the needs of my land, the voice of this place on the earth. The vineyard grew out of that lie and that mindset. And its fruit is death.

That heartbreak has made me ready to be a better farmer. I’m ready to start listening. I’m ready to eradicate prejudice. I’m ready to explode limits and think creatively. I’m ready to build a true local wine culture. I’m ready to start cultivating life.

- Adam Huss
August 2023

PS.

I wanted to make a strong case for hybrids in Mediterranean climates here. This is really about eliminating prejudice and resetting our thinking so that wine becomes a process of continual discovery, rather than a quest to clone a handful of holy grails . But I want to be clear that everything else I said about observing and listening to your land and knowing your soil and local conditions still applies to hybrids. My friends who grow hybrids on the East Coast of the US, with only a very few exceptions, will let you know that outside of a Mediterranean climate you still have to spray hybrid grapes and carefully manage the canopy if you want to get a consistent crop. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that hybrids are a magic bullet. But if you grow grapes in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas … and let’s add most of Chile, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa… and, you know, every country that borders the Mediterranean… you may find that growing hybrid grapes eliminates the need to spray much if anything in the way of fungicides. And if you’re anywhere else in the world that is not a Mediterranean climate you’ll likely find that growing hybrids means you’ll be able to a) save time and resources, and b) grow organically, whereas if you try to grow vinifera organically you’ll fail 3 vintages out of 4 or more and spend a lot more time failing.

These are generalizations, of course. Even vinifera exhibit different levels of resistance to fungi, and growing them on their own roots versus on rootstock makes a difference as well. But vinifera are significantly less resistant than the vast majority of hybrids. Grapes were hybridized, after all, to make vinifera more resistant to fungi and able to withstand more extreme temperatures, especially freezing winters. Hybrids can contain the genetics of multiple species, however, and so each one has different strengths and weaknesses.

But let’s start by stopping the binary thinking, with vinifera on one side and hybrids in opposition on the other. The future of wine, if we hope to have one, is in the diversity of genetics. In finding what works well in your climate versus putting something there because only it is considered fine wine. The future of our viticultures is in a process of continual adaptation and selection as we react to a changing world. Start with a principle of “If it can’t produce a crop if I don’t spray it, then it isn’t meant to be here,” and go from there. Nature will tell you what you should use to make wine where you are.

Never Before

Two weeks ago Wendy and I took a trip to upstate New York. We traveled all over the Finger Lakes and Catskill Mountains and visited family and some friends who do some incredible farming and make some incredible wine and cider… or at least they would if they had any fruit.

I say that because this year, following a very warm April which caused the trees to bloom and set fruit, in Mid May the entire Northeast experienced a freeze event – much worse than any “late frost” – in which the temperature was around 25 degrees F for about 5 hours one night. When it hit, it destroyed one of the biggest blooms the area had seen in years. Now many orchards are simply barren. I walked through hundreds of trees that had no fruit at all. This came after last year’s “off year” when most of the trees produced a greatly reduced crop as part of their evolved cyclical reproductive schedule. I can’t imagine trying to operate my winery in California without grapes for two years, but that’s exactly what many cider makers in the North-East face right now. And grapes have been affected as well, but it remains to be seen just how badly.

I kept hearing a phrase that has sort of haunted me. Everyone kept saying:

“Never before…”

“Never before…” That’s how the severity of this freeze event was described.

I began writing this while stranded in a hotel in Geneva NY. I say stranded because our flight back to LA was canceled and we couldn’t get another flight until three days later. And I was stranded due to the air quality. The AQI as I wrote this was close to 200. That means that there, on the verdant shores of Lake Seneca, in a quaint town surrounded by farms and forests, the air outside was the most polluted and unhealthy air on the planet because of, again, unprecedented wildfires in Canada. This too seems to be a “never before” event.

I’ve gotten used to “Never before” because of living in California. In my 26 years of living in Los Angeles, I’ve lived through multiple of the driest years on record for the western US. During that time, I also saw and breathed the smoke of fires that were the largest and most destructive ever seen in the west. And now the 2022-23 winter will go down as one of the wettest winters on record.

Extremity and severity are our future. “Never before…” is happening every year now. “Never before…” is a phrase that will become common to all of us, wherever we live.

As I sat, trapped in my hotel writing about this, I looked around and saw a lobby area full of dozens of people who seemed unperturbed by these ecological and environmental realities, visible in the extremely hazy air right outside the windows.

I began to feel discouraged. I’m sure you’ve been there. What will it take to wake us up?

But then I remembered some other ecological realities I had noticed during our visit. The farmers themselves were one of those realities. Dismayed, for sure, but undaunted. This “never before” spring was already activating deep wells of creativity and resourcefulness in everyone I spoke too. More than ever before, diversity was rising to the top of the list of paths into the future.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever lived through a terrible storm or flood or earthquake, but if you have, you’ve probably experienced that sense of community that happens when the dust settles and everyone comes out to survey the damage… and people being to spontaneously talk to each other and make sure everyone is okay, and help with anything they can. I felt this sense of community on an almost regional scale in New York. The farmers were commiserating, sharing, checking on each other, trying to learn from each other, offering help to each other.

Our car service driver was another of the ecological realities that encouraged me. When our flight was canceled, and every rental car service was sold out for 100 miles, we called a car service to be dropped at a nearby hotel to wait out our multi-day unplanned stay. But when our driver heard our story, he refused to let us be the battered victims of fate. He inspired us to call the airline and find a flight a day earlier out of another airport, and promised to get us there. He drove us an hour and a half, twice, on two separate days, picking us up the second time even though we had to stay an hour and a half from where he lived. On top of this he had an infectiously positive attitude, carried our bags, recommended hotels, and gave us receipts so that we could get reimbursed for our unexpected travel expenses.

It occurred to me that when things happen that have never happened before, we get to see people act in ways that they’ve never had the opportunity to act before. Yes, at times, we can be discouraging, but we are never always discouraging. We can be, and often are, creative, resourceful, caring, inspiring, heroic, and compassionate in ways that can change people’s lives.

As one farmer I talked to said, “Only a tiny percentage of people are crazy. The rest of us just want to pay our bills and get along.”

I’ve dedicated Centralas and the Organic Wine Podcast to promoting the knowledge and practices that reduce the number of times we have these “never before” events I've used these businesses to ask how to build a wine culture that is so diverse and adaptable that it can weather whatever comes. I’ve dedicated my time and resources to inspiring you to rise to the challenges of the future and act in ways that you never have before… in the best sense.

And I’ve reached a point where I want to do more. I want to work on projects that will extend beyond my lifetime to an unlimited number of generations from now. So I’m putting together a business plan and looking for an investor or investors who share this vision and would like to build something inspiring, hopeful, beautiful, and delicious that also regenerates the earth and builds the health of the land and the community of living creatures who are part of it.

If you have a serious interest in supporting this kind of project financially, please reach out to me, and we can schedule a call to discuss if it might be a good fit for you.

And if you aren't an investor, I'm still excited for you to be part of this project in other ways, and I'll keep you posted as it develops.

In the meantime, I'm going to show some love to a farmer... and buy some delicious wine and cider!

Cheers,

Adam

Organic Vs. Ecological Viticulture

I know multiple certified organic or biodynamic vineyards that were established by razing oak savannahs and cutting down forests of Douglas fir.

I hope that sounds as insane to you as it does to me. (If it doesn’t, I’ve not only failed and starting this piece with an attention-grabbing opening line, you also may want to question your priorities when it comes to forests vs. vineyards.)

The existence of these vineyards is the best example I can give of the difference between an organic and an ecological approach to viticulture.

The number of certifications and labels that are available for vineyards seems to increase every day: Sustainable, Organic, Biodynamic, Regenerative Organic, Fair Trade, Land to Market, Real Organic, Fish Friendly, Napa Green, Salmon Safe, not to mention terms like no-spray, dry-farmed, practicing organic, conservation agriculture… etc. It’s overwhelming to try to keep up with them, even for someone like me who spends a lot of time researching them.

But the reality is that there are really only two ways to practice viticulture:

Ego > Earth OR Earth > Ego

The first perspective dominates the way that we’ve all been conditioned to see the world. The infrastructure of our US culture implies this perspective and its values in nearly every aspect, and our agriculture is no exception. Most of our culture seems intended to eliminate the intrusion of the land into our thinking, actually. We cut it down, pave over it, and wall it out. Nearly everything in our world trains us to see land, not as a source of wisdom and an extension of our own body, but as a dumb, inanimate thing on which we should “live out our dreams” and from which we should extract the things necessary for our survival and pleasure… organically, of course.

The second way revolutionizes the dominant perspective on viticulture. It arises from the epiphany that we  borrow the life that animates our egos from this land, and it is appropriate – as fruits of that land – to learn from it how we might better align ourselves with its rhythms and relationships. We begin to see that if our perspective is realigned, we are meant to serve the earth, the source that makes our egos possible, not the other way around. This adds a depth of meaning to our time here that is absent from the other way of seeing. We cease to be an alien species who has landed our spaceship bodies to grab some goodies and be on our way, and we begin, in this perspective, to feel at home on this earth, the way a grape feels at home on the vine from which it grew.

This second way is obviously the way we practice winemaking at Centralas. I call it an ecological approach to distinguish it from something like “organic” – which we can practice while still clinging to an ego-centric world view (and which can lead to things like clearing forests to plant organically certified vineyards).

What this has to do with our Wine Club Spring Release:
There are two very special new wines in this Spring Release, and both grew out of our ecological approach to seeing wine.

 DIURNAL DREAM 2021 is Malbec from the high desert of Los Angeles (though we don’t list the variety on the label), where conditions are extreme and lead to intensely flavored wine. We picked this wine while low in sugar yet puckered from the heat, let it ferment naturally, and held the wine in neutral barrels for over 18 months. The result is a mature, beautiful wine with amazing freshness and vigor.

If you hang around wine nerds (like me) long enough, you’ll hear the term “diurnal shift.” This refers to the difference between the daytime high temperature and the nighttime low temp. In the high desert, the temperature swings widely from day to night – often 40 degrees F or more from just before dawn to just after noon. This extreme shift in temperatures is thought to help retain vivacity and acidity in the grapes while they mature in an otherwise hot climate (that would, without that shift, lead to tired and low-acid wines). Diurnal is also the opposite of Nocturnal, so this Diurnal Dream can be seen as the Yang to the Yin of Noctilucence.

A note on the vineyard: We worked with this vineyard because it is one of the closest vineyards to our winery, and because the only non-organic substance they used was a fertilizer in their drip irrigation. Otherwise they didn't spray anything in the vineyard (because the high desert climate makes it unnecessary). This was an ecological choice, and we think the impact on our environment was much less than driving to organic vineyards several hours away that spray regularly.

 IF YOU’RE FALLING 2022 has become our “flagship” wine. It’s our blend of native feral prickly pears from the Los Angeles coast and Muscat grown without synthetics here in SoCal (uncertified, but organically farmed). Co-fermented, and settled in neutral barrel for 9 months. It’s always an adventure to make and maybe even more fun than drinking it… maybe. My only regret is that it loses its hot pink color in barrel. But the flavor makes up for it I think. 

There’s a great episode of the Organic Wine Podcast featuring Mark Shepard, the author of the book Restoration Agriculture, in which he mentions the STUN technique of growing things. STUN stands for Strategic Total Utter Neglect… and basically means that once you plant it, you walk away and never return, except to maybe prune it, and then harvest its production. You don’t water it. You don’t fertilize it. You don’t spray it. You don’t weed it. You totally and utterly neglect it.

The “strategic” part of this plan is that you intentionally do this to find out what was meant to be there. If you do nothing to it, and it thrives… then that’s a resilient and well-adapted crop for that land. Prickly Pears are that crop for Los Angeles. They cover our coastal mountainsides and thrive without any assistance from us.

We want to promote plants and ecosystems and cultures that can withstand droughts, floods, fires, and pests without sprays or inputs of any kind other than, you know, love. I think this wine is the result and expression of all that. 

Humans Are Good For The Earth

As controversial of an idea as it may be today, the vast expanse of history provides overwhelming evidence that you, as a human, are actually a force for ecological health and balance.  

We really only started causing a lot of damage in the last couple hundred years, and ecological devastation really only began in earnest in the last century and a half. That’s a small blip in the time we’ve been here.

During the rest of our time here on earth, we humans have mostly lived in harmony with our ecosystems. Even more than that, we lived fully integrated into our local environments. We helped our ecosystems. We WERE our ecosystems. (We still are, btw.)

The abundance of California two hundred years ago is legendary: Salmon ran in numbers so great that people claimed that you could cross the rivers on their backs and never get wet; Herds of deer and elk and antelope numbering in the thousands roamed lush grassland parks that were bedazzled by an endless sea of wildflowers. Bears were so populous that places like Los Osos were named for them, and we honored them on the state flag. The Great Central Valley was one of the largest and most abundant wetland ecosystems in the world, home to a teeming array of birds, waterfowl, and creatures of dizzying diversity.

California was not like this because it had been preserved for all time from human influence and became this verdant wonderland of biodiversity in our absence. California achieved this incredible state of natural abundance because of the humans living here. They used their deep ecological knowledge, gained from thousands of years of living within and observing their ecosystems, to enhance the landscape through thoughtful management. This California of legend was actually a kind of landscape-scale permaculture food forest.  (See Tending The Wild, by M. Kat Anderson)

Europeans have become the easy target for today’s ecological devastation. But a few hundred years ago even they lived largely in a similarly abundant perennial polyculture that they made possible.  Again, through careful, ecological management, people all over the European continent lived in and ate from a landscape that they actually enhanced in abundance, and they did this for thousands of years. (See Max Paschall’s The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe )

This is why there has been a backlash against calling the modern age the “Anthropocene.” This term implies that we had no influence over the world prior to this time, and when we finally began to influence the world the results were negative. Embedded in this idea is that idea that we are inherently detrimental to earth, and perhaps that the world would be better off without us. But the evidence for the vast majority of our time on this earth would suggest otherwise.

We have shown recently that we can cause immense harm, and we can do it very quickly. But to redress that negative impact, we need to understand that we are capable of so much good. Our current ecological ignorance is an aberration in our history, not the norm for our species. Remembering that gives context to how we begin to solve it.

Once we stop blaming our entire species for our problems, we can begin to start asking better questions that will move us closer to the solutions:

What other erroneous beliefs prevent us from finding solutions? What is the source of our sense of disconnection from nature? What ideas or perspectives on the earth enable us to enact environmental damage? What systems strip us of our ecological intelligence and disconnect us from our intrinsic connection with the natural world? What thoughts prevent us from seeing ourselves as one of the earth’s most powerful tools for ecological restoration and regeneration?

Let this Earth Day be the beginning of new way of seeing your role, as a human, in creating Earth’s health… as you have done for millennia.

The Future of Soil Health in the Wine Industry

This is a transcription of a talk that Adam gave to a group of wine retailers, distributors, buyers and sellers here in Los Angeles on April 17, 2023.

I’ve been asked to talk about The Future of Soil Health in the Wine Industry

I’m convinced that there is no future for the wine industry without soil health.

But let me start with how I got to this point in my life with wine.

I fell in love with wine because of a glass of wine that blew my mind. I couldn’t believe how good this wine tasted. It was like a magic trick. And I had to figure out how that magic was possible. For years this quest took me to all the normal places: tasting rooms, wine shops, books, the WSET and Court of Master Sommeliers, even making wine at home.

But it wasn’t until I bought a house in South Central, with enough of a yard to plant a garden, that I began to uncover the secrets to the magic that I had been looking for in wine.

For the first time I had a patch of dirt and I planted some tomatoes. But despite my best efforts those tomatoes were mostly destroyed by blight. So I began to do the research I probably should have done before planting them.

I discovered that there are two very distinct ways of solving the blight problem and growing healthy, delicious tomatoes.

The first way is to use chemical sprays to kill the blight. This is a very simple, very easy solution. It is extremely appealing if you like bumper stickers, sound bites, and sales slogans. And, to be fair, it is an effective solution on a very serious issue for anyone who wants to grow and eat tomatoes.

But it does have a downside. And you may be thinking that I’m going to say that the downside is that it involves spraying a poison on something you’re going to eat. And yes, while that is definitely A downside, it’s not THE downside.

The main downside is the mentality involved in taking this path. The really big downside is that your mind becomes occupied with killing and annihilating things as your method of gardening.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from growing vines and other things is that while you think that you’re tending your garden or your vineyard, you’re really cultivating yourself.  And so please ask yourself how you’d like to grow?

Which brings me to the alternative way of growing tomatoes to solve the blight issue. This way of growing tomatoes involves:

1. Genetics: Pick a variety of tomato that has natural, genetic resistance to blight.

2. Rotation: Don’t plant tomatoes in the same place every season.

3. Soil Mates: Plant a diversity of other crops around tomatoes that benefit each other symbiotically.

4. Soil Health = Plant Health: if you foster and build a healthy, living soil, you create an ecosystem in which the plant can get the things it needs for its own health and resilience while also preventing imbalances that can lead to things like blight outbreaks.

Now, as you’ve noticed, this is not simple and easy. It’s a multi-part, multi-step approach that takes time. It is preventative and proactive. It takes a lot of work and doesn’t work 100% 100% of the time.

But it has that one really important positive aspect: it is pro-biotic. It is an approach that allows you to spend your time and energy thinking about and working towards ways of encouraging life.

I personally don’t think we have a climate crisis. I think we have a cultural, a mindset crisis, and the symptom is that our climate is going crazy.

On my quest to discover the magic of wine, I began to realize that – except for the crop rotation aspect – all of these same principles that apply to tomatoes also apply to growing grapes. And while I’d love to talk about genetics and how we should and probably all will be growing hybrids in California someday… or some other wine fruit besides grapes… like prickly pears.  I’m going to focus on those other principles and let you know about some of the amazing things we have discovered in just the last couple decades about the world’s most diverse ecosystem… that is, the soil under our feet.

Here’s where the magic comes in:

Vines capture light energy from the sun and use it to combine water with CO2 from the air to synthesize little packets of sugar – carbohydrates. Now, now let me restate that, in case that didn’t sound magical. If we were vines, we could take Starlight, air, and rain, and turn them into a Hershey’s Kiss!

Oh, oh! And by the way… the vine coughs out a little oxygen during this process, so that you can actually breathe and continue to live while that kiss is melting in your mouth!

And this is just the beginning. The vine then sends this sugar to its root where it essentially hosts a non-stop Candy Scramble for a bunch of sugar loving microbes.

Yes, this is a bit of a simplification, but I still like to think that plants are the original Sugar Daddys.

And there’s more.

In exchange for the sugar, the vines get the nutrients, micro-nutrients, and minerals that the microbes – the bacteria and fungi - mine from the geology of the soil. Fungi and bacteria are actually able to dissolve rock, they give that dissolved rock to the plant in exchange for some sunlight candy. The plant uses that rock to build its cell walls and proteins and stems and leaves…. and grapes. Without a healthy, biologically active soil, the plant can’t access the phytonutrients and minerals that are necessary to produce the anythocyanins, flavonoids and terpenes that we taste and think of as minerality and terroir in wine. The biology of the soil is what makes it possible to translate rock into flavor.

We have thought of terroir as geology for too long. There is no geology without the soil biology.

Now remember, the plant is taking CO2 from the air and feeding that carbon in the form of carbohydrates to the soil biology. This is how carbon sequestration happens through the magic of photosynthesis.

Now I want to focus on fungi for a minute. I don’t know if you’ve heard of mycorrhizal fungi before, but these are the soil fungi that connect with the roots of vines and nearly all plants and extend their reach into the soil tenfold or more.

These mycorrhizae provide a much larger net for catching and storing water and nutrients. This is why a soil that has a high fungal content enables plants to withstand drought better.

These fungi also connect and network with the other mycorrhizae of any nearby plants, and this allows for an entire underground network of symbiotic sharing and exchange of resources and information between plants, even of different species.  

This is amazing in itself, but there’s more. The microscopic fungal threads that create this network are made of a substance called CHITIN. There are several winemaking products on the market for removing brett and VA from wine using Chitin, so we’re just beginning to discover some of its uses. But the interesting bit of this for our purposes is that a big part of the makeup of CHITIN is CARBON. And the mycorrhizae get this carbon from the plants who get it from the air. So the more fungal the soil is the more carbon we sequester in our soils.

Vines love a fungal soil. And, let’s not forget that YEAST are fungi too.

I bring this all up because one of the major issues with growing vinifera, which is the vast majority of grapes grown for wine, is that it is susceptible to multiple fungal infections. Because of our mindset, instead of following those tomato principles from the second way, we’ve developed dozens of fungicides – things that kill fungi – and literally saturated our vineyards with them… which is strange when you realize that a pro-fungal ecosystem is best for both vine health and wine production. And in addition to these pesticides, we regularly till the soil of vineyards. This breaks all those fungal connections in the soil that the vines rely on for their health and resilience and releases that stored carbon back into the air.

When you do things like till, spray herbicides and pesticides, and use chemical fertilizers, you actually inhibit the biology of the soil, which means you inhibit the vine’s ability to make delicious grapes.

In other words, you cannot make great wine without fostering soil health. Which is great news, because it means we can begin focusing on encouraging life in our vineyards again, rather than killing things.

So… I think it’s important to ask what a microbe likes. I mean, if our vines rely on microbes for deliciousness – which is another way of saying health – then how should we care for our microbes to keep them happy?

Here’s where the principles of regenerative agriculture can guide us, and I’ll just go through these quickly:

1. Avoid soil disturbance, like tillage

2. Keep living plants in the soil – their life AND death provide a continual supply of food in the soil through photosynthesis and decomposition. This is why cover crops are so important in a vineyard. Cover crops also prevent erosion, which is another form of disturbance. And they protect the soil from extreme temperatures which harm the microbiology.

3. Diversity is key. Microbes need a diverse diet because every plant provides something unique to both the soil and human systems. One kind of plant is better than none, but 10 kinds of plants is better than 1. Lack of diversity creates imbalance. This is as true for humans as for plants. Quick aside: Did you know that the microbes living in and on you right now outnumber the cells of your body 10 to 1? Makes me question who I’m talking about when I say “I”

4. Incorporate animals. Their poop and pee are amazing for microbes if well managed.

5. Stop using herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.

6. Foster living relationships. This one may be the most important one of all, because as you can see this isn’t a simple, easy solution. And that’s good. The soil is a complex ecosystem of dynamic interconnections, and the soil is just one part of the larger ecosystem in which we farm. We’ve barely begun to understand some of the parts of these ecosystems, and nobody can understand and manage them alone. We need to rely on living relationships with our plants, our soil, and each other to solve these ecosystem-wide problems.

Now before you think this isn’t relevant to you, I want to assure you that you are a farmer.

Everyone of us here, believe it or not, is a farmer.

Every day we make executive decisions about how millions of acres of land are farmed around the globe… and we do this by what we choose to eat and drink. We have more power than we think. The wine that you buy comes from a farm that you support by buying it. What kind of farm do you want to support?

This is my appeal to you. As wine buyers and wine consumers, ask how the grapes were grown… every time. I don’t care if it is from ToKalon Vineyard or got 100 points from Wine Spectator. If you want delicious wine, insist that your wine was grown organically, or biodynamically, and ideally regeneratively.

I’m going to wrap up with a story about a conversation I overheard that I wish I had recorded to play for everyone who drinks wine.

I was wine tasting recently with another wine maker in paso robles. It turned out that both he and the woman who was pouring for us had worked as grape samplers for J Lohr and one other large winery I can’t remember.

They both had similar experiences that to this day had left a lasting impression.

Every winemaker samples grapes. And, because they manage thousands of acres of vines, big wineries employ people whose job is to drive around in the fall and pick grapes from each block of vines to bring back to the lab or do field tests to determine ripeness by various measurements.

As grape samplers, both of these young people had been encouraged by their employers to taste the grapes as well, to develop their palate for ripeness and flavor, which can at times be more important than chemical analysis.

But both of these people had refused to taste the grapes.  

They refused to taste the grapes because of the safety videos they were require to watch.

It’s California law that if you spray certain things in your vineyard, anyone who enters that vineyard as an employee is required to watch safety videos beforehand to ensure that you know the risks and perform your work with informed consent. In other words, we must first sit you down and explain that you’re taking your health and life in your own hands.

This knowledge of what was sprayed on the thousands of acres of vineyards that they had to visit had so freaked out both of these people that they refused to put the grapes into their mouths… the same grapes we’ve bought, and sold and drunk in these brands’ Cabernets, Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs, etc. I’m not picking on J Lohr… this is true for the vast majority of vineyards in California.

One of the direct quotes that I remember from the conversation was when the tasting room manager, explaining why she didn’t work as a grape sampler for a second season, said, “… I mean, I want to have kids some day!”

My hope is to reconnect you with the farming behind the wine that you drink and buy and sell. We’re disconnected from the soil that our grapes grow in, and I think we might change our farming decisions if we had to walk that soil every day. We shouldn’t have to endanger ourselves and future generations to enjoy a glass of wine.

I personally would like to make and drink and sell wine that can make you taste the magic of life.

Thank you!

Does Your Wine Require A Safety Video?

While wine tasting recently in Paso Robles, I became immersed in a conversation that I wish I could have recorded and played for everyone who drinks wine.

The winemaker I was with began talking with the tasting room manager about the fact they had both worked as grape samplers for large wineries. I won’t name the large wineries, but you know them. Think of a couple well-known brands from California whose Cabernet, or Chardonnay, or Sauvignon Blanc you’ve had… yes, that’s them.

Every winemaker samples grapes. Big wineries employ people as grape samplers to determine when to pick the grapes. Because they manage thousands of acres of vines, they employ people whose job is to drive around in the fall and pick grapes from each block of vines to bring back to the lab or do field tests to determine ripeness by various measurements.

Both of these young people had been encouraged by their employers to taste the grapes as well, to develop their palate for ripeness and flavor, which can at times be more important than chemical analysis.

But both of these people had declined to taste the grapes.  

Because of what both of their employers sprayed in the vineyards, these former grape samplers had been required to watch safety videos to ensure that they performed their work with informed consent. This is a law and a liability issue. The chemicals we allow to be sprayed on thousands of acres of vineyards are so hazardous that, in California if you want to enter these vineyards, we must first sit you down and explain that you’re taking your health and life in your own hands.

The winemaker and tasting room manager had clearly been freaked out, and performed their jobs with extreme caution and reticence. They were sufficiently concerned to refuse to put the grapes into their mouths… the same grapes we’ve drunk in these brands’ Cabernets, Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs, etc.

One of the direct quotes that I remember from the conversation was when the tasting room manager, explaining why she didn’t work as a grape sampler for a second season, said, “… I mean, I want to have kids some day!”

We shouldn’t have to endanger ourselves and future generations to enjoy a glass of wine.

It’s April, and here in Los Angeles I’ll soon give the vines of Crenshaw Cru their first spray of the season. That spray will be Stylet Oil. Stylet Oil is white (food grade) mineral oil, and is allowed in organic farming. I dilute three tablespoons of stylet oil per gallon of water, and two gallons pretty much takes care of Crenshaw Cru in the early season. It is one of the most effective organic treatments against powdery mildew, bunch rot, and several vine-damaging insect pests. It’s also the “most toxic” spray I use… which is to say it has extremely low toxicity, unless you’re a fish.

Robin shows that a vineyard can be a place to romp and play.

Other sprays I use include cinnamon oil diluted in water, sesame oil mixed with fish emulsion diluted in water, compost teas, and micronized sulfur diluted in water. I apply one of these every ten days from just after bud-break until just after veraison, when the anthocyanin build up in the grapes makes them resistant to mildews. I never, ever use herbicides (I actually plant herbs and use herbi-helpers, aka compost teas).

Other than the compost teas, which I spray as a pro-biotic for the winegarden ecosystem, I’d love to not have to spray anything in the ecosystems I care for. The reason I do spray is because I’m growing non-native vitis vinifera vines that have great flavor but don’t have natural resistance to mildew and disease. This year, I’ve started growing some very special, and delicious, hybrid grapevines that have native American genetics and will not need to be sprayed here in CA, and I hope to plant more and more of those.

If you’re considering a backyard vineyard, front yard vineyard, or any kind of vineyard… let me know. I’m available for consultation, installation, and management, and I can tell you more about the benefits of hybrid vines.

And if you just want to drink some wine that doesn’t require a safety video to produce… welcome to Centralas. We think a vineyard can be a place that enhances the health of the world and those who live in it.

Cheers!

Adam

What is Regenerative Agriculture, Really?

What is Regenerative Agriculture?

We practice regenerative agriculture at Crenshaw Cru, and we support it by buying fruit from farmers who practice it. But recently I was overwhelmed by a visit to California's almond country in the Central Valley - one of the world's bread baskets - and began to wonder how aware everyone else is about the stark difference between the agriculture that we've had for the last 50+ years, and regenerative agriculture.

The image below shows two ways not only of growing almonds, but of seeing the world, of choosing to live. One of these ways embodies ancient wisdom. The other dives headfirst into folly. I took both of these photos on the same day, on adjacent ranches. 

Aside from the differences in tree age and the fact that one is a later-blooming variety of almond, the big, unmistakable, and stark visual difference is the ground... the soil. One is full of life, and the other is lifeless.
 

Bad and Good News

First, the bad news is that the vast majority of agriculture in America, and the world, looks like the bottom picture. That lifeless soil is intentional, and it is made that way by tillage and herbicides (like RoundUp) and other pesticides.

I arrived at the top ranch on a windy day, and when I got out of my car I noticed a thick haze in the distance that reminded me eerily of a heavy smog day in LA. 

"What's that haze?" I asked my host.

"Erosion," they answered. "That's our soil."

By "our" soil, they meant all of ours, not theirs specifically (in fact you can see from the photos that they were likely contributing much less soil to that hazy sky than the many other ranches around them).

Soil is our legacy. There are estimates now that suggest we lose 4 or 5 bushels of topsoil for every bushel of food produced. That's a one way street with a dead end. 

If you aren't buying organic, the bottom picture is where your almonds and almond milk comes from. The difference between regenerative organic and conventional vineyards looks very similar. 

The good news is that the top farm exists. It's a 1,500 acre ranch in the middle of the Central Valley, showing what is possible at a large scale. It's the world’s first regenerative organic certified almond farm, named Burroughs Family Farms.

If you look closely, you may notice the irrigation lines are in the trees in the top picture, while they run along the ground on the bottom orchard. That's because the top farm (Burroughs Family Farms) integrates sheep in the orchard.

Sheep eat the grass and other cover crops, poop and pee and generally fertilize the soil, and provide a second food product and income stream from the same piece of land... all while creating healthier, more nutritious almonds, and reducing input costs like herbicide and fertilizer. 

In regenerative systems the benefits compound. This is why we can renew our farmlands so quickly with regenerative agriculture, even after decades of degradation. 

The outcomes of regenerative agriculture include increased biodiversity, enriched soils, improved watersheds, and enhanced ecosystem services (aka greater health and happiness to all creatures, ourselves included, who live off of these systems). But how do I know if a farmer is practicing regenerative agriculture?
 

The Principles of Regenerative Agriculture

1. Eliminate or Minimize Tillage/Disturbance

Every time we plow, disc, rip, or spray herbicides on the soil, we release carbon into the atmosphere, break soil fungal networks that provide water retention and nutrient transfer, and create imbalance in the microbiology. The less we can do this the better.

2. Keep Soil Covered At All Times

A very important step to improving soil health is keeping plant litter/organic matter on the soil. Allowing a layer of plant material to accumulate on the soil has significant benefits including: 

• Better moisture retention 

• Increases habitat for soil biology that will cycle nutrients better 

• Mitigates soil temperatures 

• Protects against erosion 

3. Keep Living Plants and Roots In The Soil

If there are green, photosynthesizing plants in vineyards, orchards, and fields, they are capturing carbon from the atmosphere, using it to grow products, and feeding the soil microbiology. They allow for faster water penetration, and prevent erosion.

4. Diversity

Different plants mineralize different nutrients, so it is incredibly important to maintain as much diversity wherever possible. Similar to people, a diverse diet in foods may increase your health and wellbeing. Diversity of plants in the soil leads to a healthier farm and a more nutrient dense harvest. 

A diversity of plants provides beneficial habitat for birds, animals, and insects which bring balance to the ecosystem and prevent pests from becoming dominant. 

A diversity of people and cultures and perspectives broadens and deepens our understanding of our farm, provides greater resources for problem solving, and helps our ideas be more balanced as well. 

5. Animal Integration

Whether it's cats and chickens like we've had at Crenshaw Cru, or sheep, pigs, cows, goats, ducks, geese, rabbits, and llamas - animals and birds bring fertility, profitability, pest control, and joy to the soil and the people who live from it (that's all of us). Animals are a key component to rapidly restoring soil health, but they must be well managed. Animal mismanagement can lead to unhealthy animals and degraded soils. The key to most animal management is to move them often onto areas that they haven’t been on long enough for the plants to have re-grown lushly.

6. Remove or Reduce the Use of Synthetic Pesticides/Herbicides/Fungicides

Building a regenerative agriculture ecosystem is about enhancing life. "Cides" and the mentality that inevitably accompanies them are about killing. These chemicals and this mentality seeps into every aspect of a farm, and the wider environment. They destroy the biological systems necessary for resilience and health. 

7. Build and Nurture Relationships

As you may have begun to see, these principles transcend agriculture and really begin to creep into the realm of physical, mental, and social restoration. That's because when you begin to understand how to grow the best grapes, or the best food, you come to realize that everything in the ecosystem of the farm is connected, and it is connected to everything and everyone else on earth. 

What it means to be a successful regenerative farmer includes not only economic viability, avoidance of debt, money removed from negative cycles like industrial chemical production and pharmaceutical production and put instead into feeding healthier communities, but also things like joy, happiness, and quality of life. You might call these things the "ends" of regenerative farming, but they are also the means. 

This regenerative vineyard is a safe space.

How can you practice regenerative agriculture in your own ecosystem?

Should We Stop Saying “New World”?

Why hasn’t the wine industry term “New World” gone the way of other problematic terms like “Oriental”?

This is the transcript of a special episode of the Organic Wine Podcast that I published on February 16, 2023. If you'd rather listen than read, you can do that here. 

We, in the wine industry, regularly divide the world into two parts: The Old World and the New World.

The Old World is Europe, into and including Eurasian areas around the Caucasus mountains. The New World is everywhere else.

Aside from the fact that everywhere else is a pretty massive and diverse area belied by this homogenizing and, let’s be honest, pejorative term, the painting of most of the world with one brush brings up even deeper issues.

The term “New World” reveals the true colonial nature of the global wine industry.

Wine – the dominant culture’s take on it at least, as codified and disseminated by organizations like The Court of Master Sommeliers and The Wine and Spirits Education Trust – is a colonial ideology spread originally by the English (who started both of the aforementioned organizations), who fetishized French wines predominantly, with nods to Italy, Spain, Germany, and Hungary & Portugal to the extent that they were invested in wine ventures in these last two.

“New World” means that entire world of wine outside of these English-approved European wine cultures will always be referential and derivative.

To the extent that wine has been allowed to expand beyond the narrow strictures of Europe, it has been mainly within or adjacent to these borders. We may now include the Jura in our appreciation of French wine, and we may now explore some of the more obscure grapes of Southern France and Italy. Also, we are permitted to admire the wine cultures of Austria, Greece, and Georgia peripherally.

This idea of wine is still limited to grapes alone, and not actually “grapes” plural, but one grape: Vitis Vinifera. This one European grape, and our embrace of England’s wine culture, rather than our development of our own wine cultures wherever we are in theworld, accounts for the entireglobalcolonial monoculture known as “wine,” and only 20 popular cultivars of this one grape account for 80% of thatglobalproduction. In the USA, a mere 7 cultivars of Vitis Vinifera account for close to 70% of the “wine production.”

We in the “New World” may only explore “Old World” cultivars if we wish to be included in “wine.” Any other species of Vitis has been branded inferior in both sensory appeal and moral standing.

This wine-idea structure puts the majority of the world (the New World) always at a disadvantage: always imitating, always trying to be as good as the original.

In addition to the detrimental ecological impacts of this monoculture – from attempting to grow the same maladapted grape in every environment around the world– and the problematic Eurocentrism of this term, it has also resulted in a wine world that is devoid of diversity, bereft of local color or unique culture. In a word, it has made wine BORING.

And we wonder why “wine” sales are declining, or why “wine” isn’t getting traction in younger generations.

There’s nothing wrong with England’s approach to wine culture, nor with European wine culture in general. The wine cultures of Europe are deep and rich and deserve appreciation and study. What’s wrong is that England’s wine culture has been mistaken for Wine Culture, as in “the only acceptable wine culture for the entire world.”

French wine IS delicious. It’s just not the only delicious wine on the planet, and it’s certainly not more delicious than any other wine except perhaps in the realm of subjective judgement.

The good news is that this wine world as we have come to know it is not actually wine.

Wine is something big and inclusive and indigenous and colorful and unique to every culture around the globe.

Wine is something that varies from year to year and place to place. It reflects local abundance and reflects the unique ways that human cultures interact with the land.

Wine can be made anywhere. In North America alone we have at least 24 different species of grapes, and we’ve barely begun to ripple the surface of that gene pool. What would we achieve with centuries of breeding and selection programs from this enormous genetic resource?

What would we have achieved if we had just spent the last 70 years breeding and selecting rather than trying to perfect our imitation of our colonial parents?

And wine isn’t made only with grapes. In Belize you might drink cashew wine (made from the fruit, not the nut), and in different regions of Mexico you might drink wines that have been made for thousands of years like tepache (made from pineapples), pulgue (made from agave), or colonche (made from prickly pears), and more!

All of this is wine, and every region of theworldmakes a special version of wine based on what fermentable plant-fruits thrive there naturally.  

Do we really need to colonize the world with Cabernet in order to have wine?

No, we don’t.

We don’t need any more derogatory “New World Wine.”

We need a new world of wine. 

Cheers!
Adam

The Most Delicious Wine Ever

The most delicious wine I ever drank was terrible.

It was made with grapes that were left over after a winery had picked all the best grapes from their vineyard. It had about seven varieties of grapes in it, white and red, all picked on the same day, some unripe, some over-ripe. It was made in a couple of plastic bins, and spent no time in barrel. 

I have to confess that I made it. In my bathroom. It was so tart that I crushed up berry-flavored antacid tablets and added them to the wine to reduce the acidity. 

When I drank this glass of wine there was a dead insect floating in it.

But here's the most important part:

Wendy and I shared this glass during our wedding ceremony. We picked the grapes together as one of our first "dates." The wine was almost as old as our relationship at that time. We wrote a special part of our vows to include it. 

Did I care that a fruit fly was doing the backstroke in that glass when it came time for us to take a ceremonial gulp during our vows? I did not.

It was the most delicious glass of wine I’ve ever tasted.

(Wendy cared a bit more about that bug than I did, but I think she’d tell you that it was still a meaningful moment.)

It showed me that wine is not about scores and data and information and grape names and region names.

I began to see that wine is about sharing beautiful times with great company. Wine is about connection.

That’s when the idea of Centralas was born. We wanted to use wine to build connections. As Centralas grew, so did our understanding of those connections.

Wine is a product of connections (as we all are).

A fruiting plant is an intimate connection between heaven and earth. Plants use cosmic light energy to transform the air and the rain that falls from the sky into carbohydrates. It uses these sugary packets of cosmic energy to feed the trillions of microbes that make up the networked socio-biome, the most biodiverse ecosystem on our planet: soil.

Isn’t it interesting that we refer to our home as Soil, aka Earth? (And don’t get me started on the Hebrew meaning of the name אדם - “Adam.”)

We began to realize that we had the ability – and the respons-ability – to either break or build these connections.

We may ignore these connections. We may discount their importance. But these connections remain between us even when we disagree about politics, religion, wine styles or everything.

We still need our connections to each other and to the soil through plants to survive. These connections are something to cherish.

So that’s why we do what we do with Centralas. To support, build, and enhance connections in the soil and among those of us who grow from it.

(If you want to learn more about how we do that, or discover what it tastes like, check out CentralasWine.com and the Organic Wine Podcast).

Because we want to help you have the most delicious wine of your life... with or without bugs. 

Cheers!
Adam

Organic Wine Podcast Reaches 100 Episodes

The Organic Wine Podcast is a thoughtful odyssey through the wine industry with a focus on and the burgeoning movement of organic, regenerative farming. This dynamic and expansive series – one of the most popular independent wine podcasts – just kicked off its 4th season with its 100th episode! 

OWP isn’t a “Wine 101” forum. Don’t even expect “wine” to always be something made from grapes with European names. Instead, it is a deep dive into a creative swirl of ideas that challenge convention and tackle big and sometimes philosophical ideas around viticulture, enology, soil science, and cutting-edge agricultural practices informed by an ecological perspective that can help the wine industry adapt to a rapidly changing world. Host/producer Adam Huss states, “It is a podcast that questions everything you think you know about wine.” 

Host/producer Adam Huss engages guests in stimulating, insightful dialogues. He draws from an eclectic collection of experts, fellow winemakers, organic and regenerative pioneers, authors, scientists, grape breeders, and others who challenge mainstream thinking and move the wine industry toward a more delicious, more meaningful, more diverse, more resilient, healthier, and more enjoyable future for everyone. 

As the 100th episode rolls out, we hear from Isabelle Legeron, founder of the RAW Wine Festival and author of the book Natural Wine: An Introduction to Organic and Biodynamic Wines Made Naturally.  “Isabelle’s career is dedicated to promoting the same farming-first wine culture that I want to cultivate with the Organic Wine Podcast, so she was a natural choice for the 100th episode,” says host and producer Adam Huss. 

The exchange of ideas and emotional truths captured in many episodes leaves the listener inspired and in awe of those disrupting the industry status quo. Some standout interviews include: Jason Kesselring, near Fargo, North Dakota, who grows America’s only all-Vitis Riparia vineyard; Justine Belle Lambright, of Kalche, a worker-owned winery in Vermont; Brian McClintic, of SOMM documentary fame; Christopher Renfro, of the 280 Project in San Francisco; Autumn Stoscheck & Ezra Sherman of Eve’s Cidery who teach us how to make sparkling ciders from wild foraged pears and apples; Diana Snowden Seysses on climate change and carbon capture in Napa and Burgundy; well-known luminaries like Mimi Casteel, Randall Grahm, Greg La Follette, Steve Matthiasson, Kelly Mulville, Martha Stoumen; and many more.  

The Organic Wine Podcast is available by searching for it on most podcast apps and at OrganicWinePodcast.com 

In addition to producing and hosting the OWP, Adam Huss also makes wine under his Centralas brand from organically-farmed vineyards and foraged prickly pear fruit in Southern California. He podcasts from, and farms, his “estate winegarden” named Crenshaw Cru in South Central Los Angeles. 

Why Does The Word Noctilucence Exist?

The winter solstice is a cosmic turning point so primal to our psyches that it has spawned myths of gods’ deaths and resurrections (echoing the sun’s), festivals of lights (to celebrate it’s return), and rituals of feasting and revelry with wine (to celebrate our endurance and pack on some extra calories to make it through the rest of the winter).

In this magical moment, we simultaneously endure the deepest darkness of our cyclical journey, and find inspiration in knowing that we’re returning to the light. Dread and hope, fear and love – the demons and angels of our souls – dance on the edge of this climactic nadir.

The word “Noctilucence” (which my spell checker doesn’t even recognize) is a real word in English, despite its obscurity. It means nightshine. Like the winter solstice it seems to embody the existential oxymoron of the possibility of light within the darkness that is defined by its absence.

It is a word that seems to try to tell us that this self-contradiction is not actually impossible.

Online dictionaries will tell you that “nocitlucence” exists for scientific reasons, to describe the bioluminescence of phytoplankton in the ocean at night or lightning bugs, or to describe clouds that remain visible after twilight.

But the word is much older than these concepts. I found it inscribed in Latin on the gazebo at the Temple of Diana in Rome, Italy:

“NOCTILVCAE SYLVARVM POTENTI”

Or, “TO THE MIGHTY NIGHTSHINE OF THE FOREST.”

That ain’t about fireflies I don’t think.

But what is it about? Why do we need this word?

I don’t have an answer to why, but its existence fills me with a sense of wonder.

First, of course the moon and stars, and their reflections in the quiet streams and marshes, glinting off the rain-wet leaves, is clearly a form of nightshine one might encounter in the forest. The goddess Diana is closely associated with the moon, and so this inscription at her temple could be a poetic evocation of this role. And I think that the forest, like a great book, can be read in this straightforward way, while other meanings lurk deeper in the shadows.

But Diana was a much more interesting god than just the divine incarnation of the moon. She was also the goddess of the hunt, the goddess of fertility and birth, and the goddess of the underworld. Even if this inscription evokes her lunar association, why is the focus on the forest?

What it would take to find out about this mighty nightshine of the forest? To truly understand it, to experience it, we need to transgress several human boundaries.

We need to leave civilization and go into the forest.... the forbidden realm, the realm of mystery and danger. The forest is where we can become lost. It is the unknown.

We also need to enter this realm at night, when we should be home safe and warm by the fire. The nocturnal realm does not belong to us. We are strangers to its secrets. At night we cannot see. We become the prey. Going to the forest was scary enough, but to go at night is terrifying.

Finally, we also must not take any light. No torch, no fire. If we want to see what is shining in the forest at night, we cannot bring any artificial light for comfort or guidance.

So now, here we are, in the darkness of the forest at night without a light. What do we see now that we’re blind? What do we perceive in our terror? What do we experience now that we’ve traveled beyond all things known and safe and human? What is the mighty noctilucence?

We could panic, of course. We could succumb to fear and descend into the madness of horror.

Or we could discover something about ourselves. We could find a courage at the core of our beings, an ability to face the darkness, a gleaming wildness within that matches the shadowland without.

We may realize that this was our origin, that we emerged from the dark womb of the forest of night. It is part of our lineage. We have more than one family tree... we have a forest of them.

We come from mystery, we incarnate it, and realizing this gives us the strength to confront its terrors.

What we may find shining in the forest alone at night without a light is a light that we project from inside.

I don’t know if this is what the ancients intended to convey with their inscription. I don’t know if this is why “noctilucence” is a word. We will have to go into the forest some night to find out.

But as we pass through this solstice, I hope this meditation gives you another perspective on these celebrations, and the magic of darkness giving birth to light. Let yours shine!

The artwork on the label of our wine, Noctilucence (below), tells the story of a young child, old enough that their parents let them stay out just past dark. In the twilight they began chasing fireflies whose flashing light is always just out of reach. Led by wonder, the child is soon out of sight of home and becoming lost in an ominous, but magical, forest of vines. As the fireflies fade, the moon and the stars begin to light the way, and the forest seems to have a light of its own shining from deep within. The child won’t discover the magic of the forest if they don’t become lost.

Happy Holidays!
Adam

Do Something Different

50% of new world wine making only uses 7 varieties of grapes, none of which are native to the new world.

This was one of the truth bombs dropped at the VitiNord conference that I attended last week in Burlington, Vermont. VitiNord is the preeminent international cold climate viticulture and oenology conference.

Which might make you wonder, Why would a winemaker from Los Angeles want to attend a conference for cold climate grapes and wine?

The reason I was excited about this conference was that I think it’s in the colder climates, that have not been the traditional regions for growing wine, that the most innovation is happening in the wine industry.

In those regions with brutal winters and extreme weather, like Scandinavia and North Central Europe, Canada, and New England and the Upper Midwest of the US, those 7 varieties that make up 50% of the wine industry couldn’t grow well. So these regions have always invested significant resources in breeding, adaptation, and innovation, out of necessity, in order to make wine that could both survive and compete with the global vinifera monoculture.

These marginal regions have attracted the curious and the brave and those with a more ecological mindset. They’re now in a much better position to deal with the rapidly changing world environment than the stagnate vinifera culture that has essentially invested in life support systems for a dying industry, rather than investing in keeping wine out of the hospital in the first place.

To put it another way, the cold climate winegrowers have had to prepare their vines for the world, rather than prepare the world for their vines. I believe the future of wine is in these cold regions, both in terms of the ideas and the fruit that will be able to thrive in the future.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an enormous waste of resources on growing vinifera in these cold climates. There is. At VitiNord I found out about the use of geotextiles to grow vines. The use of geotextiles is akin to building a long, skinny greenhouse for every row in a vineyard, within which the fragile vinifera vines are tucked every year to survive the winter.
 

Rows of vines under geotextiles.

The simple alternative to this huge input of materials and labor, in order to grow something that doesn’t belong in that region, is to breed and grow something that actually belongs in that region. I guess the next step in vinifera cultivation will be giant Plexiglas domes that are climate controlled.

On the other hand, based on the findings of the wine climatologist, Greg Jones – who was the keynote speaker on the morning of the first day of the conference – it might not be long before these cold climates become warm climates. So maybe they won’t need geotextiles for long.
 

I seem to see these graphs all the time because of my interest in viticulture. Those of us directly involved in agriculture have perhaps become inured to the reality of the data. But it occurs to me that it might be good for more of us to see these graphs.

A direct quote from one of the speakers in the context of these climate realities was, “If you’re in agriculture, you need to experiment.”

We’re actually all “in agriculture” since our survival depends on successful, sustainable agriculture, and our choices of what we eat and drink help direct whether agriculture will be successful and sustainable into a future where all the graphs show the same trends.

The good news is that there are lots of new, delicious choices that can support a more ecological form of wine, if you’re open to experimenting. If you haven’t heard of Itasca, La Crescent, Solaris, Petite Pearl, Crimson Pearl, and Marquette, these are vines that both thrive in extreme climates and make incredible wines.

These are just a handful of the many varieties that are available, and I can’t emphasize the quality of these wines enough. I tasted stunning examples from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nova Scotia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Denmark, and more are in the pipeline from breeders in these regions.

I was also thrilled to find out that Nova Scotia has embraced something you’ve heard me talk (rant?) about before – the idea that we need to abandon varietal labeling of wines and begin to wrap our heads around understanding wine without relying on knowing the varieties of grapes from which it is made.

Tidal Bay, in Nova Scotia, is unique in North America. It is a conglomerate brand in which 14 wineries participate currently. Every year each winery must submit their wines for blind judging to determine if the quality meets the standards for the brand (and it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’ll be approved, even if you’re a member winery). The wine you submit must be white wine of that meets the desired style of the Tidal Bay brand: fresh, aromatic, crisp (something that goes really well with Nova Scotia’s fresh seafood culture).

And there’s never any designation of what the varieties of grapes are or must be.

So if you make a wine of the Tidal Bay style, and it is judged to be of sufficient quality, it can carry the Tidal Bay label. I think it’s an exciting idea, and has some great consumer benefits. Check it out!

The slogan on the Tidal Bay marketing material is:
“When 80% of the wine in the world is made from the same 20 grapes, do something different.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I will be interviewing many of the producers I met at VitiNord for the Organic Wine Podcast. If you haven’t listened to it yet, the Organic Wine Podcast is a library of soon-to-be-over 100 episodes of interviews and conversations about wine from an ecological perspective that can change the way you think about wine. You can find it on most major podcast apps, and it can make for some great listening during holiday travels.

Enjoy!
Adam

Happy Thanksgiving

Book of the year at Centralas.

We want you to know how grateful we are for all of you who read our posts, buy our wine, listen to the Organic Wine Podcast, and generally support the Centralas mission. Creating something new or different – like an ecological winery – is exciting and inspiring. But it often means going against the flow without a map… which can make us feel discouraged and lost. We couldn’t do what we do without your support.

It has been so encouraging to see the way our prickly pear wines have been embraced this year. We will be sold out by December (so if you’ve been thinking of trying them… now is your last chance), meaning they have been our best sellers of 2022!

Wendy and I drove from LA to Sonoma County recently. If you’ve done that drive it’s easy to zone out in California’s central valley since you can drive for 4 hours and only see 4 crops – grapes, almonds, cotton, and citrus. Seriously… that’s it. That’s where our almond milk, margarita mix, and t-shirts come from, folks.

But in the midst of those millions of acres of monoculture, this time I noticed a small orchard of prickly pear cactus of maybe 1 or 2 acres.

I couldn’t help but think that in 25 years that patch of prickly pears may be the only plants still thriving out of all those millions of acres… and that’s because they are the only plants that are currently thriving without massive amounts of irrigation and pesticides.

Making these wines is like being an investigative journalist at times. We have to dig deep into culture, history, science, psychology, and politics to uncover suppressed stories about excluded ingredients, forgotten techniques, and marginalized ideas. It’s a thrill to reveal some of these stories through our wine, and we hope we’re opening some eyes and hearts to new possibilities.

So, Thank you as well for the work you do in your own lives to further ecological awareness and support regenerative, biodiverse agriculture of all kinds. Keep up the great work!

If you want to be inspired by someone who is practicing agriculture in a way that will revolutionize the way you think about agriculture, check out this week’s episode of the Organic Wine Podcast with Mark Shepard, author of the book Restoration Agriculture – which is a top 10 Amazon bestseller in at least 3 categories.

With heartfelt gratitude,
Adam & Wendy

PS: There are some folks who have been especially supportive of Centralas in many special ways, and if you don’t know them, they are definitely worthy of encouragement and support:

Vinocity Selections, James Endicott – our distributor & friend who shares the same ecological values. Check out his other wines…. You can’t go wrong!

Chiara Shannon, Mindful Wine – Chiara has interviewed Adam for the Organic Wine Podcast as well as introduced us to many wonderful folks for some incredible collaborations. Interested in taking an ecological wine trip in the Columbia Gorge? Yoga and wine retreat in Paso Robles? Chiara does that and much more.

Wines Of Impact – our wine networkers, who we love to work with, and who extend our reach.

Viola Gardens, Jessica Viola – Jessica has featured Centralas multiple times at her amazing Topanga Canyon permaculture gardens, and she does stunning ecological landscaping.

The Westside Winos, Offhand Wine Bar and The Friend – our neighbors and friends who support Centralas and many other local wineries with great values, are instrumental in the Natural Action wine club, and also know something about art.

The wine shops and restaurants that buy our wine are too numerous to mention all, but here are some who have carried our wines repeatedly, hosted Centralas tastings, and continue to support us:

Esters in Santa Monica, Good Clean Fun in DTLA, Open Market in Koreatown, Café Birdie in Highland Park, Vintage Wine & Eats on Ventura Blvd, and last but definitely not least… South LA Wine Club, Highly Likely, Post & Beam, and Adams Wine Shop right here in West Adams/South LA.

And finally, we want to thank those who are the true foundation of Centralas… those responsible for caring and tending for the grapes and fruit we use to make wine:

The Galleano Family, who are responsible for the historic Lopez Vineyard and several other legacy vineyards.

Bill Shinkle, Tranquil Heart Vineyard, who is responsible for a variety of interesting and ecologically chosen grapes that we sometimes blend with prickly pears.

Also, let's not forget Patrick Kelly of Cavaletti Vineyards who might be the nicest guy alive and who provides a home for Centralas to make wines.

And life itself, the improbable and magical combination of water & light with a dash of stardust that found a corner of the universe to grow and dance and sing.

Thank you!!