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.