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.
