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!