Ideas and resources to help you be a more thoughtful wine consumer, maker, and lover.
The New Ecological 100 Point Wine Scale
Soon there will be only one wine score that matters in wine shops across the nation and around the world: The Ecological Wine Score or EWS.
The EWS is the new standard for the best wine in the world, because greatness can only be judged in context.
“What’s your EWS?”
To have your wines scored on this new ecological scale, please send your bottles or cans, with the below requested information, to:
Ecological Wine Score
3953 Somerset Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90008
With the submission of your wine, the following information is also required*:
Payroll & benefits data for all employees who worked in the source vineyards/orchards/farms/fields/forests and winery for the entirety of the vintage year. Please clearly show hourly rates or salaries and lists of all benefits given with their value, as well as length of employment for each worker.
Description of any training or education offered, to which employees.
Description of hiring practices.
Please answer: Where is the owner’s/owners’ primary residence/s? How close does the owner/s live to the winery? How close does the owner/s live to the vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest?
Describe the winery’s integration into its local community. This may include charitable efforts within the local community, social events and outreach, support and engagement from the local community, etc.
List of all source vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest inputs and frequency of application. This includes water, fertilizers, cover crop seeds, composts, fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, manures, etc. Please include specific product names where applicable.
If water is an input, please describe the irrigation system, frequency of watering, and total gallons of water used for irrigation during the entire vintage year.
List all certifications (organic, biodynamic, SIP, etc.) and include certificate for the vintage year.
Soil test results from, at minimum, the vintage year and previous 2 years showing soil organic matter content, (Not necessary for foraged fruit from preserved natural areas), as well as description of soil type.
Description of tillage regime, if any, and photos of the source vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest from April, May, June, and September of the vintage year.
Description of wildlife habitat created or maintained around and/or within the vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest, with photos.
Describe any and all methods of wildlife exclusion, including deer fencing, bird netting, sound repellents, poisons, traps, etc., with photos.
History and provenance of the source vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest including: how and when the land was cleared, previous use of land, specifications of clones and rootstocks used, the age of the vines/trees, size in acres of the vineyard/orachard/farm, designated viticultural or agricultural area, and specific location/address.
List of motorized equipment used in both vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest and winery, source of energy used to power them, and total liters of fuel used during entire vintage year (if any).
List of all domesticated animals used in the source vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest, with descriptions of management practices, and any certifications related to animal welfare. Please include photos.
List of any other vineyard management practices with schedule of use. (For example: mechanical mowing, hoeing, weed-whacking.
Description of winemaking.
List of any and all ingredients added to the grapes during winemaking, and amount added.
List of any and all mechanical processes used on the wine including: filtration (what kind and why employed?), flash détente, pasteurization, distillation, etc.
List of vessel(s) used to store and age the wine, source of materials used to create the vessel(s), age of vessel(s), number of vintages used, and if vessel(s) will be re-used again.
List and description of any carbon capture practices employed.
List of energy sources used for all operations, and total amount used of each kind during the entire vintage year.
Full description of waste disposal or treatment for all winery and vineyard operations including: sewage, trash, fruit skins/stems/seeds after pressing, cleaning water, etc.
Website, point of contact, and contact information for the winery, as well as winery location.
Other factors that will impact the total EWS include:
1. The weight of the bottle. (Because of this, canned wines and bottled wines will be judged as separate categories.)
2. The producer’s transparency, on label and website, about vineyard/orchard/farm/field/forest and winemaking practices.
3. Fruit variety (appropriateness to the climate where grown, indigenous genetics, reflection of terroir, etc.).
4. The sensory experience (taste, smell, texture, appearance) of the wine.
*Please Note: Please submit your wine with as much of the requested information as possible. We will score every wine submitted regardless of information supplied, but incomplete information will result in point deductions.
Thank you!
Please email comments and questions via the contact form on this website.
Cachuma Lake Sans Merci
The desolation of Cachuma, from 2016. Six years later she still hasn’t returned. Photo: Santa Barbara County Public Works Department
Every time Wendy and I used to drive through Santa Barbara County on Highway 154, I’d play a silly game of trying to get her to say “Cachuma” by asking things like, “What’s the name of that lake?” or “What does that sign say?” Because if she’d say “Cachuma” I’d get to shout, “Bless you!”
Cachuma is the largest reservoir in Santa Barbara County. It once filled the snaking contours of the inland end of the Santa Ynez Valley. Highway 154 is a major wine country artery that follows along the lake’s southern edge for several miles.
For years I knew a spot where you could pull off the 154 and park in a concealed location, then jump a fence and hike down through the liveoak savannah to a lakeside meadow. This was the site of trysts, skinny dipping, and laugh-filled times with friends… usually after a long buzzed day of drinking great wine. Lake Cachuma played a part of every great wine tasting trip I’ve taken through Santa Barbara County.
Over time, fences were raised, gates erected, and parking along the road became impossible. I saw the lake only from a distance then, from the periphery of my vision. Soon, flickering glimpses of the lake suggested that the lake itself was changing… diminishing.
To be honest, I was changing too. No more time to loiter in her beauty, I sped along the edge of Cachuma, hurrying past those bucolic shores on my way to meet with vineyard owners, check on grapes, and generally engage in the business of winemaking.
Eventually, Cachuma no longer winked her wild eye at me through the breaks in the trees. As my fascination with her had faded, so had she. Successive years of drought had withered the sedge from the lake and left dry gravel where once had been deep, refreshing pools.
We drove by today. The water has been gone from much of what once was the lake for so long that plants have once again colonized the lakebed. She seems to have not been a lake for so long that she has forgotten that she ever was one.
I hate the term “the new normal.” It took me while to put my finger on why. When I saw the Cachuma today – like a shriveled old woman, frail and lost in her bed, so ravaged by neglect that she no longer remembers that she once seduced princes – I realized why this phrase bothers me.
There is nothing normal about life. There is only life. Throbbing with constant change. Like a child struggling to carry a bucket full to the brim of water and almost too heavy to lift, life spills out joy and tragedy with each rushing, sloshing, stumbling step.
Here, in California, for the first time in a long time, our expectations have begun to be disappointed. We are actually facing the consequences of our choices, and our parents’ choices, for the first time in generations.
Memories of halcyon days-gone-by at the waterside may be all we have left besides hard work and difficult times ahead, and no promise of rest… no promise of honeyed light and evening swims.
This isn’t the new normal, though. This is the world that we’ve been creating all our lives. We just didn’t want to think about it.
Looking at Cachuma today, I was forced to think about it. Its emptiness, despite recent winter rains, held up a mirror to a past of careless and selfish choices. The waters that concealed our prodigal youth have disappeared, laying bare a dire present.
The word Cachuma comes from a Chumash word that means “sign.” A sign of what, I wonder?
As we drove by today, Wendy and I didn’t make any jokes about sneezes. The view of what is left of Cachuma sobered us and made us feel woe-begone. She looked as if she had been taken for granted for so long that she decided to move on. In her absence we can finally see that the void she had always filled was ours.
“And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.”
From La Belle Dame Sans Merci – John Keats
Is the Cost of Organic or Biodynamic Certification Worth It?
Let me clear something up right away: it does not cost a lot to get certified organic or biodynamic.
I’ve heard so many retailers and producers excuse the lack of certification in their wine inventories because of the exorbitant cost of certification, and that’s just absolutely not true.
Retailers, please stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why you carry wines produced from dubious farming. Producers, please stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why you don’t get certified. You’re spreading misinformation and doing a disservice to everyone involved.
I know much of this spreading of misinformation is just ignorance about the certification process. And it’s easy to speak confidently about something you don’t actually know about, because often, you don’t know what you don’t know.
But it is an immediate red flag for me when someone uses the cost of certification as an excuse. Because when someone assures me that their wines are farmed really well but the cost of certification is prohibitive and that’s why they have wines from non-certified vineyards, what I hear is a sales pitch.
Because I know the cost of certification is not prohibitive, I begin to wonder what else this salesperson either doesn’t know about the wine or is possibly even concealing from me.
Am I saying that every producer needs to go out and get certified, and that every retailer should only carry certified wines? No, not at all. Maybe that would be great, but all I’m saying is – don’t use the cost of certification as the excuse for why you aren’t certified or don’t carry certified wines.
Because… bottom line… getting certified organic or biodynamic doesn’t actually cost that much.
And some of that very reasonable cost is actually reimbursed by the US government.
Now, with that fundamental point made, let’s get into all the nitty gritty.
Because here’s the unfortunate next point in answering whether the cost of certification is worth it: it’s complicated and it depends.
Here’s something that a lot of people, even seasoned professionals in the wine industry, don’t realize:
You cannot say the phrase “Made With Organic Grapes” on your wine label even if your wine is made from 100% certified organic grapes… if your winery isn’t also certified in addition to the vineyard.
That’s right, there are two certifications - one for the vineyard and one for the winery. Without both certifications you cannot make the claim on your label that your wine was Made With Organic Grapes, even if it was. Nor can you use the term “Organic Wine” on your labels. Labeling restrictions under Biodynamic certification through Demeter are very similar.
Why is this? Well, I don’t know for sure (see how I admitted ignorance there? That’s okay, you can do that too.). But if I had to speculate, I’d guess it’s because in wineries there can be lots of mixing and blending of ingredients and wine. You could crush two tons of certified organically grown grapes and one ton of conventionally farmed grapes, and then blend them together and technically say your wine was “Made with Organic Grapes” – in fine print, 66 percent. So having the winery certified in addition to the vineyard probably adds another necessary layer of accountability in the organic claims made on wine labels.
You can see how this is problematic for someone who shares winery space or uses a custom crush arrangement to make their wines. If you don’t control your production facility, it may be impossible to get your winery certified because it would involve having the ownership and all tenant wineries get on board to follow the organic or biodynamic guidelines.
So if only your vineyard is certified, what can you say?
Well, Not much. And what you can say might cause a problem for some producers. Because the only organic claim you can make if only your vineyards are certified organic, is to give a complete ingredients list and list “organic grapes” as one of your ingredients.
I say this could cause a problem for some producers because it can look pretty strange to list “organic grapes” in an ingredients list that includes other common conventional winemaking ingredients like “diammonium phosphate” or “gelatin” or “Mega Purple” or “velcorin” or any number of the over 60 ingredients allowed to be added to wine during winemaking.
So if transparency scares you, you may not like the idea that the only way you get to tout your organic farming is in an ingredients list. And that may be a deterrent to you wanting to get certified at any cost. Why go through any amount of hassle that includes even a small fee if your label doesn’t get a boost?
That’s a great question actually. I would argue that there are many advantages to only certifying your vineyard, even if you have no intention of mentioning it on your labels. Because you can mention it pretty much anywhere else… like on your website & social media, in emails, in press releases, on marketing materials, etc.
Now, what is the actual cost of certification? Well, it depends.
Let’s talk first only about certifying your vineyard, and we’ll address certifying your winery later.
It will cost more the larger your vineyard because there is licensing fee based on your production (it’s a tiered fee for organic, and a half a percent of gross sales for biodynamic). But while this means greater costs for larger vineyards, you’d have the benefit of scale. So while your total cost will be more, your cost per acre will be significantly less than a smaller vineyard. I’ll break that down in a minute.
Keep in mind that to get certified for the first time takes three years. Even if you have been farming better than organically for 50 years, the certifying body doesn’t know this and has no records of it, so they need to do annual inspections to create this farming audit that shows you are indeed farming wonderfully, and that you’ve done it for a sufficient amount of time – three years – that your land is a viable organic farm, worthy of certification.
There are costs during these three years, because you’ll have paid an application fee and you’ll cover the costs of the CCOF or Demeter inspector’s time and travel expenses to come inspect your vineyard. But while you are paying these first three years you still aren’t certified and can’t make any organic or biodynamic claims.
In other words, we might look at these first three years as a single fee for the cost of getting certified, even though it will be in a series of smaller payments spread over that time.
And it’s different for Organic vs Biodynamic certification. For organic there are only two inspections in the first 3 years, and for biodynamic there are three inspections.
Further, once you get certified, the costs will depend not only on the size of your vineyard, but also on how much it produces and how much you sell your grapes for, or what they would cost if you sold them.
So let’s put this in a real life circumstance.
Let’s say you have a 20 acre vineyard producing an average of 3 tons per acre and that the market rate for your grapes is $3,000 per ton. That’s a gross production value of $180,000.
Now, I’m going to present a worst case cost scenario, so that we can see the absolute most it will cost:
Inspections cost an average of $500-1,000, and there’s one of those per year in Demeter. So let’s say $3000 for the first three years. The first-time application fee is $325 for CCOF and $350 for Demeter. And in your third year you’ll begin paying a renewal fee and inspection deposit to Demeter of $420 plus a production fee of $900. For organic there’s no renewal fee and the production fee is only $710.
So a 3 year certification process will cost you, at the very most, $4,035 for organic or $4,670 for biodynamic. That’s around $1,500 per year at worst. You’ll be fully certified at this point, and the truth is that the cost will likely be less. Inspections average less than $750 in a vast majority of cases, bringing the real cost of certification down below $1,200 per year for the first 3 years.
After getting certified your annual cost will just be the annual inspection plus the licensing and renewal fees. So your annual cost to have an organically or biodynamically certified 20 acre vineyard will stay at around $1,500 per year or less.
So there you have it. For less than $1,500 per year, you can have a certified organic or biodynamic vineyard. I would definitely not call that an exorbitant cost. And I hope you can see why I really want people to stop using the cost of certification as an excuse for why someone isn’t certified.
One important caveat here is that while Demeter is a national certification, CCOF is just for California, and fees and processes may vary slightly depending on the organic certifying organization in your state.
But, don’t forget, through the Farm Bill the US government will reimburse you for a portion of the cost of organic certification… making it actually cost even less.
But it’s important to note that even if you’re farming 7 acres instead of 20, this cost won’t change that much. Because a majority of the cost is that inspection, and that cost will not change a lot unless the inspector is dealing with a very large vineyard spread over multiple blocks at distance from each other.
But that means that a 7 acre vineyard could pay over $200/acre for certification each year, while a 20 acre vineyard would pay only $75/acre.
And maybe that makes a difference. I mean for that extra $125 per acre I can afford a lot more cover crop seeds, compost and even some extra labor to help spread them, and those are vitally important expenses in an organic vineyard.
Or, for example, I could take that $1,500 annual expense for certification and use it instead to rent sheep to run through my vineyard each spring for a month to do all the wonderful sheepy things that sheep do for an ecosystem. (Although, honestly, it’s going to cost you more than $1,500 to rent sheep for your vineyard, but you see what I’m getting at.)
Now that doesn’t mean that the cost of certification is a deterrent, it just means you might have different priorities about where to put your money. That’s a very different thing.
Whether or not you choose to prioritize the use of a very modest amount of money for certification or not does not mean that the cost is prohibitive.
Ok, now, don’t forget that even if you choose to prioritize certification for your vineyard, you still haven’t certified your winery yet.
I’m not going to go into as much detail about certifying your winery, but suffice it to say that it will cost approximately the same as certifying your vineyard. So take that $1,500 and double it.
If you want to say “Organic Wine” or “Made With Organic Grapes” or “Biodynamic Wine” on your label, it’ll cost you, roughly, $3,000 per year (a bit more for Biodynamic, and again depending on your production value).
Now this still couldn’t be classified as exorbitant by any stretch, I don’t think, but it is 100% more than just certifying your vineyard. And certifying your winery may put limitations on your operations that you don’t want. If your winemaking skews more conventional, for example, you may find your choice of yeasts to be more limited.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a lot of interest in the additional cost of certifying my winery, and it would be currently impossible for us since we make wine for Centralas as a tenant winery in a shared production facility. Also, we already list all ingredients added during winemaking on our Centralas labels, and my reason for being in wine at all is because of the farming. If I can look on your winery’s website and see that you make wine from certified organic or biodynamic vineyards, I don’t really care at all what you put on your labels.
But you can see how the question of whether the cost of certification is worth it becomes very personal in the answering. If the main way that Centralas wines were sold was in a grocery store, and we had very little personal interaction with the folks who drink our wine, being able to say “Made With Organic Grapes” on the label might be really important to us.
So some of the questions you might want to ask would be:
What kinds of wine drinkers are you trying to sell your wines to?
What is your dominant form of messaging with those wine drinkers?
Do you want to list ingredients?
Is there an “organic premium” that comes from certification when selling wine to your demographic?
There are a lot of ways to evaluate certification.
I will say this, certification makes communicating with customers a lot simpler. Trying to explain good farming takes too long for most sales interactions, whether in print or in person. Brevity is one of your best sales tools, and “Certified organic” or “Certified biodynamic” is about as brief as you can be when trying to highlight the values and care that you put into your approach to winemaking.
It’s also a signal of accountability. I am a skeptic, so when someone says “farmed organically but not certified” my gut reaction is “they must cheat.” I immediately assume that they use chemical fertilizers, or they think that not using Round-up means they’re farming organically. Because I’ve encountered both of those examples too many times to count at this point. (By the way, if you are doing either of those things, you aren’t organic. Period.) If you’re certified, I will still want to know the details of your farming, but my skepticism won’t be immediately triggered.
Now, is certification a hassle, despite its low cost? That is, is it worth the time and energy to complete the paperwork and coordinate an annual inspection, etc? First of all, it’s really not that much extra paperwork.
The hardest and most time consuming part of being certified organic is farming organically. The paperwork of certification may not be your favorite thing, but it’s really not that much. And, the good folks at CCOF and Demeter are very good about answering questions and providing guidance. I got a very thorough and helpful email response to my questions within 24 hours. Really, if you’re going to use the hassle of certification as an excuse, you’re probably just looking for excuses.
On the other hand, are there any legitimate ecological reasons why you might not want to get certified organic or biodynamic?
That may seem like a strange question, but I can imagine a scenario in which keeping your organic certification might cause you to farm in a more harmful way, debatably.
For instance, this past year of 2021 the winegrowers on the East Coast of the US had to deal with an average of 5 out of 7 days of rain all summer. To be organic, that would mean spraying every 3-4 days to prevent fungal buildup, or spraying less, but taking a big risk of crop loss. In a larger vineyard, that would mean gallons and gallons of diesel fuel burnt, powering dozens of tractor passes causing serious compaction in muddy soil, and lots of stuff being put into the environment, even if it was organically allowed.
If you spray a systemic chemical fungicide, you’ll lose your certification. But from an ecological perspective, would it be worse to spray a systemic chemical fungicide once every 14 days? What if you had to do this only once every 5 years, and the rest of the time you could farm perfectly organically? I don’t think it would make sense to lose your certification every 5 years and start the process over again the following year, but you might make the argument that you are farming more responsibly than if you stayed within the limits of organic practices to keep your certification.
I honestly don’t have the answer to these questions, Although I might make the joke that this could be the universe’s way of telling us we shouldn’t be growing vinifera in climates where it can’t thrive.
The point is, evaluating what is the best farming for you can be very complicated and involve some very difficult decision making. And getting certified organic or biodynamic can further complicate those decisions.
Having said that, if you don’t at least aspire to farm organically at this point in history, you really aren’t paying attention… or you’re being lied to.
In the vast majority of cases, especially in the West and Southwest US, I would argue, getting certified organic and/or biodynamic is a smart choice, and a wise investment of $1,500 per year.
And I think it’s fair to be skeptical as a wine buyer when you hear organic claims without certification.
Finally, and most importantly, I hope everyone can see that the cost of organic or biodynamic certification is extremely reasonable, it’s partially government subsidized, and we should now and forevermore never use the cost as an excuse for a lack of certification.
…
You can find a breakdown of fees for both Demeter and CCOF on their websites at CCOF.org or Demeter-usa.org.
Happy farming, and happy drinking!
Winter At Crenshaw Cru: Chapter 2 - Pre-Pruning to Force Dormancy
Viticulture at Crenshaw Cru in South Los Angeles is influenced by the ocean, which is less than 7 miles away as the crow flies. And we have lots of crows… and parrots. The hills of Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills funnel ocean breezes through our neighborhood, both cooling the wine garden in the summer and warming it in the winter. This microclimate is warm enough that our vinifera vines do not go fully dormant, even by the winter solstice.
However, some winter rest is good for our vines, both for them to have a natural break and also so that they can do the underground work that prepares them for health and vitality in the next growing season.
It is also ideal to get the old leaves off the vines as they can host an excess of fungal growth by the end of the year.
So in mid-December, we do a “long prune” of the vines and strip off the leaves. This “long prune” leaves 18-24 inch canes, but signals to the vine that its energies should turn downward and inward.
This first pruning cut of the season is far from the main trunk of the vine, so any infection that enters at the cut site is far away from hurting the main vine and will be cut off the vine when we make our second cut in the Spring right before bud break. This way we don’t have to use chemical inputs to protect our vines during pruning. And even though there are organic protectants that you can use at pruning (Vitiseal for example), we prefer to reduce our inputs (and therefore costs) as much as possible.
As we strip the leaves from the vines, we let them fall down and create a leaf compost on the vineyard floor. This leaf compost decomposes over the winter and feeds the vine in the following growing season.
This process of long-pruning and stripping leaves requires a lot of hand labor. It’s time and energy we’re happy to spend in Crenshaw Cru, but may not be scalable to very large vineyards without a lot of humans to help with the work.
Winter At Crenshaw Cru: Chapter 1 - A Permaculture Ecosystem
The Centralas Estate Vineyard - Crenshaw Cru - is a permaculture ecosystem that produces fermentable and edible goodies. We call it a wine garden, but wine is just the highlight. It’s also a home to 5 old hens - named Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Willa Cather - 2 cats named Robin of the Hood and Rowan (The Shadow That Cries), and occasionally a hive of wild honey bees, among many other flora and fauna too numerous to mention. Other perennial crops besides grapes include macadamia nuts, Haas avocados, dragon fruit, Eureka lemons, Wonderful pomegranates, prickly pears, Manila mangoes, oranges (Navel and Satsuma Mandarin), apples (Fuji, Anna, Golden Russet), Thai limes (kaffir), artichokes, herbs, papayas (Mexican and Hawaiian) and strawberries. There are vegetable crops in a couple boxes as well as inter-planted in the new backyard vineyard rows - a true polyculture vineyard ecosystem.
Oh, and there are grapes. The front yard vineyard block is going into its fifth leaf this spring. It is 14 Syrah vines, cloned from the Tablas Creek grandmother, which originally came from Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, France.
We just planted the back yard vineyard block to 23 vines of Nero D’Avola, in addition to 3 vines of Sangiovese on the cusp of their third leaf, and 2 vines of Pinot Nero (2A) that are mostly decorative, trained over our patio pergola.
Today I spaded into a random spot in the front yard vineyard and found a thick tangle of roots. The soil is rich and dark and alive. The entire front yard block must be one large network of communication and exchange below the soil.
Here’s the farming we employ to make this happen:
We do not till the soil.
It’s what we don’t do that makes this rich ecosystem possible.
We do some things too. Here’s what we do:
We plant and encourage cover crops of many species to grow in the block. From Nasturtium and California Poppy, to Daikon, oats, and peas. This winter we scattered the seeds of about 20 species. Cover crops do many amazing things for an ecosystem, like pull carbon and nitrogen from the air and deliver it underground, providing health for the soil and the air and the things that grow in them (like us).
We also add fertility by shoveling compost around the vines at this time of year.
Here’s how we make compost:
Starting in the fall, we throw stuff (like all of our garden scraps and food scraps, plant and chicken litter) in a pile and wait.
That’s pretty much it.
Since that pile of stuff lies on the ground, worms (red wrigglers) find it and turn it into a dark, nitrogen-rich humus. By late spring the worm population in our compost is at peak levels and they churn a gallon or more of food scraps into compost in under a week. It’s amazing. What the worms don’t eat gets broken down by fungi and bacteria, and the compost becomes a microbial super organism by the fall, as we’ve continually fed it for several months. We stop feeding it in late summer, and start a new pile (inoculated with a shovelful of worm-rich compost from the old pile), so that the worms and microbes and fungi can finish their work completely in the old pile.
Then we use this mature compost to brew compost teas, in which we drench the vines and soil.
Here’s how we make compost tea:
We stir a handful or two of compost & a tablespoon or two of unsulfured molasses into a five gallon bucket of water. (We use tap water, but let it sit in the bucket for about a week before adding the compost to allow it to off-gas the chlorine). Then we drop a bubble stone, or air stone, into the bucket and let it bubble for 24-36 hours. When there’s a frothy foam on the water, the tea is ready.
The main bane of our viticultural efforts in South Los Angeles is Powdery Mildew. PM is Public Enemy #1, and here at the bottom of the LA basin the conditions are perfect for it almost year round.
But while powdery mildew flourishes in the phyllosphere (the above ground part of a plant’s microbiome), it flounders in the rhizosphere (the below ground part of a plant’s microbiome) where it is out-competed by other fungi and bacteria. When we douse the vines (leaves, shoots, trunk) multiple times in compost tea, we are bringing some of the rhizosphere up into the phyllosphere. It adds fertility to the soil, but also acts as a winter-time fungicide against powdery mildew.
Then, after we’ve made numerous batches of compost teas, and doused all the vines multiple times, we use the remaining compost (which is most of it) to activate biochar.
Here’s how we activate biochar:
We stir the mature compost into the crushed biochar and wait.
Here’s how we make biochar:
Build a pile of all the large, woody prunings from vines, trees, brush, etc. around Crenshaw Cru. Light the pile on fire near the top, not at the bottom, and let it burn down. Put out the fire with a hose, a little at a time, as the wood turns to black charcoal and before it turns to white ash. That charcoal is basic biochar.
The tiny crushed pieces of biochar are like empty cities, waiting for trillions of microbes to move in. Mixing them with compost introduces the microbes to their lovely new homes. Biochar and compost build soil carbon, fertility, microbial life, and water holding capacity, as well as buffer soil pH, and balance soil chemistry. This combo has been shown to increase soil productivity significantly.
The winter rains take care of the rest.
The rains soak the biochar-filled compost over the cover crop seeds. Rich nutrients and microbes from the compost trickle down into the soil with the rain, reaching the root zone where the networking and exchanging begins with the vines. The soaked cover crop seeds sprout up through the compost, and begin using sun energy to capture nitrogen and carbon from the air which they use to build roots down into the soil to break up our heavy clay and enrich it with sky minerals.
Our vines love this. They communicate with the other plants in the soil, getting messages about and treats from the environment that is out of their reach. They may get warnings about environmental threats or pests before those threats or pests reach them, giving them time to prepare a defense strategy, or they may be able to exchange some of their carbon for a micronutrient that they need that is not within their immediate grasp.
This system creates health and vitality for the whole community of plants and micro flora and fauna within it, which creates health and vitality in the products of this system.
What are the products of this system? Air, shelter, food, water… and wine. That’s all. Just the stuff we need to live.
The vineyard at its best is not a vineyard, it’s an ecosystem.
The Organic Wine Lover’s Revolutionary Reading List
Beware of the person of one book.
– Thomas Aquinas
If you came to this book list for suggestions of books about wine like “The Wine Bible” or “The Wine Atlas,” you will be disappointed.
I would argue, though, that at this point in history – nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st Century – this list of books is so much more relevant to understanding, appreciating, and contextualizing wine than any “wine book” could be.
If the terms “regenerative” or “organic” or “biodynamic” or even “sustainable” matter to you at all, then it is only a matter of time until you will find yourself trying to get traction on the slippery slope of the connection of wine to all things.
Wine has this power of capturing our attention in the glass, then leading us backwards to the ecology of the entire global ecosystem.
In a sense, the common theme of all the books on this organic wine book list is terroir. Reading or listening to the books on the list will take you on a journey into the literal and figurative soil from which wine grows. You will discover it is the same soil from which you grow.
Classics
One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka
“An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.”
1975
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
1962
The Unsettling of America, by Wendell Berry
“People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
1977
A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
1949
Modern Classics
Restoration Agriculture, by Mark Shepard
“We must begin making long-term, permanent change in a world of short-term thinking. In a world impatient for a quick fix we must continue to make the long, steady progress needed toward a rich, green, abundant world, started by planting one tree at a time and repeated over and over around the world.”
Pastoral Song, by James Rebanks
“There were profoundly important questions about the potential effects of each new technology that it was nobody's job to ask or answer. There was no mechanism for farmers or ecologists to judge whether a technology or new farming practice was on balance a "good" thing or a "bad" thing, and we really didn't know when we had crossed the invisible threshold from one to the other.”
The Omnivores Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
“Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connection to our food and the web of life that produces it. We would no longer need any reminding that we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and that what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. I don’t want to have to forage every meal. Most people don’t want to learn to garden or hunt. But we can change the way we make and get our food so that it becomes food again—something that feeds our bodies and our souls. Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace.”
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
Tending The Wild, by M. Kat Anderson
“…One gains respect for nature by using it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it.”
Finding The Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard
“But nothing lives on our planet without death and decay. From this springs new life, and from this birth will come new death. This spiral of living taught me to become a sower of seeds too, a planter of seedlings, a keeper of saplings, a part of the cycle. The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans. The source of clean air and pure water and good food. There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance.
There is an extraordinary generosity.
…The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied.”
The Legacy of Luna, by Julia Butterfly Hill
“The question is not “Can you make a difference?” You already do make a difference. It’s just a matter of what kind of a difference you want to make, during your life on this planet.”
The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist
“The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”
Growing A Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back To Life, by David Montgomery
“There’s a revolution brewing – a soil health revolution. Since the dawn of agriculture, society after society has faded into memory after degrading their soil. But we need not repeat this history on a global scale… Are you ready for an optimistic book about the environment?”
Mycorrhizal Planet, by Michael Phillips
“We are not at the end of a rope, as it’s so easy to think. Humanity can yet choose to turn direction. The moment has come to leap into action with glad hearts. The seeds are germinating. The fungi are willing. And we must be, too.”
Teaming With Microbes, Teaming With Fungi, by Jeff Lowenfels
“One of the most amazing things about mycorrhizal fungi is their ability to associate with more than one host plant at the same time—in other words, their networks can be shared among plants, even plants of different species. As a result of this feat, mycorrhizae can benefit entire forests, as the larger trees literally feed and protect the smaller trees through an interconnected mycelial network. And when one plant dies, many of its nutrients are returned to the network and flow toward other plants.”
The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
“Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
“It is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.”
Where to find these books?
If you can, please buy these books to support the work of these authors. If money is tight…
My friend, Craig Gore, once hung up on another friend of his when he discovered, during a phone call, that his friend didn’t have a library card.
I was never more proud to call Craig a friend than when I heard this story.
Wendy, the Boss Lady of Centralas Wine, is a librarian for the City of Los Angeles, and through her we have easy access to more books than I have life-time to read. We both love books, and our life is full of them.
Unfortunately, I’m a slow reader.
Generally, the only time I have to sit down and read is at the end of the day, when my energy is at its lowest. And books take me away from my racing mind and its concerns, which soothes me and relaxes me. Within a couple pages I drift off to sleep.
Imagine reading a 500 page book at a pace of a couple pages per day. I might get through two books per year at that rate.
But a couple years ago Wendy showed me the Overdrive and Libby apps that are used by the library, any library, to lend digital copies of books, as E-books and, if available, as audio books.
Audio books have changed my life. I’ve been able to consume (I won’t say “read”) books at a rapid clip. I can listen to books in the car, when doing repetitive farm work (pruning, harvesting, etc.), mundane chores like washing dishes and laundry, on walks or while exercising, etc. Audio books even allow you to listen at 1.25x, 1.5x or greater speed, so not only do I have more time to consume an audio book, but I can also listen quicker.
If you’re at all like me, do yourself a favor and download Overdrive or Libby (free apps) on your mobile device. All you need is a library card, and you can connect your local library account to the app and start downloading e-books and audio books.
You do have a library card, don’t you?
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
- from Good Will Hunting
Natural Intervention
(…Is Not An Oxymoron)
There is a pervasive modern misconception that keeping humans, and our tools, out of nature is good, because humans only harm nature. “Untouched by human hands” is equated with the highest and best state of nature.
I say “modern misconception” because it has only been for a short amount of time – a few hundred years – that some humans saw themselves as separate from nature in the first place. Prior to modern times, we could not keep humans out of nature because we were nature.
Since we began seeing ourselves as separate, we have drastically reduced biodiversity, decimated the health of the environment of the entire earth, changed the climate, and caused the extinction of innumerable species.
One might begin to wonder if the idea of our separateness from nature might ironically be the cause of the problems that now inspire us to think it a good thing for us to stay out of nature.
A problem we have today is a lack of positive examples of humans benefiting nature. We look around and see ample evidence of the ugly impacts we can have – trash in the gutters, brown waters in the streams, smog-filled air, farms that lack diversity of any kind.
We created Centralas to be a good example of humans making something beautiful that benefits nature, in cooperation with nature, as part of nature. We created the Organic Wine Podcast to highlight other humans who are working in nature as part of nature, doing beautiful things that benefit all nature.
And if we re-learn the story of our past, we’ll begin to realize that the idea that ‘Europeans arrived in the Americas to discover an abundant wilderness landscape untouched by humans’ is a dangerous myth. When we realize the Americas were inhabited for thousands of years by millions of humans who just had a different perspective that allowed them to live in balance with nature, we begin to realize how much we have to re-learn.
How does this apply to wine?
I’ve begun to think that the “natural wine” movement has grown out of that original misconception about human intervention in nature being a bad thing, because it relies on the fundamental flaw of thinking that we are separate from nature in the first place.
I am a natural wine maker. However, I don’t have a dogmatic commitment to laisez faire wine making.
Because there is nothing hands-off about wine making.
We plant vineyards in very specific ways. We cultivate the vines in very careful ways for years. We protect grapes from spoilage, theft, consumption, and damage as best we can until the appointed time for their harvest. Then we plan and execute the harvest of the grapes for very specific and intentional reasons.
We have made careful practical, legal, and business plans for the leasing, building, licensing, and furnishing of our winery. We have purchased or rented many pieces of equipment that burn fuel, or run on electricity made by burning mined fossil fuels or technology-harnessed forces.
An entire supply chain of industries, businesses, and crafts supports our efforts at every step as we tend, grow, harvest, vinify and sell our wines. Let’s not forget the infrastructure that allows us to turn on irrigation systems and get water, or turn on our hose to clean a barrel.
Then there’s plastic – that most natural of materials. I’m pretty sure you picked into plastic picking bins, maybe even fermented in them. Do you use any plastic funnels or pitch forks or just plastic wrap to cover your fermentations?
And of course you’re using some kind of storage vessel. Steel tank, plastic, glass, cement, wood barrel, clay amphora… they all involve serious human intervention to come into being. Not to mention cleaning them.
Did you make any winemaking decisions? Maybe decided to make a rose? Co-ferment somethings? Bottle during fermentation for a pet-nat? Skin contact or pressed? Of course you did. Let’s add that to the “human intervention in winemaking” column.
Bottling. You have to. Are you going to make people just dive into a pool of your wine and guzzle as they swim? Bottling is yet another form of pretty intense intervention.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
An immense amount of “unnatural” work – aka intervention – goes into making a bottle of wine.
At every stage we are thoughtful, intentional, and careful. We want to ensure that all of that work – all of that investment of human time, energy, intelligence, and resources – isn’t wasted. We want to perform the magic trick of distilling a place and time in nature into something that we can drink with pleasure.
It is a labor of love. Only in that sense is it natural.
So why, oh why, oh why has so much thought been wasted on whether someone makes a 40 ppm sulfur add? I honestly can’t imagine a more absurd preoccupation, and yet entire festivals, distribution chains, and brand identities are built around whether and how much sulfur a winemaker adds to her wine.
You see there’s intervention, and then there’s natural intervention.
Intervention - or “conventional” winemaking - is just like strict “natural” winemaking in that they both see the human as separate from nature. Conventional intervention just sees humans as separately superior, attempting to remove the taint of nature from the wine, while natural winemaking sees humans as separately inferior, attempting to remove the taint of human from the wine.
Our separateness from nature is an illusion we need to rid ourselves from at both ends of the spectrum in wine.
I believe there is an inherent beauty to nature, of which we humans are part, and I want to reveal a version of it in each of my wines.
There is a difference between revealing and concocting.
Both involve human intervention, but revealing comes from observing nature and trusting the deep well of knowledge that we have inherited as natural beings. Revealing is about knowing when to deftly steer a natural process – not toward an idea of good, but away from problems that eliminate the possibility of discovering inherent beauty.
I’d define beauty in wine as uniqueness, which is another way of saying terroir. It is the singular expression that a specific fruit can become when grown in a specific ecosystem, over a specific time, and vinified in a specific way.
Uniqueness is destroyed by sameness. Sameness can result from allowing spoilage microbes to dominate a wine, as much as by following a recipe.
Revealing does not follow a recipe, but it is informed by science and intimate knowledge of specific grapes (and other fruit), and their microbes, grown in specific ecosystems.
Revealing involves humans in protecting the health of the wine ecosystem. We shepherd the wine making process all the way from the soil into the bottle. We don’t stop protecting that health when the grapes cross the winery threshold.
That’s nuanced, and a bit subjective. That’s hard to judge without deep understanding and some expertise.
That’s natural intervention.
Introducing Crenshaw Cru
We made history this year...
2021 is the year that the first commercial wine was made from grapes grown in South Central Los Angeles, and we made it.
You've heard of Premier Cru. You've heard of Grand Cru. Allow us to introduce you to Crenshaw Cru.
We debuted some pre-release, non-commercial bottles of the Crenshaw Cru sparkling rosé at our recent wine-paired dinner at Post & Beam Restaurant.
It's the first sparkling wine we've made, and maybe it's just beginner's luck but it's beautiful. Watermelon pink with crisp acidity and fine bubbles that make your mouth dance.
We also did a darker rosé sparkling, of course because we're all about the dark rosé..
We also made a Crenshaw Cru Red - still, not sparkling - and when we tasted it off the press, we can honestly say it's the best Syrah we've had this year, if not our favorite red in general.
I know that's like a parent saying their child is the smartest and most beautiful child they know, or that, you know, our kittens are the most adorable kittens alive, but I mean, come on... Look at them!
I've actually had a few glasses of the Red Crenshaw Cru while writing this (from an extra bottle that just didn't fit into any of the aging vessels) which has nothing to do with my enthusiasm, I swear. The flavor of this young wine is already addictively yummy, and the color is a gorgeous deep magenta purple.
These are the kinds of wines that try my patience. So good that I can't wait to see what it will taste like in a year.
This is why I got into wine making in the first place, for the magic that can happen when everything aligns.
But why did everything align? And why am I so confident in the quality of the Crenshaw Cru wines?
Well, first of all we had the best vintage in Los Angeles in the last 20 years at least. But also because we farmed them with the utmost care, by hand, hand-in-hand with Mother Nature. These wines came from 14 vines we have tended and touched individually hundreds of times over the last 4 years, nurturing them, observing them daily, loving them, and building an ecosystem in which they can thrive.
Great wine can only come from great grapes, and great grapes can only come from a healthy ecosystem (not just a healthy vineyard).
Given the amount of care we have showered on these vines AND the ecosystem in which they grow, these may be some of the greatest wines ever. We believe in a holistic definition of greatness, one that takes into account much more than just the flavor of the wine.
And that's the point of Centralas - to show the beauty that can result from environmentally positive farming.
Now, before you get too excited, I'm sure you can understand that we will be counting these wines in the number of bottles, not cases, produced. Like a couple dozen bottles of each, if that. This is nano-production.
Because of that, we won't be doing tastings of these wines, and the prices will be high.
Wine Club members will have the option (in order of date joined) to get one bottle of Crenshaw Cru until all available bottles are spoken for. Beyond that, we haven't figured out anything, so stay tuned!
The good news is that we are currently preparing a large part of the back yard to plant about 24 more vines... so there will be more Crenshaw Cru to go around in the future.
Please join our email list and wine club if you would like be the first to know, and have opportunity to purchase, when Crenshaw Cru wines become available.
The Centralas Prickly Pear Odyssey
I wanted to make wine with prickly pears this year, but there was one major obstacle: I didn’t know where to find them. Thus began a search - no, a journey… nay, a quest – that resulted in this story of a wondrous discovery.
What started as a search for prickly pears became a quest through history, culture, and the soul of wine itself.
Yes, I’d passed many patches of the cactus along the coast as we drove to the Sunday morning Malibu Farmers Market, and as we made wine deliveries throughout Malibu. But these were scrubby little opuntia littoralis, or coastal wild prickly pears, with large needles and small fruits. After a few exploratory hikes through these steep coastal patches I realized that hours of painful foraging would produce firm buttocks but not much in the way of usable fruit.
Opuntia Littoralis - ouch!
I began Googling.
My internet searching also produced scant results. For days I tried various keywords with no hits, gradually beginning to accept my fate that harvest 2021 would bring a toned bottom and only a token amount of foraged cactus pears.
Then an image search returned a picture of a huge corridor of prickly pears with a caption about a “prickly pear trail.” My senses prickled. Was I on to something?
More investigation placed this trail in a nature preserve in Rancho Palos Verdes. And within that nature preserve there was a… farm?
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Rancho Palos Verdes (RPV as we locals refer to it), it is the peninsula that forms the south end of the Santa Monica Bay, and it is the home, primarily, of bazillionaires. The high bluffs of RPV jut out into the Pacific Ocean and provide sweeping, multi-million-dollar views of the entire bay, Catalina Island, and the bosom of the Pacific. It isn’t uncommon to see whales breeching, and dolphin pods cavorting… and mansions. Trump (yes, the former president) owns a resort on the cliffs of RPV. You get the picture.
What RPV does not have is farms.
Yet, there it was, on satellite imagery, just above the cliffs at the very tip of the peninsula, and not too far from Trump’s resort, the neat rows of a few acres of cultivated land.
Why did a farm exist here? And why did it have prickly pears?
The answer to those questions is why this story became more than a search, and even more than a journey of discovery.
Long ago, before RPV became populated by the uber-wealthy, it was a patchwork of farms that were leased by many Japanese-Americans (leased because they were legally prevented from ownership as immigrants). This beautiful coastal pastoral life came to an abrupt end for these people during WWII when they were forcibly removed from their farms and placed into internment camps.
After the war, many were never able to return to their homes and their farms. That life for them and their children had ended forever.
Blood and thorns.
One man, James Hatano, who served in the US Army during WWII, found his way to RPV after his military service, and the war, ended. He leased some Army-owned land, and began farming. A much more complete telling of his story is found here:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-aug-21-me-lastfarmer21-story.html
That farm is now the last farm on RPV.
The farm has no online or public presence, so there was no way to contact the farm directly. I knew it existed, but not how to find it or find out if the prickly pears were usable.
So I called the City of RPV, who holds the current lease on the land.
After what you can probably imagine was a strange phone call… “Um, I’m trying to get in touch with the farm that you lease to a guy who grows prickly pears because I want to make wine from them…” I was surprised when only a day later I got a call back with a phone number for a man named Martin.
Years ago, Martin Martinez, a long-time employee of Mr. Hatano, convinced Hatano to diversify and plant prickly pears on what was otherwise a flower farm. For a time, they sold the beaver-tail-shaped cactus pads – nopalitos – to Mexican markets and consumers, but those markets diminished.
Time passed, and so did Mr. Hatano. A living history disappeared into the ocean mists, yet the prickly pears continued to grow and mature.
Mr. Hatano’s son continued the lease of the land with the City of RPV, but he had little interest in farming. So he left Martin to run the farm pretty much as he saw fit.
There isn’t an address for the farm. So I typed in the name of the adjacent park, also owned by the City of RPV, into my maps app to get a general direction, figuring I would be able to bumble my way into the farm once I got close enough. As the app returned directions, I discovered something amazing.
The way to get to the farm was to take Crenshaw Boulevard, which passes two blocks from my house and is the reason our neighborhood has its name, all the way south to its terminus on the bluffs of RPV overlooking the ocean. Crenshaw Blvd provides a direct through-line from the notorious neighborhoods of South Central to the home of the 1% and some of the most valuable real estate in LA County… and a one of a kind farm.
The farm has a hidden driveway. I drove in literal circles around it several times before parking along the roadside and hiking through the brush in what I thought was the general direction. I broke out onto a dusty drive. I climbed a rise and turned a corner.
And there it was. Like a fabled secret orchard. No… not like one. An actual one.
Martin was harvesting sunflowers on the slope above me. The mists of the marine layer were drifting up the cliffs from the ocean below. The afternoon sunshine was just breaking through, haloing Martin and illuminating acres of mature prickly pear orchard, standing taller than me, laden with green pears. And these were the kind that had only a few tiny spines.
My heart began to beat faster.
“I’m the guy who called about the tunas,” I called out as an introduction. “Tuna” is the Spanish name for the prickly pear fruit. Don’t worry, it’s just an accident of language. They don’t taste fishy.
Martin straightened up and began walking down a row of flowers. I headed in the same direction so we’d intersect. For someone who spends a lot of his life bending over planting and harvesting things, Martin’s posture is perfectly straight, like one of those postures that makes you feel like you’re slouching even when you aren’t.
He greeted me kindly, if bit incredulously. But as soon as he saw my fascination with him and his work, he opened up and began to share his pride in the life he had created here.
As is so often true, no matter how amazing a place is it’s the people who make it special. Martin spent almost every day of his life for the last 40 years, from 6am to 6pm on this little spot of paradise. I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of his life as he showed me around.
He planted every one of the innumerable prickly pear… trees?... over several acres of the hillside. He irrigated them minimally at first, but now they thrive without any irrigation, plump and abundant. They have spread too, across the hillside beyond the borders of the farm, meeting other patches of wild prickly pears coming down from above.
The farm is organic, perhaps not certified, but has never needed any outside inputs. He uses dead flowers in the corridors between the cactus. That’s their mulch fertilizer.
“They’ll be ready in October,” Martin said of the prickly pears.
I gave him my number and said, “Mucho gusto.”
“Igualmente,” he said.
This is probably a good point to explain why I wanted to work with prickly pears in the first place.
California has once again entered extreme drought conditions. This has come far too soon after the last major drought. It has become likely that we will live to see a time when our survival is at stake due to water availability.
This is something we want to talk about with anyone who will listen.
The prickly pear is a native cactus that thrives with our limited rainfall, marginal soils, and extreme heat. They were a food and beverage source cultivated for thousands of years by the first humans who populated this land.
As we try to bring Centralas ever closer to a business that is fully ecologically integrated into our eponymous land of Central Los Angeles South, using a fruit that literally grows wild in the natural areas within walking distance from our house just makes sense.
And as we intend to blend the prickly pears with local white grapes that were originally imported from Europe, there is a symbolism that we find too important to ignore.
Taste the prickly pear rainbow.
Also, have you seen the color of the fruit? They’re some of the brightest colors you’ll find anywhere in nature. Hot magenta pink, neon yellow orange. They are shockingly, flamboyantly beautiful. If we could capture even a hint of this in a wine, we’d be thrilled.
Understanding this background significance of the prickly pear itself to the kind of winemaking we want to promote with Centralas, you may begin to understand how excited I was to discover this magical, one-of-a-kind orchard with its own cultural and historical significance and uniqueness.
In mid-August, Martin called. “The tunas are ready.”
“I thought you said October,” I said.
“Too much heat,” Martin replied. “The birds are already eating them.”
And so, our first prickly pear harvest from the Hatano farm commenced. You can see the results in the photos below.
One amazing thing I’ve discovered is that every prickly pear tastes different. Fresh, they have a rainbow of flavors to match their colors.
But I’ll be honest… picking prickly pears is a lot more painful than picking grapes. Even using tongs and gloves and layers of clothing, I’ve had cactus spines in nearly every part of my body. The spines are barbed and thin as hair. If you accidentally brush one of the fruit, however lightly, you’ll be covered in spines. I’ve literally had spines in my gums.
They usually aren’t as much painful as annoying. I try to look on the bright side: free acupuncture.
There are still a lot of unknowns. There aren’t any local experts on fermenting prickly pears. I’m learning on the job.
And the final decision will rest with you – whether you think the wine we make tastes great or not. I can guarantee that it will taste like nothing you’ve ever drunk before.
But the fact that we are making wine from an orchard that is the only one of its kind in the world, with a history as rich as the red soil from which the prickly pears grow, and that is literally down the street from our house, is enough for now for me to feel extremely grateful and humble to be part of something much larger than wine… which is what we always wanted for Centralas.
It may even be enough for me to be happy for every one of the prickly spines that are stuck in my taut glutes.
Cheers!
Adam
Dirty Wine: Messiness Is Next To Godliness
There was a sign in our kitchen when I was a kid that read:
“Our home is clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy.”
I always loved that message, and still do. It spoke of a rejection of a neurotic attempt to live in a sterile environment. It spoke of sanity, warmth, and hardiness. It announced a tolerance for the messiness of real life.
As we have converted our South Los Angeles home into a permaculture food & wine garden, we’ve become the house on our street with the “messy” yard.
This mess has a purpose.
None of our neighbors have said anything yet, directly, but it could just be a matter of time.
Why are we, as a culture, so averse to mess?
My amateur psychologist take on the mentality that prefers perfectly manicured lawns, edged tree wells, bordered gardens, and evergreen foliage is this:
We are afraid of death.
Neatness can be a form of controlling the uncontrollable. We crave control, or the illusion of control, because we want to believe there is something we can do to stave off the end of ourselves.
Leaf litters, mulches, composts, brown and withering plants… these are the stuff of the fungal side of life, the dark underground side. They are all harbingers of life-enriching death.
And so we associate negative judgements with a messy looking yard. The owners must be lazy, lacking in moral uprightness. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all.
Those were the same judgements made of the native peoples in the Americas when European colonizers first arrived.
I’m reading a great book titled Tending The Wild, by M. Kat Anderson, about how the “wild” landscape of California – the lush abundance of which was marveled at by every European who came here – was actually a cooperatively managed ecosystem by the people who had lived here for the previous 10,000 years. There was deep understanding and intention to the mess.*
Well, read the headlines about California today. We certainly cleaned it up.
But back to our little slice of unkempt Los Angeles...
Are we lazy? Sure, at times, I guess you could say that. Between managing a wine business and having two full-time unrelated jobs, yeah, we tend to see how little extra work we can get away with.
I prefer the term “efficient” to lazy. We let nature do the work that it evolved to do, rather than try to clumsily and wastefully replicate its energies at soil and ecosystem building.
We don’t believe in keeping nature in its place, outside our city.
We don’t allow gardeners with leaf blowers – which are illegal in LA but still used every day – to scour our “yard” of every scrap of plant litter. We let leaves and flower petals fall to the earth and stay there, decomposing, creating richer soil.
We don’t pull up and discard every seasonal flower or plant. We let them go to seed and die and fall back to the earth. If we pull them up we do it to lay them back down somewhere else in the yard as a mulch that will produce flowers or vegetables in the spring.
There are no such things as weeds in our yard.** Thistles, with their long tap roots, help break up our heavy clay soil. We try to cut them off at the ground before they go to seed, and they become mulch and tillage.
We’ve come to love how knotweed is the first plant to colonize any bare soil in the yard. It creates a perfect ground cover - only an inch or two deep – that prevents erosion and keeps the soil cool so that other food plants can flourish. So far we haven’t noticed any competitive disadvantage for our food crops. We now let knotweed go to seed. We are actually cultivating it, passively.
When I pull leaves or laterals or hedge the vines in our vineyard, I drop them to the ground to help enrich the vineyard soil. When we prune vines or trees, we chip the branches and put them under our trees and vines as mulch.
Our garden soil is so rich at this point that vegetables spill out of the boxes and literally fill the back yard. We don’t try to contain them. It’s hard to walk out the backdoor to feed the chickens at this time of year. You have to pick a meandering path through a jungle of squash & grape vines and tomato plants and runner beans. It’s hard to turn over a leaf without finding lady bugs, or monarch or swallowtail caterpillars, or some other beautiful, diverse, and beneficial life form.
Swallowtail caterpillar on fennel flower.
There is intention to every of the dozens of species of plants that we cultivate – or allow nature to cultivate – on our little lot.
To see that intention, nature asks us to look at the world in a different way than is the current cultural norm. Because the mess is in us – in our ignorance of and disconnection from natures processes, and in our fear of them.
But a messy vineyard can make a more delicious wine, if it’s the right kind of mess. Just as our home can be a place of happiness, if it’s the right kind of dirty.
* The fetishized idea of wilderness as a place absent humans or human intervention - places set aside into parks and preserves - is a misconception based on a Western dichotomy between nature and human. If you see humans - if you see yourself - as part of and inextricable from nature, as the original peoples of California did, then the idea of wilderness is nonsense. All nature is our home and all living things are family, to be respected and cared for as such. When the wild is everywhere, civilization is seen as a process of burning down our own home and not having a back-up plan of where we will live.
**The one exception is the Bermuda grass that had been planted long ago as a lawn on our lot. It’s a real pain in the ass, and we try to eradicate it with extreme prejudice. We are begrudgingly impressed by its stubborn resilience, though. It will not die. It is the tester of our determination and commitment.
What Foods To Pair With Microbially Uninhibited (aka Flawed) Natural Wine
Natural Wine that has been made without sulfites and other additives often exhibits at least 1 of 3 major microbial expressions: Volatile Acidity (aka “VA” aka “Vinegar”), Sulfides - H2S etc - (aka “funkiness”), and Mouse or Mouse Taint.
The characteristics of these microbial expressions also often dominate the sensory experience of the wine, other than visually. VA and Mouse influence all three of the tasting impressions: scent, flavor, and texture.
Because of this dominance, when making a food pairing decision it’s usually pointless to think about the kind of wine, variety of grape, or region of origin. It doesn’t matter if you’re drinking a 100% whole cluster, amphora fermented and aged Seperavi from Georgia if the main thing you smell, taste, and feel is VA.
Mouse is a bit different in that it generally only affects the second half of a wine’s taste, from mid-pallet through finish. But it’s usually such a powerful ending impression that it eclipses any of the up-front sensory impressions.
Similarly, but in reverse, Sulfides generally only affect the first half of the tasting experience of a wine, from aroma through the attack (or approach, or front/fore-pallet?). But it also can be such a strong first impression of the wine that the sense of funkiness can stay with you and linger all the way through the finish. And when sulfides have become mercaptans their flavor actually does stay all the way through the taste of a wine, from sniff to finish.
So here are the perfect pairings for natural wines with one of these microbial expressions (aka “wine flaws”):
1. The perfect pairing for VA is: Balsamic Vinegar
Balsamic is the perfect pairing for a natural wine with dominant volatile acidity.
VA is the most common flavor experience in natural wines, especially in red wines made without sulfites. The good news is that it’s got an easy pairing that works perfectly: balsamic vinegar.
VA is actually acetic acid, which is vinegar. So a wine with VA dominant flavors is actually diluted vinegar, and the best thing to pair with diluted vinegar to make it taste better is undiluted vinegar.
Pair a wine with lots of VA with balsamic glazed carrots or lamb chops, or a balsamic-soy marinated grilled portabella, tossed salad with olive oil and balsamic drizzle, or hard cheese or figs soaked in balsamic.
2. The perfect pairing for Mouse is: Peanut Butter
Peanut Butter is the perfect pairing for a natural wine with mouse taint.
Mouse is as much textural as flavorful. It lends a chalky, grainy texture to the wines it dominates. It also removes the fruity flavors of a wine, and leaves aromas and flavors of urine-moistened straw with a back-of-the-pallet impact like a pine nut that has lost its freshness, or horseradish if horseradish had a nutty flavor.
Peanut Butter can make the most of these non-fruit pallet experiences. Its ground nut texture is similar and makes the Mouse Taint feel almost like melty, crumbly, aged tannins, while balancing and enhancing the most desirable elements of the Mouse flavors.
Try mouse tainted natural wines with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Indonesian Satay, and Panang Curry, or just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
3. The perfect pairing for sulfides is: Cooked or Fermented Cabbage
Cooked or fermented cabbage is the perfect pairing for a funky natural wine with dominant sulfide aromas.
This is truly a like-for-like pairing because cabbage is high in, you guessed it, sulfur. As you cook or ferment it, you actually create and increase Hydrogen Sulfide, the exact compound that is usually most dominant in “stinky” or “funky” wine.
If you’re embracing a wine with a dominant sulfide expression, it’s a great time to eat those foods that otherwise might over-power another wine’s more delicate, nuanced fruit or floral expressions. Cabbage is good for you, but the gassy, sulfur smell it emits when cooked can be difficult to pair… unless you have a gassy, sulfuric wine too!
Try sauerkraut with pork, kimchi with Korean BBQ, or corned beef with cabbage.
So there you have it: three great pairings with the three major microbial developments in natural wines.
If you’d like recipes for any of the foods mentioned here, please email us via our Contact Page.
Happy drinking and eating!
Learning A Language
At breakfast this morning Wendy spoke a different language to her phone.
And her phone responded!
The language of soil and plants is a passport to flavor & health.
I was just sipping some coffee, and she just launched into a full stream of what was clearly a complete set of thoughts, and the phone understood her perfectly and answered in kind.
It was like magic.
I couldn’t understand a bit of it. It was like a secret code that I wasn’t privy to. It was awe inspiring.
It was French.
As I stood, dumbfounded, clinging to my mug, I quickly remembered that in reality there was nothing magic about Wendy’s knowledge of a new language other than its effect on me.
I remembered how she had, with unfailing discipline, used Duolingo every day for months. She didn’t just fit it in when she had time. She set time aside for it. She was committed, and regular.
Over time she built a foundation of basic knowledge of the language and then added to it. She made mistakes and learned from them. Many things happened in her life, like all of the life and job changes that resulted from a global pandemic as well as all the normal abnormalities of life. But none of these changes kept her from learning new words and practicing old ones every day.
The result is that she has begun to learn a new language and everything that implies. She has a passport to a different culture, new ideas, a bridge between her and many new people around the world… and the ability to order wine in Paris.
If you’ve traveled internationally (or even nationally in some cases) you probably have had those moments of wishing you could convey your thoughts to someone who didn’t understand you.
Wendy and I experienced an entire wine tasting on the slopes of Mount Etna with a proprietor who didn’t speak English. She just plunged ahead in Italian, and described each of the wines and (presumably) how she grew them to reflect the flavors of the volcanic terroir. We only had beginner level knowledge of Italian. As memorable as the experience was, I think we were all a bit frustrated at our inability to connect above an elementary school level.
“Grazie mille,” as heartfelt as you say it, only goes so far.
The problem is that most of us aren’t like Wendy. We don’t start learning the language we need until we’re forced to.
We don’t usually change unless it hurts more to not change. Don’t ask me how often I’m doing my Duolingo Spanish lessons.
But most things that are important are like languages. The knowledge necessary to understand the complex problems facing us, and their potential solutions, can’t be learned by occasional attention.
When people visit our house in Los Angeles, they’re amazed by the vibrant and thriving permaculture ecosystem they see. It’s like a magical, fairytale food & wine forest in South Central.
But we’ve been building it for 9 years. We didn’t know what we were building towards when we started. We just wanted to know where our food and wine came from.
During that time we’ve learned an immense amount, and that knowledge has changed our lives – even revolutionized it.
What we’ve learned has enabled us to see how much we don’t know… how much there is to be learned. This is a language we will continue to study for the rest of our lives.
We started Centralas for anyone who wants to begin learning this language.
Make an appointment to come taste our wines and get a garden tour. We’d love to see you… and practice our language skills.
Why So Much Sulfites? An Open Letter To Natural Wine Buyers
Hi _____,
Thanks again for taking the time to try our new wine. I just wanted to follow up to see if you had any feedback or would like to make an order?
I also wanted to provide a more thoughtful response to your questions when you tasted. Specifically, when I mention we added a total of around 40 ppm of sulfites, you wanted to know why so much?
Honestly, that caught me off guard at the time as in my head I use the Raw Wine standards as a reference for what would be generally considered acceptable levels of sulfites (below 70ppm) in the natural wine world. 40 may seem high compared to zero, but considering that naturally occurring sulfites are often over 10ppm, I don't really think that I'm altering the wine at that level, but rather protecting it. And allow me to get technical...
While use Zero sulfites is always an option, it is always also risky if you want to avoid microbial blooms - the most common of which are acetobacter, pediococcous, brettanomyces, and the cocktail that causes mouse taint. I am strongly averse to the development of detectable levels of these microbes as I don't find their taste to be unique. They are really the same in every wine you taste. Therefore, I aim to preserve the unique expression of the fruit and its terroir, so I don't have a severe philosophical aversion to sulfites.
Part of my aversion to these microbial flavors is that I want to promote the agriculture behind my wine, rather than my winemaking philosophy. The agriculture behind my wine affects the planet and everyone who lives in it, so it's much more important to me to highlight organic, regenerative agriculture beautifully, rather than stick to my philosophical guns regardless of whatever develops in my wine. I want the majority of wine drinkers to actually like the flavor of the wine, and see the benefits of organic farming.
And so I almost always choose to add some protective sulfites. Not an amount that sterilizes the wine by any stretch, but enough to effectively inhibit runaway microbial infections. The lowest amount of sulfites generally accepted as effective is 15ppm. Below that you may as well not add any. Without that amount, some level of volatile acidity (VA) caused most often by acetobacter, is highly likely unless you're fortunate... it's probably less than 50/50 odds you'll avoid it. Even with that amount you can have issues, as you’ll see.
Another thing, techically, to keep in mind is that the effectiveness of sulfites is influenced by the pH of the wine. The higher the pH, the more sulfites you need to be as effective as a lower amount at a lower pH. There are other factors too, and that's part of the skill and science of winemaking.
The rose noir (Noctilucence) is something I wanted to be fruity and fun to drink. So to protect the fruity freshness of the organic and biodynamic syrah, I added 15ppm after crush. After fermentation and malo-lactic conversion, the pH had risen, and the levels of acetobacter had grown to a level that I - who am a sensitive taster - could detect. We also do lab testing pre and post crush to monitor these things, and found raised levels of VA (explaining why I was smelling it). Based on all the factors involved and the growing levels of acetobacter, I added another 20ppm sulfites to prevent a VA bloom. It worked beautifully. The sour smell disappeared and the wine became fruity and delicious again.
Then we did another lab test before bottling, and discovered we had almost zero Free SO2... which, if you are not going to filter and you've had a VA issue already, risks having VA develop in bottle, so we added another 10ppm. Some of that is absorbed/bound up immediately, and more is bound up during the bottling process. So though we added approx 45ppm total throughout the life of the wine making, the remaining free SO2 in bottle will be less than 10ppm. This allowed us to minimize the risk of our beautiful organic and biodynamic fruit ending up tasting of vinegar, so consumers can connect positively with this beautiful agriculture that is really the biggest impact on the health and well-being of everything on the planet... which is our goal.
I apologize if this comes across as pedantic. You probably are already aware of much of this anyway, but I just wanted to explain our thinking and approach to wine. We are definitely not zero-zero zealots, so maybe that means we won't be right for some of your customers. We're okay with that, because our mission is really to promote the agriculture not the winemaking.
Thanks again, and I really do appreciate any feedback!
Adam
An End In Itself - The Culture of Viticulture
The idea of “culture” is right there in the terms “viti-culture” and “agri-culture.”
So why, when I think about the idea of “culture,” does it seem to be lacking from my vision of farming in the USA?
Culture, to me and by definition, implies a sense of artistic achievement and style. Things that are cultural have an aesthetic. They are concerned with a sense of beauty even if they also are concerned with function.
American farming does not seem to be concerned with beauty at all, though.
Despite what my individual values may be, I’ve come to accept that America’s preeminent value is business, and our entire culture is built around that, including farming.
Now, maybe there’s nothing inherently wrong with business. In some form it seems as if it is necessary for and has always been part of human cultures. But if we pursue it to the exclusion of all other values we lose our souls.
When farming becomes soulless, eating becomes soulless. And when eating becomes soulless, our lives become soulless. This has been our cultural trajectory over the last 70 years in America.
The vast majority of farming and food production in the US is a factory industry. To better understand this, please read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan if you haven’t.
Industrialists have one end in mind. It isn’t beauty, or health, or quality, or even the thing that their factories produce. The End toward which everything else is manipulated is profit.
Every aspect of farming – from the land, animals, crops, as well as the farmers and consumers – are simply means to this end… the end of the almighty dollar.
Beauty, on the other hand, can only be conceived, created, or seen when we stop seeing things and people as means to an end.
Culture is created when we see what we are doing as an end in itself.
Sure, a square box will give you shelter, is cheap to build, and can turn a profit. But a beautiful architecturally designed home does not need to seem to be a luxury.
Yes, you can cover 100 acres with straight rows of a single vine or crop, and that will make it easy to farm quickly with machines to increase profits (if you’re lucky). But using 100 acres to create a biodiverse ecosystem of many species of plants and animals does not need to seem fiscally irresponsible.
We only get one life. If what we are doing is always a means to an end, then what we are really working towards is the end of our lives.
A means-to-end culture is a death culture.
As a winemaker, I’m beginning to wrap my head around each step of the process being an end in itself. I want to help create and work in vineyards and wineries that are culturally rich.
I’m trying to do more than make wine. I’m trying to nurture a beautiful, and delicious, culture of life.
In what ways can you create culture with what you do every day?
NOCTILUCENCE
Another delicious Centralas specialty rosé, NOCTILUCENCE is what we call a Rosé Noir. It’s the perfect summer “red” with low alcohol, bright & dark color, and fresh & juicy flavor.
The name means “night shine” and it is a real word, believe it or not. We mean it as nod to those who brighten after dark, and those who choose to shine their light regardless of the darkness in which we may find ourselves.
The artwork on the label 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 may be lost, but because of it they may find something very, very special.
This was an idea that has been on Adam’s mind for years. In 2021 he commissioned a Filipino artist (@romkun_arts) for the label.
In 2020 we picked organic and biodynamic (as usual) syrah and a bit of grenache grapes, and we picked them early for fresh acidity, and light body.
We make Noctilucence as a true rosé, fermented off skins, but we give it at least 24 hours of soaking on the skins before pressing it off to neutral barrel. That time on skins imparts beautiful color and flavors without the astringency and tannic texture that come from on-skin fermentation.
The result is a rosé that is dark but translucent, 12% alcohol, smooth, fresh, and deliciously easy-drinking.
Noctilucence is unfined and unfiltered, Vegan, Gluten-free, and made naturally with only two ingredients: grapes and a teensie weensie bit of sulfites. And that’s it.
We recommend putting it on the table (or picnic blanket, etc) chilled, but then don’t be afraid of it warming up as you drink it. It seems to taste great at a wide range of temperatures, and it’s fun to taste it and see how it changes as it warms up.
Pairs amazingly with salmon, Indian vegetarian, fried chicken, soul food, pizza, beaches, shade, sunshine, trysts, lightning storms, road trips, swimming holes… actually it would be easier to list the things it doesn’t pair well with.
Here’s to shining your light in the darkness!
Natural Wine Is Bullshit
I hope I got your attention with the title of this post (which is mostly a transcript of an episode of the Organic Wine Podcast). I also want to point out that there is a bit of irony in that I’m speaking as one who makes, or aspires to make, what some would consider to be Natural Wine.
We released our first wines under our Centralas label in the fall of 2020. It was a terrible time to start a winery, or any kind of business really, but, hey, I’ve never done this before so I have nothing to compare it to. Anyway, I’ve started going around giving samples of our wines to various wine shops around Los Angeles – you know, the sales part of the business – and I’ve had some really interesting conversations with shop managers and owners who interface with the natural wine drinking public. Some common and troubling themes emerged. So this is an attempt to address the alarming trends I’ve become aware of… and if you hang in there you’ll hopefully see that it actually fits with the overall theme of the Organic Wine Podcast, and Centralas.
The fad of Natural wine has some serious problems, and, hey, that’s all okay with me – everything has problems. I just did an episode about some of the problems of organic. But let’s not pretend Natural wine is superior, morally speaking, because of its priorities or in any other way. I actually think its priorities are out of whack, even with its own values.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just jump in.
Look, I can say a lot of good things about natural wine, and most of the time I do… but this isn’t one of those times.
So, here are 4 reasons why Natural Wine is Bullshit:
1. The attention given to sulfites is utter and complete Bullshit.
Whether a winemaker adds sulfites to a wine has absolutely no impact on anything in the world. To not add sulfites is a purely philosophical choice that arises from some ethos of purity that has become at times a little Nazi-esque, to be honest.
Sulfites have no impact on the environment, the carbon footprint of the supply chain, nor the health of the drinker. I’ll come back to that last one, but the point is that sulfites are meaningless to pretty much everything that is important in the production and consumption of wine… except your philosophical prejudice against them.
[I have overstated here for effect. Sulfites do affect one thing: the smell & taste of a wine. The thing is that this effect can be very positive, especially from a standpoint of protecting the good work done in the vineyard. See point #2 below.]
You know what part of wine does have a massive impact on everyone and everything in the world? The way the grapes were farmed. And the great tragedy of natural wine is that it has trained a whole generation of new wine drinkers to again focus on the wine making instead of the wine growing. The average natural wine consumer who goes into a wine bar is going to ask “Did they add sulfites?” rather than “Did they grow organically it, ethically, and equitably?”
Of course organic farming is one of the tenets of natural wine, but that has almost been forgotten. And it can never be assumed. It should never be the unspoken and understood basis for natural wine. It should be the primary focus.
A Zero-Zero wine is not a natural wine.
Only a Zero-Zero-Zero wine qualifies to be natural wine.
There are three zeros in natural wine, and without the first zero, the other two zeros – the two everyone talks about – are pointless.
The first zero is: no synthetic chemicals in the vineyard. Organic farming is the foundation without which you cannot have natural wine.
Honestly, if you used Round-up in the vineyard, I couldn’t care less about your native fermentations, no filtering, and no sulfites. Your “natural” wine is a joke.
And maybe we even need a fourth zero: Zero exploitation. If your pet-nat was made from grapes that were grown by indentured servants, it doesn’t deserve the honor of being called wine, let alone natural wine. Yeah, I’m looking at you Italy and South Africa.
But all of us better realize that if we’re buying natural wine from California (or anywhere else) and expecting it to be cheap, we better be really sure that the economics make sense for everyone involved. Because someone is paying the price if you aren’t.
Now let me go back to sulfites and their impact on a wine drinker:
Once and for all, No, you don’t have a sulfite allergy. The reaction that you think is from sulfites is actually from histamines that occur naturally in wine, or maybe from the alcohol – I mean how much did you drink anyway? The truth is that only a fraction of a percentage of the population has a legitimate allergic reaction to sulfites. If you haven’t been tested by a specialist and your allergy confirmed, you don’t have one.
Now, I’m not advocating we add sulfites any more than I’m advocating we should not add them. My point is that they have no impact on the world, and the outsized importance they have in the philosophy of natural wine is utterly absurd.
Hey, I know I’m not the first to weigh in on this debate, and there’s some hypocrisy here in spending so much time talking about this issue when I’m arguing that we should pay less attention to it. I guess I just think it’s such tragedy that we’ve taken the eyes of the consumer off the truly important connection that should be made by wine to the farming. And that’s why I’m talking about it as the number one reason natural wine is bullshit.
Now, on to the second reason Natural Wine is Bullshit.
2. A flaw is a flaw, and calling a flaw a feature is Bullshit.
Sure, when you’re young you’ll drink anything. And you may even get used to it and like it. But I’m not going to start saying that a wine that tastes of vinegar, smells of sewage, and has a finish of rodent is not flawed. It is. Wine that smells and tastes bad is actually bad wine.
I’ve been making wine as a home winemaker since 2007, and commercially since 2019. Over the years I’ve learned a lot, and the way I learned was by making mistakes. I’ve made lots. And you know how I knew when I made a mistake? The wine tasted and / or smelled bad. That’s why we sniff a milk carton that has reached its expiration date. Our senses have evolved to alert us to something that is spoiled.
You can call that sewage smell “funky” but it doesn’t change the fact that you are detecting an excess of hydrogen sulfide and/or other highly toxic gaseous sulfur compounds.
And, sure, a tiny bit of acetic acid and other volatile acids may add a sweet aroma and elevate some of the flavors of a wine, but when a wine tastes sour from it I just want to encourage the winemaker to bottle some salad dressing rather than trying to pawn it off as wine.
And mouse taint – what a great word – is probably my favorite flaw. It’s like the opposite of a refreshing finish. The wine smells pretty good, you get some delicious fruit as soon as it hits your pallet, and then, boom, you can’t taste anything but an animalistic, chalky, almost urine-tinged finish that wipes out any of the upfront goodness.
You can philosophically rationalize the existence of these flaws in wine, and others, by saying that our pallets evolve and taste is subjective, and you can call me names and say that I’m an unenlightened sheep of industrial winemaking for criticizing these flaws. And you can even point to people who prefer these flavors.
But I think that many of these justifications are really just rationalizations for a very narrow and misguided idea of winemaking when we have the understandable motivation to not want to have to pour a heartbreaking 10 barrels of a mistake down the floor drain. Let me explain:
Minimal intervention is a great idea, but let’s be honest: the truth is that winemaking is NOT natural. It is an agricultural and cultural act. It is necessarily a choice to intervene in a myriad ways in a myriad of natural processes. And please… ask yourself why we have intervened in these processes for millennia?
Why do we cultivate vineyards and stomp grapes and activate carbonic maceration and age wine in amphora or neutral oak or cement eggs? It’s not because those things result in wine naturally in nature without humans. We do those things to make good tasting wine… and I would argue that means wine without flaws.
Viticulture is a good analogy. Doing nothing is not regenerative organic viticulture. If you want to grow a vineyard biodynamically, organically, and regeneratively, it actually involves more work and more careful attention than conventional viticulture.
So why do we think natural winemaking is doing nothing? Why are we okay with intervening in all the innumerable ways we natural wine makers manipulate nature to make natural wine EXCEPT at the exact point where that intervention could prevent flawed wine…? That’s bullshit.
I don’t want to give any more airtime to sulfites, but I will say that there are a couple completely natural additives that, if used judiciously and sparingly at the right moments when necessary, protect the natural flavors of wine rather than adulterate them, and prevent most, if not all, of the common flaws.
I am definitely not suggesting that winemaking should follow a recipe. But I am strongly suggesting that good winemaking should acknowledge that what’s in the bottle is extremely important to most people, and the average wine drinker can’t taste a philosophical rationalization.
And I’d argue, actually, that we are betraying all of the hard work and amazing values that goes into a well-grown and well-made natural wine if we let a philosophical prohibition against those minimal additives to ruin – yes, ruin – a batch of otherwise good wine with an easily preventable flaw.
The unfortunate thing is that those flaws have become synonymous with Natural Wine. And that, in turn, has likely relegated natural wine as we know it to being pretty much a generational fad that will pass as soon as someone influential enough admits that the Emperor is not wearing clothes, or when the folks who are drinking flawed wine grow tired of it, or can afford better wine.
And as soon as they do that, you can bet they’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater too, and begin to blame the organic farming behind natural wine since these nuances about sulfites and yeast hulls is lost on pretty much anyone that doesn’t make wine. That’s exactly what happened to Organic Wine from 20 years ago or so. People didn’t know that the labeling laws don’t allow you to add sulfites if you put the words “Organic Wine” on a label. They only knew that the wine tasted like shit, sometimes literally. And so a generation of wine drinkers have associated organic wine with flawed wine. Do we really want to make that same mistake again?
I think the association of organic wine with delicious wine is far more important than any philosophical prohibition I have against adding a half a teaspoon of sulfites to 60 gallons of wine. Why? Because organic agriculture actually matters.
Now, this association by the consumer of natural wine with flaws brings up my third point about why natural wine is bull shit. And I promise these last two points are not as long-winded as the first two.
3. Natural wine has become more about a style of wine than the principles and values behind it.
It’s gotten to the point that when most people think of orange wine, or pet-nats, or co-ferments, or piquettes, or verjus, or anything aged in an amphora, they now think that they are thinking about natural wine. The truth is that those are styles of wine that have nothing inherently to do with natural wine. You can make any of them in a way that would violate every single requirement of qualifying as “natural.” However, the average consumer of natural wine not only thinks that being a Pet-Nat is all that it takes to be natural, but also will turn their nose up at a Zinfandel made by a producer like Ridge, for example, which often meets pretty much every requirement of being natural.
Natural wine is not a style of wine. It is a set of guidelines for growing and making any style of wine.
Well, actually, I’m wrong, because it has become a style. And in becoming a style it has trained consumers not to care about what its really supposed to be about. So now to many people it’s pretty much only a style, and therefore it is really just a sales gimmick. And that’s why it’s bullshit. Seriously… let’s not pick on Cameron Diaz. To the average consumer her “clean wine” is completely interchangeable with what natural wine has become. And actually, she’s at least promoting the organic agriculture behind her wine. So props to her.
And now … drumroll… the final reason, at least for this episode, that natural wine is bullshit:
4. Your natural wine from Georgia has a massive carbon footprint.
And I don’t mean to pick on Georgia. Natural wine aficionados love new wines from any far flung places. Japan, Armenia, Austria, Sicily, Lebanon, Bolivia, etc. The more obscure the origin of the wine, the cooler I am for drinking it. I was in a natural wine bar in Los Angeles recently where less than 20% of the by-the-glass options were from California, or anywhere in the US.
Honestly, when you consider what the natural wine ethos is supposed to be, that’s absurd. Natural wine should be drunk locally, out of kegs.
Wine moving around locally in glass bottles already has a pretty big carbon footprint. It’s a liquid in a heavy glass bottle, and it moves, often, a minimum of 5 times via burning fossil fuels before it reaches your glass. Now if it’s imported, add to those miles all the moves it has to make in its country of origin before it gets to port, and then a long diesel-fueled sea voyage. That’s a lot of carbon.
So when you’re sipping your Meinklang, don’t feel too cool. You just helped make the world hotter.
Look, we import coffee, tea, and spices from other countries because they don’t grow well here, for the most part. That isn’t true of grapes. In fact grapes grow really well here. North America has 25 species of grapevines compared to 1 in Europe and Central Asia. If we invested as much time, money, and energy in discovering and developing the wines from the local, indigenous grapes of America, as we do in importing and drinking the indigenous grapes of everywhere else in the world, we’d probably have a pretty amazing indigenous wine culture right here.
So there you go… that’s my editorial/rant on why Natural Wine is Bullshit. To consider some ways to improve natural wine, check out my companion post on How To Build A Better Natural Wine.
The truth is that I love Natural Wine. But I love it because of its values: Its values of equitable, organic farming, and its respect for the fact that we humans can’t really make the best wine… we can only carefully observe and gently guide a wild and constantly changing process.
In the best farming and the best winemaking, in my opinion, we are merely microbe shepherds. And that’s a beautiful and humbling truth.
Now let’s go out there and make - and drink - some organically and equitably grown, delicious natural wine!
… I’d love your feedback. Please email us to let me know what you thought about this.
The Power Of Questions
Did you know that only one third of wineries with organic certification label their bottles with any mention of it (Frogs Leap is one example)? One of the main reasons they don’t promote this is because consumers aren’t asking for it.
We started Centralas because your choices as a consumer have the power to change the world. The many small daily decisions that you make about what to drink and eat, multiplied by the number of days in your life, equals a huge influence on how that food and drink was produced and distributed.
But you have another power as a consumer, and it has the potential to be much more viral.
You have the power to ask questions.
When you ask your favorite wine-seller, “Do you have wine that was made with organically grown grapes?” you exert influence in several ways.
1. Questions grease the wheels of change.
The market provides what you ask of it. If you don’t ask for it, why would the market change?
Asking the question sends ripples of information up the supply chain.
“We’ve been getting a lot of requests for wine made from organic grapes,” gets telegraphed from the salesperson on the floor to their manager, to the buyer, to the distributor, to the producer.
If enough of these signals are sent over time, change happens.
2. You are asking your wine-seller to know about this aspect of their inventory.
You may be surprised how many people that sell wine don’t know what “organic” or “biodynamic” or “sustainable” actually means for wine. (Did you know that certified “sustainable” wines can still be grown with hazardous chemicals?).
Get your wine-seller engaged in being knowledgeable about these certifications, and their importance to the world. Your question will help them be prepared for the next person who asks.
It helps if you know a bit about what each of these things means, so that you won’t be misled by an unscrupulous, or over-zealous, salesperson. But even if you’re still confused by all the terminology, don’t let that deter you.
Here’s a great rule of thumb: if it doesn’t say it anywhere on the bottle (or can or box), pull out your phone and search the winery. If the winery website has descriptions of their vineyards and doesn’t mention organic or biodynamic – it probably isn’t.
3. You show that you care.
It’s a statement that you aren’t just an alcoholic looking for a buzz. You think of wine as an agricultural and cultural product that impacts our environment and our world. You aren’t just a mindless consumer dazzled by pretty labels and clever marketing. You want substance.
This is a cultural shift. This is the big difference between where we are now, in America, and where we need to be to stop the precipitous decline in our health. Mindless consumption has been the norm, and the supply chain has been built around it.
Questions are the only ways to find out the story and values behind the wine. Big Scores can’t tell you that. Staff Picks can’t tell you that. Big Discounts can’t tell you that.
Questions open the door to new ways of thinking about wine, and everything.
I know that, thanks to COVID, a lot of us have started buying our wine online. We now don’t get the opportunity to ask these questions in person.
So try emailing the retailer. Or ask the questions of the internet. The algorithms need to know you care too.
I know all of this seems like a lot of work to get a nice bottle of wine, and it can be.
But it’s only a lot of work now, because not enough of us have been asking the questions. We’re getting something moving that has a lot of stagnant inertia.
But you’ll see. The more you ask the questions, the easier it will get.
The power of questions is like a winch, slowly turning, pulling wine inch-by-inch out of the chemically polluted mud in which it has been stuck for decades.
Pruning Lone Wolf Vineyard
On the hottest day of the winter, two weeks ago, we drove almost two hours to the southeast of Los Angeles, to do something that had never been done before. Well, almost never.
In 90-degree January heat we joined about twenty other volunteers to prune vines that had not been pruned since they were established, likely 80 to 100 years ago.
The vineyard is known as Lone Wolf. Many, but not all, of the vines had been lightly pruned the previous year for the very first time. The vines were essentially wild… or re-wilded.
And they were doing just fine without us.
Don’t think of this as a normal vineyard with rows. This looks more like a briar patch – a tangle of disorderly branches lying close to the ground. The entire jumble is below waist, or even knee, height.
And as we kneeled in the sandy soil to make the first pruning cut some of these vines had ever felt, it became clear that grapevines are, actually, not grapevines. At least not the way we usually think of them.
When left to survive on their own, the vines grow laterally along the ground. They even occasionally go underground and re-emerge, and they put down roots in these spots. So an original “mother” vine may expand outward in all directions, connecting to the earth again and again, claiming new resources, creating a network of inter-connected vines that are actually one vine.
They are surprisingly fertile as well. As they create their expanding vine network, the grapes that they produce – often lying directly on the soil – sow themselves and produce new vines that begin to create their own expanding networks. Every “vine cluster” – as we had to begin referring to them – had several “baby” vines around them – each a new variety, due to the genetic variability of its seeds.
As we carefully made our way through this vineyard, it was easy to see that this isn’t a collection of individual grapevines. This entire vineyard is one big super-organism.
It’s important to note what should be obvious as well: this vineyard has never been fertilized nor sprayed with any kind of pesticide, and it is thriving – growing, expanding, reproducing.
Of course it isn’t doing this with any human ends in mind. It doesn’t care if good wine can be made from its grapes. The vineyard’s end is health and survival. To do this it networks, stays connected, diversifies.
As we pruned, it was hard not to ask if we were actually doing harm. To achieve our ends – a unique wine – we stopped many of these super-organism survival techniques from continuing. And the winemakers will begin removing the babies from the super-organism, preventing further reproductive diversity from happening.
It was hard not to be extremely careful… even reverent of the place where we were imposing our will.
In the microcosm of Lone Wolf, these global tensions – human vs nature – are much more obvious. We cannot help but be human. But it seems that we would benefit from having our human-ness be informed by thoughtful respect of the super-organism of which we are part.
As the organizer of this pruning expedition, Abe Schoener, said, “…To make a good cut, we must think not only about this year; we must imagine 5 years from now. In order to make a cut worthy of these 100-year-old vines, we must imagine a time when we might long be gone.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Terroir
Who cares whether terroir is a real thing or not? French marketing was probably the real reason the term “terroir” became popular.
But it points to something that we – winemakers & wine lovers – aspire to in some way.
The problem is that we incorrectly think it’s an external goal. By misunderstanding terroir, we strive to achieve wines that express an external geography.
Real terroir is inside us.
We regularly talk about terroir in California. Yet the vast majority of the grapes we grow here did not evolve or adapt on this continent. Further, a vast majority of vineyards in California are irrigated. How can terroir even apply under such artificial conditions?
And what role does winemaking play in terroir? Does a particular geography lend itself toward pressing the juice off the skins before fermentation to make rosé? Is Georgia a better place for skin-fermented whites? Is Montrachet a better place for oak-aged whites?
Maybe.
But it may not be because of the geography.
We can taste a difference between a Pinot Noir from Santa Rita Hills versus one from Cote de Nuits, so we want to say that each place has a distinctive terroir.
This is what I’d refer to as the Comparative Difference version of terroir.
This leads to judging and grading various soils and bedrocks and aspects and latitudes. We create hierarchies based on this version of terroir.
The other version of terroir is the Geographical Expression.
We want the wine to be a unique expression of the place where it was grown. We want the wine to communicate for our land.
This leads to a desire to limit human manipulation of the wine. The popularity of natural wine and low-intervention wine are part of this ethos. We have an innate sense that changes to the wine that are the result of human intention somehow lessen the reflection of this version of terroir.
The problem with this concept of terroir is first that geography itself doesn’t taste that great, and some geographies are actually not conducive to delicious wine at all.
But secondly, there is always an element of human translation (via winemaking) to this expression of the geography, even if we aren’t adding ingredients. Oak or steel or amphora. Skin or No Skin. Co-ferments and Blending. Or just, simply, the timing of the pick.
Even the most natural zero-zero vigneron acts as interpreter for the land.
So while there does seem to be something to place, if we think a little about it I think we’ll see that none of us really mean that we want to purely and simply reflect the geography of our wine.
In Californian that purist version of terroir would mean drinking wine that tastes of sand, scorched chaparral, and raisins much of the time.
We have to acknowledge that even the most hands-off approach to this idea that we encapsulate in the term “terroir” still involves some alchemy. We transmute the geography – not merely reflect it – into something tasty.
How does that alchemical process play into terroir? What the heck are we talking about when we talk about terroir?
There are two analogies that come at the idea of terroir from different and helpful angles.
First, raising children. As a parent we become distinctly aware that we have inherited many characteristics from our parents and will likely translate those, for better or worse, to our kids. It’s humbling to think where those characteristics and manners came from. Certainly your parents also inherited them from their parents who inherited them, and on backwards into the deep recesses of history.
Of course those characteristic were mutated along the way via your ancestors’ unique experiences. You too have shaped those characteristics by your own life, which often includes a hearty rejection of being like your parents (which is in itself a kind of mutation of characteristics… really there’s no escaping your inheretance).
And now your kids look and have characteristics of your great-grandparents no matter what you do, but they will also be unique. And as good parents you likely cherish that uniqueness, often by trying to influence them as little as possible by your own hang-ups, weaknesses, fears, and failings.
This kind of respect of the specialness of your child (which results in a modest attempt at low-intervention parenting) is a good analogy for winemaking, and children are great examples of unstoppable uniqueness that paradoxically results from inescapable inheritance.
The second, and perhaps better, analogy for understanding terroir is photography.
There is something inherently disappointing in a posed photograph. Just go look at Instagram. Candid shots capture a spark of true life that can’t be replicated by a selfie.
Anyone can take a photograph, but it takes hard work and experience to capture the right moment – when the light and composition are just so – so that we can see the beauty of a scene… the story of that moment.
A good photographer can find the angle, lighting, detail, and perspective to alchemize almost any scene into something extraordinary. And they can do all this without touching anything in the scene.
Alan Watts made the point that we are actually part of any rainbow that we see because the rainbow exists only as an angle of perspective – our perspective – on the refraction of sunlight through rain. Our unique positioning on earth allows a rainbow to come into being, and if we change our position the rainbow will cease to exist.
What is it that a good photograph captures? Beauty, yes usually. But what does that mean?
It’s something like the unique story of a perspective on a moment in space and time. If done well, the timing and perspective on that moment evoke a feeling, or many feelings in us… at times pain, yearning, sadness, memory, fear, love, awe, humor, joy, or all of these and more.
In the photograph of a completely untouched scene, we still see the invisible hand of the photographer behind it.
This is what I think we aspire to when we talk about terroir. It’s not just aspects of flavor that allow us to differentiate wines made here versus there. It’s not just a reflection of a special geography.
Terroir is the attempt to capture in a bottle the unique story of inescapable change – the beauty – of a place and time… and our own lives.
As parents and photographers we understand that our subject is inherently beautiful. With that understanding we begin to realize that to translate that beauty to the world we don’t have to change the subject, we have to change ourselves.
The wine that most reflects terroir – the real terroir – is likely made by changing our perspective, our angle, our timing to capture the beautiful truth of its story as only we have discovered it.
Terroir in wine is an attempt to show that we have the artistry to find beauty without constructing it.
The Importance Of Soil Health To Wine, And How To Foster It
I have the great pleasure of hosting the Organic Wine Podcast. I get to talk to brilliant, inspiring people about the amazing work they are doing in agriculture in general, and viticulture specifically. The common thread I found with all of my guests this year is that they see themselves directly tied to agriculture, no matter whether they are wine distributors, sommeliers, importers, winery general managers, or soil scientists and grape breeders.
We are all farmers, ultimately, because we literally determine how millions of acres of land around the world are farmed simply by our everyday consumption choices. Whether we buy this bread or that bread, this wine or that wine, actually has the power to change the world.
With this in mind, I wanted to summarize the dominant and fundamental themes that I have learned this year about wine. You’ll see by the end that there’s really only one theme, and it’s that the ground under our feet is the most important resource we have… and how we treat it will determine our future.
Where does your wine come from?
Soil. Soil. Soil.
It’s all about the soil.
A healthy, biodiverse soil ecosystem helps vines thrive, survive droughts, resist pests and pathogens, and helps create better tasting wine. A healthy, biodiverse soil ecosystem holds water, prevents erosion and run-off, and regenerates fertility. A healthy, biodiverse soil ecosystem pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, enriching plant life and rolling back the causes of climate change.
We cultivate a healthy, biodiverse soil ecosystem by planting the right vines in the right places, never using herbicides or other harmful synthetic chemical pesticides, planting diverse cover crops, fostering biodiversity in and around vineyards, integrating vineyards as much as possible into the natural environment, not tilling, grazing animals strategically, and composting.
2. Plants Are the Best Social Networkers
Plants have evolved to cooperate with trillions of bacteria, and connect to other plants and to each other via massive micorrhizal networks through which they exchange food and information. This is the soil-food-web. Plants are busy making millions of underground connections and communications while we walk about blithely thinking they are just stiff, solitary individuals.
When we till, or plow the soil, we break these vital connections and wound the soil.
3. You Don’t Feed the Vines, You Feed the Microbes
The way vines get the food they need to survive and thrive is by feeding carbon from the air to the bacteria and fungi in their root zone. Those bacteria and fungi break down the organic matter and nutrients in the soil and feed those to the vine in exchange for their carbon-based treats.
So when you put compost in the vineyard, you’re actually giving food to the microbes to give to the vines.
4. Soil Health is a Win-Win-Win Situation
First, let’s start with the lose-lose-lose example: Conventional farming.
In conventional farming you use chemical pesticides to kill many of the beneficial microbes, insects, flora and fauna along with the “harmful” ones. This results in a barren ecosystem which then must be enriched with more inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers. Over time the vines become more and more dependent on the pesticides and the fertilizers because they don’t have a healthy and biodiverse soil microbiome to give them what they need to thrive. They become like ICU patients on an IV. The grapes that result from this system lack the micronutrients and beneficial microbial partners necessary to have healthy fermentations naturally. So the winemaking must now involve the additions of yeast and yeast nutrients to ensure that the wines taste good. All of these additions – in the vineyard and the cellar – come at a cost, and the money you spend on them supports a huge agro-chemical industry and supply chain that perpetuates this unhealthy cycle and all of the damage it does to human and environmental health.
When you instead start by fostering a healthy soil by removing the chemical pesticides and fertilizers, the healthy and biodiverse soil microbiome strengthens the vines, which results in lowered costs as the vines become more and more healthy and less dependent on external inputs from year to year. It also protects the health of those who live and work in and around the vineyard, so you have healthy people to do the vineyard work, as well as healthy bird, animal, and insect populations to keep balance. As the soil-food-web improves each year so does the health of the grapes. Winemaking needs less inputs as healthy fermentations can take place naturally and without manipulation or additives. This results in wine that is rich with flavors that are vibrant and unadulterated. In addition, this system takes money away from the agro-chem industry/supply chain, removes carbon from the atmosphere, cleans waterways, and promotes the health of all.
That’s a win, win, win wine!
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