The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture (9 page)

Three of Burgundy's most celebrated estates, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine Leroy, and Domaine Leflaive, have gone biodynamic. So has Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace, Michel Chapoutier and Beaucastel in the Rhône Valley, and Louis Roederer in Champagne. Closer to home, Araujo Estate Wines, which makes one of Napa's most sought-after Cabernets, has embraced the biodynamic approach, as has Joseph Phelps, a legendary Napa winery. Each week seems to bring word of a new heavyweight convert to biodynamic viticulture. What was until fairly recently a fringe movement has become the biggest sensation to hit the wine world since the emergence of Parker.

Biodynamic viticulture traces its origins to a series of lectures delivered in 1924 by the Viennese scholar Rudolf Steiner. In a city famed for its intellectual vitality, Steiner distinguished himself both for the breadth and depth of his interests and knowledge and for the peculiarity of many of the ideas he espoused. He is best known as the father of anthroposophy, a convoluted doctrine that seeks to examine the spiritual world by means of the same scientific methods used to explore the physical universe and that aims to help the individual transcend materialism in order to forge closer ties with fellow humans, with nature, and with his own soul. The philosophy has attracted some prominent adherents and admirers over the years, including Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow, and it also serves as the basis for the Waldorf education movement (also known as Steiner education), which flourishes to this day.

In 1924, Steiner gave a series of lectures in Germany in which he laid out what became the core tenets of biodynamic agriculture. Steiner, in his early sixties at the time and in failing health (he died the following year), was asked by a group of farmers in Silesia (now part of Poland) to help them find a way of reversing the declining quality of their soils and crops, a crisis that they attributed to the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was an issue that had long concerned Steiner, who often lamented how much poorer fruits, vegetables, and meats had become during his lifetime, a downturn he blamed on industrialized agriculture. In response to the farmers' urgent request, Steiner traveled to Germany and delivered eight lectures prescribing not just a remedy for their problems but a new, revolutionary approach to agriculture. He told the farmers to stop using chemicals in their fields. In this, he was doing nothing more than embracing a central precept of organic farming. But what he went on to suggest would set biodynamic agriculture apart from mere organic farming. In Steiner's schemata, the farm was not simply an incubator of life but an organism itself, in which everything was intrinsically connected to everything else. A sick chicken had repercussions for the tomatoes; a diseased tree was a problem for the cows. Likewise, said Steiner, each farm was part of a larger biosystem; the earth itself was an organism, and it was clearly linked, gravitationally and otherwise, to the sun, the moon, and the other planets.

Steiner's theory of agricultural management was an odd amalgam of the autarkic and the universal (the cosmic, really). He proposed that each farm essentially be walled off from the rest of the world—that it be operated as an entirely self-sustaining entity, devoid of outside influences of any kind. This would require, among other things, using homemade fertilizers and pesticides, and Steiner instructed farmers to employ a specific array of homeopathic preparations, which he numbered 500 through 508. Preparation 500, for instance, was meant to promote healthy soil and involved filling a cow's horn with cow manure, burying it in the field in the autumn, and exhuming it in the spring. Preparation 506, a compost, required placing dandelion flowers in the stomach lining of a cow; this was to be planted in the earth during the winter months and dug up in the spring. For rodent control, Steiner turned to the skies: he prescribed catching a young field mouse, skinning it, burning the skin, and spreading the ashes across the field when the planet Venus occults the Scorpio constellation. He also instructed the farmers to plant their crops and harvest them according to planetary alignments. He claimed that the position of the moon and the other planets had a clear, demonstrable impact on all phases of a plant's development and that only by getting in sync with the rhythms of the solar system could the farmers restore their farms to health and improve the quality of their crops.

In 1981, Nicolas Joly, a young winemaker in the Loire, found a book about biodynamics at a secondhand store and took it with him on a skiing holiday. Entranced, he reread the book several times before returning home. Joly had recently taken over his family's winery, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, a legendary domaine set on the Loire River a few minutes outside the town of Angers. Coulée de Serrant is part of the Savennières appellation and produces a wine by that name, made from the Chenin Blanc grape. Coulée de Serrant's Savennières was once among the most esteemed French wines; the celebrated food writer Curnonsky famously declared it to be one of the five great white wines of France. Although the wines of Savennières had since fallen out of fashion, eclipsed in popularity by more opulent Chardonnay-based wines, Coulée de Serrant remained one of the most recognized names in French viticulture.

Joly stumbled upon the book at a time when he was experiencing a crisis in the vineyard. He had been using chemical treatments for several years, and like Steiner's Silesian farmers, he had watched as the quality of his soil and of his wines steadily eroded. To discover at that moment a book that perfectly described the problems he faced and a method of farming custom-designed to combat those problems was fortuitous beyond words. But for Joly, the biodynamic approach wasn't attractive simply because it promised to restore his vines to health; he also found its philosophical underpinnings appealing. Joly had just left a career as an investment banker (he holds an MBA from Columbia and worked for several years in New York) to take over Coulée de Serrant. But familial duty was not the only thing that brought him back to the Loire: he had grown disillusioned with finance and numbers and conventional modes of thinking and living. He was open to new ways of looking at the world, and he found in Steiner and biodynamics a tonic not just for his vineyard but for his soul.

Joly fully converted Coulée de Serrant to biodynamism in 1984. Today he is its most outspoken and militant advocate within the wine world. His book,
Wine from Sky to Earth
, a combination how-to guide and philosophic meditation, is considered the ur-text of biodynamic viticulture (in the dedication, Joly credits Steiner's writings with giving “profound meaning to my life”). He organizes large tastings of biodynamic wines in cities around the world and uses these events as a chance to preach to the converted and proselytize to the uninitiated. His style is unfailingly charmless and hectoring. An evangelical and missionary, he believes that biodynamism offers the only path to good wine. He also contends that the world is on the brink of environmental apocalypse and that embracing biodynamic viticulture is no longer merely a choice; it is a moral imperative (“We have reached the time when nature will implement its law on earth”).

Ironically, while the biodynamic approach appears to be yielding better wines almost everywhere that it is applied, it seems to have taken Coulée de Serrant in reverse. In fact, it is widely agreed that under Joly's management, Coulée de Serrant's Savennières has become a stinker. That has been my experience: I have consistently found Joly's wines to be ungenerous oddballs, emitting off-putting aromas and flavors. For Joly, the result seems to be a secondary concern; what apparently matters most is the process. “Before it can be good,” he has said, “a wine must be true.” Likewise, his book includes this nugget: “A biodynamic wine is not necessarily ‘good,' but it is always
authentic
.”

Joly, with his fire-and-brimstone style, is a fat target for biodynamics skeptics, of which there are many. A lot of people regard the method as New Age hooey. Stu Smith of California's Smith-Madrone winery, which makes some of the best wines you have probably never heard of, thinks that Steiner was a kook and that the biodynamic method is “a hoax” that ought to be accorded “the same level of respect we give witchcraft.” He has even set up a website called biodynamicsisahoax.com. In an article for the magazine
World of Fine Wine
, Douglass Smith and Jesús Barquín (the former a New York investor and wine collector with a doctorate in the history of science, the latter a Spanish wine expert and professor of criminology) dismissed the biodynamic approach as “a vista of starry eyes and good intentions mixed with quasi-religious hocus-pocus, good salesmanship, and plain scientific illiteracy.” They pointed out that there is no evidence that biodynamics yields healthier soils and grapes than regular organic viticulture and suggested that its positive effects are almost surely attributable to the standard organic practices it employs (no chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used). Indeed, they said, the few credible studies that have been done comparing the effects of biodynamics and organic viticulture on soil and grapes found no statistically significant differences between the two approaches. They ridiculed Steiner's eight preparations as “viticultural voodoo” and savaged the cosmological aspects of biodynamics as “pseudoscience.” In their judgment, biodynamics was nothing more than faith-based farming.

The faith-based aspect is undeniable. Like many faiths, biodynamics even has a schism. The main biodynamic organization, Demeter International, which was founded in 1928, certifies all types of biodynamic farms. Several years ago, a handful of French biodynamic winemakers, frustrated by Demeter's global mandate and what they viewed as its lax standards, formed a breakaway group called Biodivin, which certifies only biodynamic wineries. The U.S. arm of Demeter responded by trademarking the name Biodynamic, thus preventing American wineries from using the word
biodynamic
on their labels unless authorized to do so by Demeter.

So what to make of biodynamics? Even if some of it amounts to quackery, it yields seriously good wines, and the fact that it has won the adherence of some of the foremost producers on the planet speaks to the quality of the results. Not all biodynamic wines are good—just look at Coulée de Serrant. But the good ones, and there are many of them, are not only delicious; they display a vigor that you don't typically find in wines made from conventionally farmed grapes. There is an almost feral intensity about them, an untamed aspect that makes them seem somehow closer to the vine, closer to the vineyard. Like Stu Smith and other biodynamic bashers, I'm skeptical of Steiner and can't help but roll my eyes at the preparations that he prescribed. I suspect that the real secret behind the success of biodynamics is that it encourages—requires, really—winemakers to take fanatical care of their vineyards. By eschewing the use of all chemicals and painstakingly nurturing their vines and the soils beneath them, biodynamic producers are able to obtain great fruit (assuming the weather cooperates), which translates into fantastic wines assuming they show a reasonably deft hand in the cellar. I'm not sold on the particulars of biodynamics, but the quality of the wines has made a believer of me.

N
ATURAL
W
INES

Among oenophiles of all persuasions—those who enjoy fruit bombs, those who prefer less percussive wines—it is an article of faith that winemaking is best done with a light touch. We grape nuts never tire of pointing out that wine is foremost an agricultural product, and wine nomenclature, with its surfeit of pastoral imagery, underscores this essential fact. It is considered axiomatic that the best wines are those that bear the fewest fingerprints and that most clearly reflect the particular attributes of their vineyards—that offer the least adulterated expressions of sun, soil, and vine possible. In recent decades, however, science has given vintners an array of tools that can be used to change the fundamental character of a wine, altering its color, structure, texture, and taste. Inferior land, bad weather, and shoddy farming are no longer necessarily impediments to producing appealing wines; using technology, winemakers can now override the will of nature and perform all kinds of nips and tucks on their Cabernets and Syrahs.

The natural wine movement began as a backlash against this kind of manipulation. The idea was to defend authenticity and artisanship against industrial winemaking and bland homogeneity. Although using the word
natural
in reference to food or drink is normally taken to be an implicit claim of wholesomeness, health concerns have never factored prominently in the natural-wine canon, nor could they. That's because there is no evidence that “unnatural” practices—using additives such as powdered tannins, for instance, or oak chips—are harmful to consumers. They won't rot your innards, cause your teeth to fall out, or reduce your sperm count. The argument against them is simply that they represent a form of cheating and yield less authentic wines.

But it is one thing to want wines to be made as naturally as possible; it is quite another to anoint certain wines as “natural,” and this is where the natural-wine movement runs into a wall of tannins. For one thing, a truly natural wine goes by another name: it is called vinegar. If you don't add sulfur dioxide, which acts as an antioxidant and preservative, during the vinification process, the wine will very likely spoil and become vinegar (more on sulfur in a moment). So what then do natural-wine proponents really mean when they talk about “natural” wines? That's not entirely clear. In contrast to biodynamic wines, for which there are certification programs that require adherence to prescribed farming practices, natural wines have no official classification, no sanctioning body that decrees whether a wine qualifies.

In broadest terms, “natural” wines are described as those that have been made with minimal involvement by the vintner. As with organic and biodynamic wines, the grapes must come from vineyards that have not been treated with synthetic chemicals; what sets natural wines apart is that the same hands-off approach is supposed to be carried into the cellar. The winemaker performs only those tasks that require midwifery, such as crushing the fruit. Apart from that, the wines are left to birth themselves; “nothing added, nothing taken away” is the popular catchphrase. This means relying on ambient yeasts—those floating around the cellar and vineyard—rather than commercial ones, eschewing high-tech toys such as spinning cones and reverse osmosis machines, and neither acidifying wines nor otherwise tinkering with their composition.