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    Wednesday, October 28, 2009

    Biodynamic Wine: A first look

    I wish I could go back in time to ask winemakers of past, "How do you think wine making will be affected by future technology?" They surely wouldn't know about our advances in computers.They might not mention the use of modern wine making trends like steel barrels, micro oxygenation, ultra-sound, computer chips in vineyards or extreme temperature control to make cheap wines palatable. However if I were to explained the new Biodynamic Wine trends sweeping the globe, they would think we have regressed back to medieval agricultural traditions!

    For those not familiar with biodynamic agriculture, let me give it to you straight from the Wikipedia article: "Biodynamic agriculture, a method of organic farming that has its basis in a spiritual world-view , first propounded by Rudolf Steiner treats farms as unified and individual organisms emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a closed, self-nourishing system."

    What this means is the vineyard is considered in it's entirety as a living thing and seen as an organism in it's own right, but one that is in consistent with lunar and cosmic patterns and rhythms and not merely a substrate for plant growth... Wheew...

    Wine makers are taking weird, unconventional methods of viticulture and wine making and following a strict biodynamic calendar of harvesting, planting and etc. because they believe it will help their vines and ultimately their finished wines. These methods are broken up into several preparations that all seem a bit odd and skeptical. Such examples include Preparation 500 where cow manure is buried into the soil for a period of time, dug back up and spread over the fields. Other examples include fermenting yarrow flowers in a deer's bladder or oak bark in a skull of a domestic animal and applying them to compost or spraying the vines with horsetail tea, according to the biodynamic calendar. Weird stuff you thought you'd see on Taboo, huh?

    But what definitely has the world in shock and awe is that no matter how medieval, superstitious or unreasonable these methods seem, the winemakers (all notable and renown in the wine making world) are producing outstanding wine with biodynamie. These producers include Domaine de la Romanee Conti, Zind Humbrecht, Huet, Beaux Freres , and Benziger among numerous others. (For a list of more producers check out http://www.wineanorak.com/biodynamic3.htm) I think what really has people going is because there is almost no way to prove this advantage scientifically... They just seem to be better. Here's an excerpt from wineanorak.com that sums up the whole thing:

    Despite these problems, proper studies have been carried out, and generally they seem to suggest that biodynamics really does work. In 1993, Reganold and colleagues compared the performance of biodynamic and conventional farms in New Zealand, a report published in leading scientific journal Science. They found that the biodynamic farms had significantly higher soil quality, with more organic matter content and microbial activity. In 1995 Reganold published a review of the different studies that have examined biodynamics and have met basic standards for scientific credibility. The conclusion was that biodynamic systems had better soil quality, lower crop yields and equal or greater net returns per hectare than their conventional counterparts. But what could the mechanism be? A tantalizing clue is offered by some experiments carried out by a graduate student of Reganold’s, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, on the effects of biodynamic preparations on compost development. In an experimental setting, biodynamically treated composts showed higher temperatures, faster maturation and more nitrate than composts that had received a placebo inoculation. Reganold is clearly impressed: ‘Of all the farm systems that I’ve seen, biodynamics is probably the most holistic.’

    As I conclude I will state that biodynamie on vineyards does work... They seem to produce greater environments, grow superior grapes and make tastier wine. The hard thing to conclude is why does this all work? Ancient civilizations have planted, harvested and celebrated with the phases of the moon and the cosmos for centuries. Perhaps there is something there? Perhaps it is some sort of spiritual, holistic reason for this all to make sense. Or perhaps it's just with biodynamic procedures, wine makers are paying close attention. They are giving their land, their resources and their environment the attention it deserves; the close attention and observation that is needed to produce superior wine. That's something this world could never have too many of; devoted, passionate and dedicated wine makers who "listen" to their vineyards. For further research on Biodynamic wine I urge you to google up on the subject and be sure to check out http://www.wineanorak.com/biodynamic1.htm for a great resource on the subject.

    Cheers to you,
    -Tatum
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