Beyond Organic Wine

Wine and winemaking are having a renaissance in Los Angeles. And Lindsay Williams and Belen Arredondo are making sure that South Central is part of that renaissance. Lindsay is a doctor of nursing, a frontline worker during the pandemic, and the founder of the South LA Wine club. Belen is a South LA garagiste, literally making a ton of wine in her garage, and joined Lindsay as a co-operator of the...

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is an important mantra and one that we’ve all heard and applied in some small or large way at home. But for my guest for this episode, this was more than a good idea – it was her career, and it led to her starting her winery. Lisa Bauer is the owner of Yamakiri – a winery she started when she discovered a feral sauvignon blanc vineyard full of grapes that were going to...

Today we take a trip to the country to meet Craig Camp, the General Manager of Troon Vineyard in the Applegate Valley AVA of Southwest Oregon. Troon is a certified organic and biodynamic winery and estate vineyard that focuses on blends made from the grapes of Southern France, which seem to do extremely well in this northern area with a hot Mediterranean climate. Craig was brought in to regenerate...

This episode highlights one of the new winemaking teams that are part of the Southern California Wine Rennaissance. Herrmann York is the brand new winery that is a partnership of three young gents: Dustin Herrmann, Garrett York, and Taylor York. They all originate and make wine from a part of California that is often both over-looked and unfairly maligned as a wine growing region: southern, specif...

Matt Niess discusses his winery slash cidery, North American Press, which is a California winery dedicated to native & hybrid grapes, heirloom apples, and native ingredients. Matt forages wild grapes to blend with heirloom apples to make cider. He farms and makes wine from a small Baco Noir vineyard on the Sonoma Coast that is own-rooted in clay, below the fog line, and is not tilled NOR SPRAYED....

Laura Brennan Bissel is the owner of and winemaker for INCONNU. She built her career, INCONNU, and a new project in the Columbia Gorge, by following her curiosity, her drive to find an occupation that allowed her to express her innate creativity, all while being guided by her love of wine. As you’ll hear, Laura is beautifully articulate about some of the most important aspects of wine – its abilit...

My guest for this episode is Alice Anderson. Alice is the vigneron for Amevive winery, based in Santa Barbara County. Alice leases the Ibarra-Young vineyard in the Los Olivos district and farms it with regenerative organic and biodynamic viticulture in partnership with animals and the native flora and fauna. In this interview we really dig into the winegrowing and winemaking specifics of how to cr...

There is a lot of confusion about the term "organic." These misunderstandings lead a lot of people to be incorrectly dismissive or critical of “organic” foods and practices.  This is a short episode to clear up these misunderstandings about "organic." Adam Huss, host and creator of the Organic Wine Podcast, discusses exactly what Organic does NOT mean, and what it actually does mean.  This is a pu...

Nadine Brown’s story is in many ways a classic American tale. Nadine is an immigrant. She came to the US to study and work, and when plans didn’t work out, she found herself applying for a job as a restaurant host in Washington DC. She had no previous restaurant experience and had every intention for it to be a temporary position. However, she fell in love with the hospitality industry. In restaur...

Dr. Andrew Smith is the COO and Chief Scientist for the Rodale Institute. The Rodale Institute the non-profit that was the birthplace of the organic movement. It has been the global leader at the forefront of the science behind organic agriculture. The Institute has conducted decades-long comparative studies on the results between organic farming versus conventional farming. The Rodale Institute h...

As a young US diplomat working in Switzerland, Sandra Taylor fell in love with wine while visiting the nearby Burgundy region of France. Sandra is now CEO of Sustainable Business International, a consulting business that assists clients at various stages of environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice, primarily in the food and beverage sector. Sandra has studied...

Roni Selects is a preeminent importer and distributor of natural wines, based in los angeles. And Roni Ginach is its founder. She was the former wine direct for the renowned restaurant Michael’s of Santa Monica until she was given the opportunity to help distribute wine for California’s Grandfather of Natural Wine – Tony Coturri. From there a new career was born. Now Roni represents winemakers fro...

Pamela Marrone is the Founder of Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc. and multiple other companies dedicated to finding, developing and distributing Biological Pesticides. Her companies have been responsible for several of the most widely used organic pesticides in the wine industry today, including: Serenade, Sonata, Regalia, Grandevo, and Venerate. Pam is on the boards of several institutions, companie...

Ricky Taylor worked in an office in Houston Texas and one day decided to plant a regeneratively farmed vineyard 600 miles away on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere in far west Texas at over a mile high in elevation. What Ricky and his partner, Katie, are doing with Alta Marfa – their vineyard and soon to be winery outside of Marfa, Texas - is something that essentially hasn’t been done befor...

Among several other things, Jeff Lowenfels is the author of a trilogy of books that should be required reading for everyone on the planet, but especially those of us who work in wine. His books are titled: Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Nutrients, and Teaming with Fungi Be warned – your mind is about to be blown. If you haven’t been exposed to the soil food web, it’s likely that everything yo...

Brook Williams used to be an accountant, and yet he still made the seemingly crazy decision to get into the wine business as a biodyanmic grape farmer/ vineyard owner. How did he justify such a potentially economically risky decision to the accounting part of his brain? His answer to this will give anyone with a dream of owning a vineyard some practical financial ideas about how to make vineyard o...

Doug Swim is the California Sales Manager for Amy Atwood Selections, one of the premier distributors of natural wine in California. The portfolio that Doug supervises includes the most well-known names in the New California wine movement, and we discuss what it's like to work with and be part of this new, crazy thing that's happening here in California and in Los Angeles specifically. This is an i...

Abe Schoener has been a disrupter and part of the avant garde of the new school of California wine for so long he’s old school new school. Since 2000 he has been the mind behind The Scholium Project – his winery/philosophical pursuit of a natural, vineyard-specific wine experience. Recently he has moved his base of operations to downtown Los Angeles, and is beginning to make wines from unique old...

Chloe Miranda is the sommelier at Birdie Gs Restaurant in Santa Monica, California. Birdie G’s is one of our favorite restaurants, not just because the food and wine is amazing, but also because they use a significant percentage of organically grown ingredients and feature many wines grown organically (or better). Chloe is my favorite sommelier. She’s a consummate and egoless professional, asks go...

Matt Clark is an assistant professor of horticulture and enology at the University of Minnesota. He heads up the U of M participation in VitisGen2 , a multi-institutional grape breeding collaboration that has a goal to breed new resistant grape varieties that taste delicious and can be grown with far less pesticide use than standard European grapes. Matt is at the cutting edge of the academic effo...

Andy Brennan is the owner of Aaron Burr Cidery in New York, and he's the author of Uncultivated - a book about making cider and a cider business from wild, foraged apples.  Real apple cider is one of America's finest wines, and Andy is one of the finest cider makers in America. In this interview we explore his philosophies and strategies for navigating the modern world with an perspective that is...

Rudy Marchesi is the chairman of the board of directors for Demeter USA , the national Biodynamic certifying organization for all biodynamic agriculture. Rudy is also a managing partner for Montinore Estate . Montinore is based in the Willamette valley in Oregon, and is one of the largest biodynamic wineries in the nation, growing classic Oregon Pinot Noir, as well as some Italian varieties that a...

Mimi Casteel is Imbibe Magazine’s 2020 Wine Person of the Year. She’s the vigneron for Hope Well , a certified organic vineyard and a winery in Oregon that she farms regeneratively with animals and birds and all kinds of flora and fauna with no tilling and no fences. Please do yourself a favor and find Mimi’s YouTube video about glyphosate. It’s a master class on soil and vine microbiology, and th...

Karl Hambsch is the owner of the only certified organic winery in Virginia - Loving Cup Vineyards & Winery , outside of Charlottesville - and one of less than a handful of organic wineries on the entire East Coast of the US.  Karl has been able to grow wine organically in Virginia because of a lot of hard, and careful, work. He has trialed over 50 varieties of grapes over the past dozen years to f...

How can wine help connect us to the solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing the world today? How can the wine industry change to make this possible? And who is Adam Huss, and why has he started the Organic Wine Podcast to answer these questions? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.sub...