Beyond Organic Wine

My guest for this episode is ​Lore McSpadden-Walker. Lore (they/them) is an embodiment navigator and neuro-spicy hedge witch who has dedicated their work towards helping people who have experienced systemic denial of access, disability, and/or traumatic experiences learn about their physical selves through education, facilitated conversations, movement coaching and somatic awareness, Reiki, herbal...

The last episode featured a 110 acre biodynamic chateau in one of Washington state’s famed AVAs. This episode features a 1 acre organic and regenerative vineyard of hybrids and vinifera with a straw bale winery and an underground house in a part of Washington that isn’t known for wine. I point out this contrast not to say that one is better than the other, but because in our dominant culture I’ve...

Let’s take a trip to the state of Washington in the US. You know Washington… it’s that place where it rains so much on the coast that vampires can live there year round. It’s a land for volcano connoisseurs. Its largest city was named for a man commonly known as Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples, who is thought to have said: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com My guest for this episode is Pascal Baudar. For many of you he needs no formal introduction, so I’ll introduce him informally. I think he’s the Monet of wine. He has given me the inspiration of thinking of wines as impressionist paintings, capable of expressing more than just a landscape or regional distin...

What seeds are you sending out into the world with your wine? What systems, or economies, are you building with the energy you exchange with the plants? Absent the physical seeds, are you helping disperse the vine’s metaphysical seeds, the stories and ideas the plants embody, or something else? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus ep...

"What do you think, you higher men? Am I a prophet? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams? A midnight bell? A drop of dew? An odour and scent of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it? My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun..." That’s Friedrich Nietzsche as quoted on the label of a bottl...

My guest for this episode is the matriarch of a Mendocino winery that has been organic since before there was organic certification. Martha Barra runs Barra of Mendocino which includes the Girasole brand, one of the few wineries with both vineyards and winery certified organic. Barra is a family business that her late husband Charlie started by purchasing Redwood Valley Vineyards in 1954. They wer...

Sunny Hodge is the owner of wine bars Diogenes the Dog in Elephant & Castle and Battersea-based aspen & meursault. Known for challenging the status quo, Sunny has built a reputation as a disruptor in the wine industry. The Cynic’s Guide to Wine is his first book - a bold, unapologetic guide to a subject that’s far too often shrouded in mystery. With a degree in Mechanical Engineering f...

This episode is the last of the Quebec series, and it’s such a great one to end with… because it makes me miss Quebec and want to go back for a visit again as soon as possible. This one is special for several reasons: first, I got to interview a family… or part of the family who farms and makes wine as Vignoble Pigeon Hill. Kevin, Matthew and Trisha Shufelt treated Maxime and me to a beautiful tou...

My guest for this episode is Simon Naud of Vignoble La Bauge. La Bauge is the first Canadian vineyard to be Regenerative Organic Certified by the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Knowing what I now know about Quebec it doesn’t surprise me that the first certified Regenerative Organic vineyard is here. Simon is also a past recipient of the best winemaker or vigneron for Quebec. When you see the trell...

On June 21, 2025 I gave a talk at the Carnival Brettanomyces in Utrecht, Holland, virtually. It was 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees farenheit in Holland at that time. The original title of this talk was called Making Wine for My Community, and you need to know the original title –  because I structured this talk as a three part breakdown of the assumptions implicit for most people when they hear...

My guest for this episode is Michael Marler who, with his partner Véronique Hupin, owns and farms and makes wine as Vignoble Les Pervenches in Quebec and has been doing this for 25 years. Mike has twice been selected as the best winegrower or Vigneron in Quebec, and he’s the only person to have received this honor twice. 75% of his vines are vinifera, with 25% Seyval Blanc, and he specializes in C...

I’m excited to introduce another incredible and relatively new Quebec winery, Domaine Oak Hill… and I love that it was named for a tree, and I met that tree and it is incredible… and worthy of having a winery named after it. I’ll even have a photo of Maxime and my guest and the owner of Oak Hill, Louise Macdonald, standing under and dwarfed by the oak. Louise, with her partner Sylvain Lalonde, far...

I’m so excited to bring you this special series on Quebec wine over the next few weeks, and I think you’ll soon realize why. Quebec might be 25 years ahead of most of the wine world. The innovation, adaptative strategies, and ecological approach to expressing something unique about their land, sets an example of the path forward for dominant wine culture. But the one thing you can’t hear on a podc...

My guest is Laura Barrett, and she’s been the winemaker at Clif Family winery in Napa for over 10 years. I met Laura when she was on a panel I moderated for Napa Green earlier this year. She’s got some really great things to say about working for a B corp and the farming they do at Clif Family… which has been organic from the beginning and is now introducing regenerative practices. None of that is...

Christian Cain does contract grazing for vineyards and orchards in Northern California with sheep and goats with his company Perennial Grazing. “We are members of natural communities: what we do to them, we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them can we nurture ourselves. Palates link cultures with landscapes and moderating the impacts of palates on human and environmental health will require chan...

This is part 2 of my interview the Dan Rinke of Art + Science. We get into even more specifics of how he makes his holistic farm of vines and trees and animals work with very little inputs, his lessons and insights from multiple years of running both egg and meat chickens through his vineyard, his experience as an organic transition advisor, and much more. At one point Dan mentions how his orchard...

This episode is part 1 of a two part episode with Dan Rinke of Art + Science Cidery and Winery in Oregon. The conversation was interrupted by technical difficulties after about 45 minutes, which was plenty of time to get to hear about Dan’s ecological journey with wine, and how his love of winemaking turned him into a crazy beyond organic wine and cider grower and maker. Dan has had a pretty serio...

My guest for this episode is Fritz Westover. Fritz, like me, is originally a fellow Pennsylvanian, and he’s going on 3 decades of learning about, working with, and teaching about viticulture. He runs a viticulture consulting business, focused primarily in Texas, Georgia and the US South, and he reaches an international audience through his Virtual Viticulture Academy. And he’s also a fellow podcas...

My guest for this episode is Rob Schultz. Rob is the vineyard manager for Lemelson Vineyards in Oregon, and farms 130 acres of organic vineyards in the Willamette Valley. Lemelson Vineyards has been certified organic for over 25 years, and has been one of my favorites since I started in wine over 2 decades ago. Rob also happens to be one of the main people responsible for the Organic Winegrowers N...

My guest for this episode is Elaine Chukan Brown. Elaine is a writer, speaker, wine educator, and now author of the book The Wines of California. Elaine has been a contributor, columnist, editor, and/or wine reviewer for nearly every wine publication out there, and they co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum, and have advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries. In 2019, the Win...

In this episode I interview Wendy McNabb, the current owner with her husband, of Carolina Heritage Vineyards, one of only four certified organic wineries on the entire East Coast of the United States. They use paper bottles, so we talk about the pros and cons of this alternative packaging. And we talk about some of the really interesting wines they make at Carolina Heritage, including dry Muscadin...

I’ve known about Botanist & Barrel and DeFi Wines for a couple years, and even visited them in Asheville, North Carolina. They introduced me to both Muscadine grapes and Paw-paws through their wines. And they have a wine named Grapes Have Feelings, made with apples and muscadine grapes, that is both a delicious wine and one of my favorite names for a wine. I talk to Lyndon Smith, one of the fo...

Tommy Fenster is a scientist who studies agroecological systems, but specifically for the last few years he’s been focused on gathering data from dozens of vineyards around California and studying the practices and impacts of regenerative viticulture. Tommy gathers data across something like 49 vineyards. In a sense, the largest regenerative viticulture trial is the one being conducted across all...

Gideon Beinstock started Clos Saron with Saron Rice in 1999 as an attempt to purely and distinctively express the terroir of their home in the Sierra Foothill outside of Oregon House, California. Over the years they've developed and refined both their winegrowing and winemaking with an eye always toward a more pure expression, less about them and any input, and more about finding what the land has...