Beyond Organic Wine

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...

This fun episode is a conversation with Domenico Musumeci, co-owner of Ca’Musu and Wine Pirati, with his wife Elise. They live and farm wine in Michigan, and Mimmo talks us through their unique approach to viticulture… which involves working with a draft horse named Buster. I’m a lover of horses, myself, and worked as a horseback trail guide in Colorado at one time in my life, and had the great fo...

My guest for this episode is Caine Thompson, head of sustainability for O’Neill Vintners. Caine has initiated and oversees the largest side-by-side trial of regenerative organic viticulture in the world at Robert Hall Winery, one of O’Neill Vintners flagship brands in Paso Robles. Going into it’s 5th year in 2025, this regenerative organic viticulture trial is already providing data that show that...

My guest for this episode makes wine from flowers. Her name is Aaliyah Nitoto and her winery is called Free Range Flower Winery. She’s based out of Oakland, California, so she could use grapes. But her first attempts at infiltrating the grape wine hegemony we’re overly welcoming. As she assessed and regrouped, her studies led her to a different calling. Her story is inspiring and her fermentations...

This episode digs into several varieties of hybrid grapes being grown in New Hampshire by the team that makes up NOK Vino. I speak with Nico Kimberly, the founder of NOK Vino, about the challenging viticulture of New Hampshire, what its like to be making wine in a new, young wine region, the importance of community to these efforts, and the diversity of grapes that are making it possible to do wha...

Maybe you took a break from alcohol this January and you don't want to go back to drinking wines made within the dominant paradigm. Maybe you'd like to try something truly extraordinary, rare, unique, ecological, and excellent. If so... this episode offers some suggestions.  For this episode I assembled a gathering of Los Angeles wine professionals to taste through a handful of wines that represen...

Becky Sykes is the Program Director of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, and she’s gives us a great introduction to many of the resources and opportunities available to wine producers through their work. Becky tells us about the RVF’s upcoming 1 block challenge, as well as their regenerative Toolkit that you can participate in as a winegrower, and we discuss many of the other resources and...

Bruce Reisch joined the faculty of Cornell University in New York in 1980 and spent the last 40 years specializing in developing new grape cultivars as well as new grape breeding techniques. During this time his program released 14 new grape cultivars, 10 of which are wine grapes. In fact I have one of his most popular grapes, Traminette, growing with a persimmon tree in my front winegarden here i...

Behind the ecological devastation caused by conventional, industrial viticulture and agriculture in general are ideas of disconnection and individualism, which lead to extraction and parasitism. These won't be solved by focusing on soil health. We need to rebuild our belonging to the community of life. Gratitude is a great place to start to reconnect with our dependence on our community. The Haude...

My guest for this episode is Daniel Callan, the cellar man behind Slamdance Koöperatieve. Daniel pointed out to me recently that I've been too focused on winegrowing. I had to agree, and Daniel’s suggestion was that we talk about how the past of winemaking may actually be its future. Because, essentially, all wines made throughout history until sometime around the start of the 20th century, were n...