Beyond Organic Wine

Esther Park leads Cienega Capital, a private investment company that invests in food and farming enterprises that are helping to build a regenerative food system. This episode is about the unique criteria and ways of investing that Cienega Capital uses, and why it shouldn’t be so unique. If you are a regenerative farmer or if you are helping to build a regenerative food system – and I think Esther...

This episode is about growing Vitis vinifera wine grapes without sprays. Yes, it is possible. My guest is Paul Vandenberg of Paradisos del Sol Winery in Washington state in the US’s Pacific Northwest, and he has been growing about 5 acres of vinifera with zero sprays since 2012. Beyond this pretty amazing achievement, Paul has a remarkable wine career. He started by making wine with blackberries,...

My guest for this episode is Megan Bell of Margins Winery near Santa Cruz California, and this conversation may cause you to have strong emotional reactions at times. That’s not a trigger warning, it’s a tease. Megan has hot takes on just about every topic related to wine, and I’m not shy about asking her some big questions. Most of all I think you’ll come to love Megan’s honesty and openness abou...

Daniel Hess is the owner of Convivium Imports, which has one of the largest Swiss wine portfolios in the US, as well as unique wines from lesser known producers practicing organic viticulture (at minimum) in lesser known regions all over Europe. The wine he imports to the US reflects his multi-cultural background and his desire to represent a greater diversity of producers who put great farming fi...

My guest for this episode is Ben Falk. If you don’t know Ben, he’s the author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead, 20 Years of Permaculture and Whole Systems Design , which I would describe as THE homesteading manual and is the result of decades of Ben’s life in Vermont designing, implementing, and maintaining regenerative polycultures systems. Ben is very well known in the permaculture world, but...

If you haven’t heard of Dr. Jonathan Lundgren and Ecdysis, you’re in for a treat. Jon is from the middle of this country and has seen the return of dust storms to our farmland. He was one of the most preeminent scientists in his field, but when he looked around at the farmland he passed as he drove through the Midwest, he saw that none of his achievements were making a difference. He wanted to eff...

My guest for this episode is Nick Hillman. Nick has worked with vineyards on three continents, including all across the US. Nick now lives in Texas where hed does vineyard and farm consultation with his company Regenerative Agriculture Solutions. Nick has been on a journey that led him from conventional, recipe-type viticulture to a transformed regenerative outlook and approach. He tells us about...

What if everything you ever heard about foxy wine is a lie? Wine’s F-word is the word "Foxy," and I have been on a journey over the last few years to discover the truth about this word. It has been a surprising and surprisingly impactful journey because it turns out that this word is tied up with almost everything that is currently and perennially relevant to the wine industry because it has to do...

Meet Charlie and Josh of Sylvan Farm and Cidery. They do such an excellent job of introducing themselves and their story, that it would be redundant for me to pre-introduce them here. But I will tempt you to listen on by saying that they talk about harvesting wildish fruit – you know wild is an illusion, right? So maybe feral is more accurate - and making wine cider from it. Or cider wine. They ta...

Winegrowers around the globe have made it their goal to grow grapes without sprays. Not only are they succeeding, they are reshaping the way we think about wine. This is a special episode featuring a story about multiple winegrowers who make wine from grapes that they never spray with pesticides or fungicides, neither conventional nor organic. If the thought of attempting this makes you queasy, it...

My guests for this episode are Kelly Allen and Andrew Napier of Artemisia Farm in Virginia. They are hybrid grape growers, and winemakers, aromatized wine makers, makers of wine made with native American fruits besides grapes, writers and publishers, wine faire organizers, farmers who do a regular CSA, foragers, and passionate entrepreneurs. But more than that they are incredibly thoughtful about...

This episode is the second part of the conversation I had with Nicolas Haack of Triebwerk agroforestry consulting in Germany. In this part, Nicolas asks me to go into detail about the vitiforestry project I’m planning near the Finger Lakes region of New York. As part of my education and design process for this farm, I took a permaculture design certification course last year through Oregon State U...

“To care for what we know requires care for what we don’t, the world’s lives dark in the soil, dark in the dark.” “Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know. We live by lives we don’t intend, lives that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast our designs, staying by passing through, surviving again and again the risky passages from ice to warmth, dark to light.” - Wendell Berry,...

Joyce Jones and Charity Potter sound like the street names of Marvel super heroes, but they’re actually the real women I interview for this episode. They’re better than super heroes, though, because they actually live in this messy, complex real world and take part in the real battles that result from living with the courage to speak up and ask questions and call BS when they see BS. This episode...

This episode is a conversation with three gents who help caretake the oldest winery in the world: Staffelter Hof. It has been a winery since the 800s… and it seems incredibly fitting that Jan Matthias Klein, Kosie van der Merwe, and Nicolas Haack are thinking and talking about how to build resilience into their systems. They farm organically, have planted PIWIs, and implements several hectares of...

This episode is an outdoor spirits tasting with Rob Easter in the backyard at Crenshaw Cru… so you will hear some authentic LA audio texture in the back ground. Rob Easter is the man behind Workhorse Rye and Modern Ancient spirits, and he’s trying to instigate a revolution in the grain spirits industry. The vast majority of grain spirits in the US come from a single variety of genetically modified...

My guest for this episode is Regine Rousseau. Regine is the the founder & CEO of Shall We Wine, and she’s also the communications director for The Veraison Project… one of the best named programs in wine. Regine explains the work of Veraison Project, and she offers some really important insights into how we can help make wine more inclusive. I’ll be honest, I got a little choked up as I relist...

When we say the word "wine" we most often express a system of unquestioned assumptions that excludes the fruit fermentation traditions of everyone throughout all time who has made "wine" from anything besides Vitis vinifera. As we head into 2024, I'm asking us to begin to question those assumptions. Whose definition of wine are we using? Who and what is included and excluded from the dominant defi...

My guest for this episode is Cameron Clark. Cameron just finished a masters program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. As part of completing his masters he spent several months working on an Biodynamic farm and the wrote a thesis titled: Spiritual Agriculture, Wellness, & Sustainability: A case study of Biodynamic agriculture in South Tyrol, Italy Last week’s episode...

This episode is a special how-to exploration of a year of biodynamic viticulture.  The more I’ve learned about biodynamics, the curiouser and curiouser I’ve become. and the more I want to learn. So this episode is a practical exploration of biodynamics from both a practical and a philosophical perspective. 2024 is the 100 year anniversary of the start of Biodynamics.  My guest for this episode is...

For a dose of hope and imagination and a vision of beauty and permanence, for this episode I bring you Ron and Monique of Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands. Ron and Monique are doing so much cool stuff all at once I don’t know where to begin. They are the largest commercial no-spray vineyard that I’m aware of, at 6 hectares or 15 acres, and they’re doing this in Holland… That means that the vi...

This episode is sponsored by Stoke Wines. https://stokewines.au/ My guest for this episode is Jason Haas. Jason is the partner and general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles California. I hope that you’ve heard of Tablas Creek, but if not, let me give you a short list of their environmental leadership in the wine industry. Tablas Creek was the first Regenerative Organic Certified wine...

I heard a great quote that went something like this: when you’re a child, you think your parents are gods. When you become an adolescent, you realize they’re human. When you become an adult, you forgive them for being human. When you become wise, you forgive yourself for being human. My guest for this episode is Nick Dugmore. Nick is a winemaker in South Australia for his winery The Stoke. Nick li...

AKA - How to make wine from everything besides grapes! It seems to me that what we have called wine and revered as wine and created certifications and diplomas about, is not actually wine. It’s one perspective on one kind of wine from one region of the planet. And I think the first step, the lowest hanging fruit if you will, to having an authentic local wine culture is simply using local ingredien...

My guest for this episode is Zac Brown of Alderlea Vineyards in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Zac grows an array of grapes in his vineyard, some that he has to spray multiple times every year, and some that he doesn't really have to spray but chooses to once per year. Zac grows resilient wine grapes (some PIWIs), side by side with more common vinifera, and he h...