Beyond Organic Wine

My guest for this episode is Nan McCarry, and she’s no exception to the exceptional people I’ve been fortunate to get to know because of this podcast. Nan is an ethnobotanist by passion and trade, and she has had a focus on the native grapes of North America over the last few years. What we might call “native” grapes, Nan refers to as “crop wild relatives.” She talks about the importance of preser...

In the intro to this episode I introduce the new name of the podcast: Beyond Organic Wine Podcast.  I also talk about the three weeks I've spent working with the crew of La Garagista, including Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber, and Camila Carrillo of La Montañela, and Anna Travers of Lilith Wines.  Should you get a chance to come to Vermont, you could not be more fortunate than to meet this crew –...

My guest for this episode is Mireia Pujol-Busquets, and she’s breeding the future of Catalonian grapes at her family’s estate vineyard just outside of Barcelona, Spain, called Alta Alella. 27% of the organic vineyards globally are in Spain, making Spain the country with the most organic vineyards in the world, by area. Mireia grew up on a vineyard that was organic from its inception in 1991, but s...

This episode is a special update on the 2023 vintage at my "estate” winegarden - Crenshaw Cru - in Los Angeles, where we lost essentially the entire crop to powdery mildew this year despite regular organic treatments and canopy management. But more than that, this episode is a call for an honest assessment of the vine species upon which we base our global wine industry: vitis vinifera. The truth i...

My guest for this episode is Gizem Duyar of Kerasus Wine. Gizem lives and makes wine in Turkey solely from “married vines" that are over a century old. A married vine is a vine that has been wrapped to a tree, grown with the tree, and lives symbiotically with a tree as its support structure. It is likely the most ancient form of viticulture because it simply mimicks how vines grow naturally withou...

My guests for this episode are my friends, my neighbors, and my bosses, Khalil Kinsey, Teron Stevenson, and Justin Leathers. Collectively they are known as the Westside Winos, and they own Offhand Wine Bar where I work a couple nights each week, and we talk about why Offhand is special, and why it shouldn't be. Offhand serves only West Coast (of the US) natural wine, meaning almost every wine by t...

My guest for this episode is Etelle Higonnet. Etelle is a graduate of Yale Law school and she spent her early career working on some war crimes tribunals, and with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. She then shifted focus from human rights to environmental protection and worked with Green Peace focusing on, among other things, ceasing global deforestation. She continued her focus on sto...

My guest for this episode is Gelert Hart of AmByth Estate in the Templeton Gap region of Paso Robles. Implicit in the idea of permaculture is the idea of "forever." It contains the goal of building a culture that can last. AmByth is two Welsh words that mean ForEver, and this adds another dimension to the term. What if we thought of our actions, our creations, as gifts for the future? How would th...

My guest for this episode is Deborah Parker Wong – the co-editor, with Pam Strayer, of Slow Wine USA. Centralas, my winery, is honored to be listed in the Slow Wine guide. I say honored, because Slow Wine is unique in the entire realm of wine scoring or recommendation guides in that it takes into account the ecological context of the wine that they recommend. All other wine scoring and recommendat...

My guest for this episode is Dave Carr of Raging Cider and Mead, and he’s helping to redefine what cider can be and where it can come from. Dave makes cider in San Diego County… and for those of you unfamiliar with California, that’s south of me. We often look north for great cider cultures, and I’ll admit that’s why it took me so long to have Dave on the podcast, but it turns out there’s an old,...

This is the second part of the special in-person, on-site conversation that I had in June of 2023  with Mike Biltonen of Know Your Roots. Please check out part 1 for Mike’s full bio, and for a fantastic episode about holistic orchard culture within a biodynamic context. On this episode we leave Mike’s Apostrophe Orchard and enter the forest that surrounds it. We leave the realm of the known, the c...

My guest for this episode is Mike Biltonen. Mike is the co-owner, with his wife, of Know Your Roots, an orchard and vineyard consultation and management business in the Northeast US. Mike has spent almost 40 years working with orchards, vineyards, and other specialty crops. He’s farmed in Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, California, and New York. Over the past 20 years his passion for sustainable agr...

My guest for this episode is Brent Mayeaux of Stagiaire Wines. Brent makes zero-zero wines with a lot of heart and hard work on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. This year Brent also organized and held the Wine From Here wine fair, with help from several other people of course. I’m very impressed with the humility that he embraces with the name of his winery: Stagiaire – the Apprentice. WE...

My guest is Marcelo Castro Vera of Octágono, one of a few natural wines in Mexico and the only winery nationwide that ferments in clay vessels buried in the ground. They don't have electricity in the winery, so the whole winemaking process is done by hand. They add zero sulfites to their wine. They also produce artisanal mezcal. The agaves are cooked in earth pits using fallen wood, crushed with a...

My guest for this episode is Dan Durica, and when I asked him about what inspires the work he does, he essentially credited limitations for his inspirations. What if we couldn’t throw fossil fuels at our problems? What if we eliminated the easy solutions we’ve relied on for the past 80 years? What if you couldn’t use fossil fuels to make or sell your wine? No driving, no electricity, no chemical s...

My guest for this episode is Xaime Niembro, of Vinos Barrigones. Vinos Barrigones translates to “Paunchy Wines” in English, though Google will translate it to “Pot-bellied wines.” And you’ll hear Xaime’s hilarious story of how the name Barrigon became the name for their wines and aesthetic. Xaime is using his Vinos Barrigones to regenerate his family’s 6.5 hectare or 16 acre vineyard near Queretar...

This is a special episode. More than an episode, it’s a direct request to all of you listening right now. Here’s the request: let’s solve the glass bottle problem right now. If you’ve been listening to this podcast recently, the name OOM should be familiar to you. They’re a sponsor of this podcast, and they are a company based here in my fair city that is tackling the bottle re-use challenge head...

Prepare to go on a magical, and at times hilarious, journey to a special place on earth.  Your guide on this journey is Jess Hopwood, and she has a lot of experience spoiling voyagers with amazing trips. She has been, among other things, a flight attendant on private jets, a butler on luxury yachts, and now runs Farm to Glass Wine Tours in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The Okanagan is t...

Master Sommelier David Keck discovered his love for wine while pursuing a career—and traveling the world—as an opera singer. He has a Master of Music Degree from Rice University, an undergraduate degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and attended Juilliard for opera performance. ​ After years of bartending and working in hospitality between operatic gigs, David took...

My guest for this episode is Clark Smith. Clark has been making and studying wine since the 1970’s. He’s had a huge influence on the wine world through his wine consulting business, and in 2013 he published the book Postmodern Winemaking. Ten years later, that book is still groundbreaking. Clark knows more than you do about the chemistry of winemaking. In addition to that, he’ll tell you he has a...

Drew Herman – Assume Superiority, Farm Scared, and Pretend Like You Know What You’re Doing While Killing Your Plants Imagine if you were a thousand foot tall giant. How successful would you be at helping a 5 foot tall farmer collect her chickens eggs? Drew Herman is back for a second episode jam-packed with information and laughs. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode with Drew, I highly...

When I think of Vermont, I think of slanted light and moody skies, wildflowers and rosy cheeks, small farms and big forests. And because of my guest for this episode, when I think of Vermont I also think of hardy vines and delicious wines. Deirdre Heekin is the person behind La Garagista and Domaine de la Foret, along with her husband Caleb, and what seems to be a continual stream of young winemak...

My guest for this episode is Hans Peter Schmidt. He goes by Peter Schmidt, and he is a director and faculty member for the Ithaka Institute,  an international network for carbon strategies and climate farming, and he farms and makes wine from the amazing Mythopia wine-ecosystem in Switzerland, which he also uses as a research vineyard for the Ithaka Institute. He’s also involved in other winegrowi...

My guest for this episode is Virginia Samsel. Virginia is a unique kind of vineyard, or orchard, consultant. She provides energy work and consultation using a synthesis of biodynamics and reiki. She translates the the messages she receives from a site into helpful advice for the people who care for it, and that can help farmers build a spiritual connection to their land. Much of this conversation...

One of the sponsors for this episode is actually the guest for this episode: Stephen Wilson of Vermont Vineyards. I met Stephen at the Vitinord Conference, where VT Vineyards was also a sponsor, and I admired him and his approach to viticulture enough to suggest that we have this conversation… and I guess the feeling was mutual because he simultaneously suggested sponsoring the podcast. The result...