Many apologies for my little exile here. Last week was spent in California, specifically in Napa and Sonoma seeing producers I represent.
Many things happening in Cali wine these days. Overall, there's definitely a grassroots shift back to the old school California wine scene: less oak, normal levels of alcohol, a search for true terroir, an investment in organic and bio-dynamic farming, and basically a truly sincerre effort to find balance in their wines. To be more frank, let's put it this way, at night after tasting, most producers would drink European wine rather than their own. Telling of the future.
There was one stop that I can't stop thinking about: Littorai.
Littorai is the project of a guy named Ted Lemon. I call Lemon the Yoda of the Cali wine scene as he's basically been there and done that in every aspect of wine production. He's made micro-production cuvees, and then he's consulted for the Franciscan Group. In the end he and his wife started this little winery called Littorai focusing on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the true Sonoma Coast (basically from "on the Pacific Ocean"). To say he works in a Burgundian style is really not enough. Ted managed Domaine Roulot (the famous Meursault producer) in the early 1980s- in fact he was the first American ever to manage a Burgundian estate. And today, I would easily put the wines of Littorai up against any top white Burgundies.
Ted's 2006s were stunning, but I expected that. What was revolutionary was his belief and practice of bio-dynamic farming. There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo going around bio-dynamic farming, and even I was skeptical of it prior to my visit with Ted. Harvesting and racking according to moon cycles. Burying a cow's horn filled with cow dung in your soil. And spraying animal's skins on your vineyard. Huh!? What!? You see what I mean?
As Ted put it, the premise is to return the soil (not the vines!) to a healthy natural state. The founder of bio-dynamics is a guy named Rudolph Steiner and Steiner writes about the ancient method of farming where the land co-existed in both a physical and spiritual world- in perfect harmony. So, yes, cow horns filled with year old cow manure-based compost are burried in the vineyard as the cow has the most advanced digestion system on the planet and this would spiritually invigorate the soil. Teas and sprays (that do have hamster skins in them) are employed. The hamster skins are the more intense part of the sprays, but they are there (again) to tell the spiritual animal pest world that they are not wanted in the vineyard. Moon cycle work is done. This makes the most sense, as Ted put it, "Two major cycles have been decided by the moon and control our lives: tides and the feminine cycle- both 28 days." True, true.
Is this all a bunch of dogma? Well, no. Ted's vineyards were glowing alive- just bursting with life. Moreover, the energy and vibe of his sites was very calm and positive, in comparison to the 20+ other producers I saw. The problem is that bio-dynamics is not quantifiable. You have to trust. But it makes a lot of sense. It's a return to the old natural way of farming when things were done on natural cycles, organically, and with respect for all of the elements that belonged to the site.
Makes an interesting question- is the ancient way the future?
1 comment:
So much of biodynamics just "seems" like voodoo. You need to see through the apparent religiousity of it and recognize its basics. For instance, the moon (and its phases) affects the density, and by extension, the clarity, of a liquid. When I ran the Manhattan Brewery (a lifetime ago) I learned the old time brewers would clarify their beer at the dark of the moon -much more efficient that way. It really works! So much of what Steiner and his team developed was an amalgam of old-time traditional methods that always worked in the past but had fallen out of favor.
I wonder if Ted is working with Alan York. Did he mention the name? Alan is an amazing fellow. He's the one who set up Joe Macari in BD and was the guiding force behind Ceago del Lago, Jim Fetzer's project. He rips through the highfaluttin' aspect of BD that Nicolas Joly is so guilty of and shows it for what it is, good, safe farming. Farming that requires a greater effort and skill but rewards not only in better crops but also healthier neighbors.
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