Biodynamic wines have the flavor of devotion

Twenty years before J.I. Rodale coined the term "organic" in the early 1940s, an Austrian named Rudolf Steiner had already introduced another holistic approach to sustainable agriculture: biodynamics. Caricatured as new-age crazies burying dung-stuffed bull's horns under the new moon, practitioners of biodynamics view farms as self-sustaining organisms that interact with their surrounding ecosystems -- including the spiritual and cosmic realms -- and go to enormous lengths to maintain the harmony and health of these ecosystems. While the biodynamics community is small, it is growing, particularly in winemaking.

Over the last few years, I have been lucky to taste more than 70 biodynamic wines. What did I expect from these grapes, grown in balance with cosmic forces? Would I see God, or should I bring someone to talk me down from my levitating lotus?

Of course not, but I did expect the wines to be delicious, because I knew I was going to find in them what I always look for in every fine wine: passion. No matter what you think of biodynamics (and I advocate it for the way it promotes environmental sustainability and stewardship of the land), the fact of the matter is that its complexities necessitate extraordinary care, and that level of care, when applied by skilled winemakers, almost always produces great wines.

Nicolas Joly is an indefatigable true believer, the father of biodynamic winemaking in the United States, though he is French and owns one of the world's greatest white wine vineyards, Coulée de Serrant, in the Loire Valley village of Savennières. He preaches from personal experience, with the zealotry of the converted.

Coulée de Serrant was first planted by Cistercian monks in 1130. With the ancient monastery still on the grounds of the estate, in the mid-1970s, French agricultural agents told Joly that his family's methods were archaic, and that they should adopt the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. A graduate of Columbia University and a former investment banker, Joly encouraged his family to join the modern age and embrace this high-tech approach.

But soon, he noticed that the color of the soils changed, and that the birds, animals and beneficial insects abandoned Coulée de Serrant. The vineyard had lost its life, and Joly began his search for alternatives to compacting the soil with chemicals. In 1984, he turned to biodynamics, with an approach kind of like ramped-up organics: trying to maintain a healthy biodiversity in his vineyards, unlike typical monoculture farms, which basically keep anything that's not being harvested out of the picture entirely. He replaced synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides with homeopathic concoctions, focusing on seasonally available mixtures made from products available on the vineyard itself. After just five years of growing according to those methods, Joly "began to see nature reborn," and eventually he published "Wine From Sky to Earth: Growing and Appreciating Biodynamic Wine," which has become the bible for the biodynamic wine movement. (Joly's current essays can be found here). :

http://www.coulee-de-serrant.com/index-en.html