Going new aged

Last week, during the autumnal equinox, a handful of winemakers in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino -- along with more than 100 of their brother and sister winemakers in France, Germany, Spain and Italy -- trooped out to their vineyards to perform what looked like a pagan ritual. They packed cow horns with fresh cow dung and buried them, one per acre, among their grape vines. At the same time, they unearthed cow horns packed with ground quartz that they’d buried six months earlier, on the spring equinox, and poured the powdery white quartz into glass jars.

Because, of course, the quartz needs to sit on window sills to collect the sun’s energy throughout the winter.

It’s just another day in the vineyard for the followers of biodynamic farming, a kind of organic fundamentalism that is gaining credibility and attention in premier wine regions around the world. It may look, at first, like the lunatic fringe, but the most respected names in Burgundy are among the biodynamic faithful: Domaine Leroy and Domaine Leflaive have used biodynamics since the late 1980s. Even Domaine de la Romanee-Conti reluctantly admits to the practice. The more recent California converts include such prestigious wineries as Benziger, Bonterra, Joseph Phelps, Araujo and Robert Sinsky.

The theory is that a piece of land is a living organism, and that in wine regions throughout the world, vineyard soil has had the life sucked out of it by the overuse of chemical pesticides and herbicides. Unless those life forces can be brought back, the theory goes, the grapes will not yield wines that truly reflect the terroir, that difficult to define sense of the place where the grapes are grown. Without biodynamics, proponents say, even world-class wines are muted by agricultural technology.

To that end, biodynamic vintners strive for as much biodiversity as possible: planting vineyards with swaths of flowering plants and fruit trees to attract swarms of insects and birds that will keep the environment in balance and unwanted pests at bay. They also adhere to a cookbook full of vineyard rituals, potions and other metaphysical practices that have more in common with religion than viticulture. They fortify their compost with oak bark, chamomile, stinging nettle and dandelions. And they farm in accordance with the Earth’s natural rhythms, adding some nutrients at dawn (as the earth is “outfolding”) or at dusk (when it’s “infolding”).

Such terms were unheard of in California vineyards 10 years ago. But now there are 13 certified biodynamic vineyards here, with several more vintners dabbling in the demanding practice. Part of the heightened interest is market-driven: It’s no longer enough just to make good wine. In a crowded market going through a down cycle, a wine must stand out as unique.

“As wines lose their individual character, biodynamic enters to stress individuality,” says Mike Benziger of Benziger Family Winery, a certified organic grower who practices biodynamic farming. “The wine industry feels obligated to look at it now that some of the highest-quality producers in the world are moving to it.”

Reducing chemicals

The techniques are at the far edge of an industry-wide trend toward a more “gentle,” less chemically dependent approach to agriculture, says UC Davis viticulturalist Andy Walker.

As many as a third of California’s wine-grape growers this year started moving toward “sustainability” -- the less demanding version of a strict organic diet. In the first year of an industry-sponsored program to improve the state’s vineyards by reducing the use of chemicals, 600 growers put 160,000 acres on the road toward becoming “sustainably farmed.”

Certified organic acreage has doubled during the last five years to 7,000 acres out of the 407,000 California acres dedicated to wine grapes. Of those, 500 are certified biodynamic by Demeter Assn., the international society with control of the use of the term.

“Biodynamics could turn out to be the leading edge for change,” says Karen Ross, president of the California Assn. of Winegrape Growers. “We’ve done a good job of reducing the use of highly toxic chemicals. A lot of people are organic except for Round-Up,” the most popular vineyard weed killer.

The small number of official converts understates the trend. Like Benziger, several growers incorporate biodynamic principles into their organic vineyards without jumping through the official certification hoops.

Perhaps counterintuitively, there’s little reason for them to boast about their vineyard practices. Unlike in the food world, in the wine game “organic” has a nasty reputation.

“No one wants to be associated with the organic wine that has been on the market,” says Peter Granoff, who recently opened the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant, a San Francisco wine store oriented toward teaching consumers the difference between the various wine grape growing techniques.

America’s certified organic wines taste awful, he says. Rather than aging as a wine should, they can spoil.

As long as U.S. regulations require wines labeled “organic” to be made without added sulfites -- which even most ardent biodynamic growers say are necessary to stabilize the wine -- there will be confusion over the terms. Conventional marketing wisdom dictates vintners keep mum about these vineyard practices and let the wines speak for themselves.

It’s a pity, Granoff says, because “most wines that I’ve tasted that have been from biodynamic vineyards have very distinct personalities. They zero in on the vineyard’s character. It’s an antidote for the homogenization of wine styles.”

From theory to practice

Lalou Bize-Leroy, formerly Aubert de Villaine’s partner at Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, is a leading proponent of biodynamic practices and has relied on them since the late 1980s at her Domaine Leroy.

Europe’s biodynamic evangelist is Nicolas Joly, a Loire Valley vintner who 25 years ago stumbled upon the original biodynamic farming ideas first espoused by the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s.

Also credited with the radical educational concepts behind the Waldorf Schools, Steiner was a thinker, not a doer. Early practitioners like Joly had to struggle to turn the theories of an armchair farmer into potions and practices that worked in the field.

With his Coulee de Serrant now a well respected wine, Joly spends his winters espousing the biodynamic philosophy to vintners all around the world.

“For 10 years, people take you for a fool,” Joly says. Now he counts 80 biodynamic vintners in France, with another 100 experimenting with it.

Burgundian Ann-Claude Leflaive is another biodynamic luminary who has received wide notoriety for her success with her acclaimed and costly Domaine Leflaive wines. Since she began to change her farming methods in 1990, Leflaive says vineyards that she’d written off as rubbish have become her top performers.

“When the wine you are making is better and better, then they see the vineyards are healthier and healthier, they all want to know what is happening,” she says. The 2003 harvest, which endured France’s horrific heat wave, is already generating more interest.

“We had less damage. Our fruit has more juice than our neighbors,” she says, speaking from her domaine in Puligny-Montrachet, still in the midst of harvest.

The combination of manually tilling the vineyard to control weeds and the use of organic compost instead of chemical fertilizers forced the roots to grow deeper into the earth, she explains. This protected the vines in the worst of the heat. Also, the deeper the roots, the more varied the mineral structures they pull from to create distinctive flavors. “The balance is better in the vineyard and it is better in the wine,” she says.

It’s a good guess that biodynamic practices work, says Walker, the UC Davis viticulturist. But it’s still just a guess because there haven’t been any scientific studies. “Some of these vineyards are incredibly beautiful,” Walker says. “But it’s more of a mind-set, a religion, than viticulture.”

Without research to back up the theory, winemakers can have a difficult time talking about why biodynamics might work.

“We’re not wing nuts!” says Alan York, California’s leading biodynamic consultant who counts Benziger, Brown-Forman’s Bonterra Vineyard, Sonoma-Cutrer, Quivera, an Oregon grower and two Chilean vintners, among his clients.

The basic idea, York says, is to boost vine performance beyond what can be expected with conventional or even organic farming by creating a singular life force.

Steiner delineated three arenas for this. First, the vineyard needs to be a closed cycle where the waste stream becomes the nutrition stream through recycling waste water and composting organic matter.

Second, the vineyard needs to be a “self-regulating organism.” That, York says, is accomplished through biodiversity: a plethora of plants and insects living symbiotically.

Last, there are the preparations with the manure, silica and a host of natural elements. York believes they trigger the vineyard’s natural biological activity at just the right moment for each phase in a vine’s annual growth cycle.

Worldwide ritual

It’s why biodynamic practitioners around the world all planted the manure horns at the point of the year when night begins to be longer than day, he says.

After the first rains of winter, usually in November, they will mix the horn-cured manure from previous winters with water, a 10-to-1 solution so diluted it looks like clear water. That’s sprayed on the freshly tilled vineyard as winter cover crops are sown between vine rows.

“It’s a way to tuck in the vines for the winter,” York says.

Another dose of the manure mixture is applied in the spring when the cover crops are tilled under. “This mixture helps to turn the organic material into humus,” he says.

Mixing these concoctions is no ordinary barnyard task. Steiner’s rules dictate it must be stirred for exactly one hour, clockwise and then counter-clockwise as the liquid creates a perfect vortex. (The French insist on copper stirring cylinders. Americans make do with stainless steel. But the size is the same: 35 inches high and 27.5 inches in diameter.) And it must be applied within an hour of stirring.

The silica, in a dramatically less concentrated mixture, is applied as a fog that settles on the leaves when the vines flower around the summer solstice in June. It is sometimes applied again between verasion (when the grapes change color) and harvest.

The theory is that the silica, after sitting on the kitchen window sill for several months, has “captured” the sun’s energy and can promote fruit production.

It’s all a back-breaking commitment with hidden risks. Suddenly withdrawing a vineyard from conventional growing techniques can cause production to dip dramatically, sometimes for years, before the biodiversity kicks into gear.

While the cost of maintaining biodynamic vineyards is not significantly higher than conventional farming, according to Benziger, it is risky.

Vintners rely on good insects to eat bad insects, nurturing plants to choke out noxious weeds and last year’s refuse to make better fertilizer than that store-bought stuff with a written guarantee.

Benziger has a very limited tool chest to fight infestations. The trick, he says, is to stay on top of what’s happening in the vineyard so that those tools are effective.

That closer-than-conventional relationship to the land means growers see problems earlier and are more in tune with their grapes, he says.

“I respect their vigilance,” says Kendra Baumgartner, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service in Davis. “But researchers look at it as voodoo,” she says, noting that she’d be risking her reputation if she treated it as legitimate.

It’s the general trend toward organic and sustainable grape growing that is significant, she says.

For instance, Gallo of Sonoma had been certified organic. But with 95% hillside vineyards, vineyard manager Matt Gallo says tilling the soil to control weeds became an overwhelming project.

“We saw more harm than good from taking weeds out by tractor tilling. Erosion mostly. Being locked into the certification process limited the options,” Gallo says. Still, he believes in limiting overall chemical use. Outside of Roundup, Gallo of Sonoma uses little besides organic sulfur compounds in the fields.

“If we could get the really large acreages to reduce the use of toxic chemicals by just 20%, that would mean more than doubling the number of certified organic growers,” says Niebaum-Coppola winemaker Scott McLeod, a certified organic grower.

“You need to make room for the natural life forces in the vineyard when you grow grapes,” says Napa vintner Rob Sinsky, who farms biodynamically.

“It will take off,” he predicts. “It’s about making unique wine.”

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But how do they taste?

Winemakers devoted to biodynamic practices like to boast that their wines have a heightened sense of terroir, the romantic notion that a sense of place, including soil, climate and even something indescribable, like soul, can find its way into the glass.

Skeptical as we were, after tasting 14 biodynamic wines from France and California, we felt that as a group, the wines were highly successful -- more complex and full of character than we’d expect in a random collection of bottles from wide-ranging regions, numerous varieties and across price points from $13 to $75.

For a list of certified biodynamic growers, go to the Demeter Assn. Web site (www.demeter-usa.org). And to find the wines, one of the best sources is Organic Wine Co. in San Francisco, (888) 326-9463 or www.theorganicwinecompany.com.

Here are the standouts, in alphabetical order. Wines that have been certified biodynamic by Demeter, which controls use of the term, are noted.

2002 Benziger Estate Sauvignon Blanc, Sonoma Mountain, $20. Big and rich, but not over-oaked; classic expression of Sauvignon Blanc fruit.

2000 Benziger Estate Zinfandel, Joaquin’s Paradise, Sonoma Mountain, $45. Highly extracted, yet somewhat elegant, with surprising complexity.

2001 Domaine Eugene Meyer Gewurztraminer, Alsace (Demeter certified), $17. Luscious and pleasantly minerally, with generous litchi aromas.

2001 Marc Kreydenweiss Kritt Pinot Blanc, Alsace, $13. Rich with layers of flavor, pretty floral aromas and a beautiful, long finish.

2001 Marc Kreydenweiss,

Andlau Riesling, Alsace, $13. A wine with nice minerality, a classic petrol nose and bracing acidity.

1999 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet, Cote-d’Or, $75. Well-structured and beautifully balanced, with an earthy elegance and flavors that turn somersaults on the palate.

1998 Chateau Romanin Les Baux-de-Provence (Demeter certified), $28. Herbal and well-structured, with attractive red fruit aromas; more complex than one would expect of the region.

2000 Sinsky Vineyards Merlot, Los Carneros, $27. Elegant and well-balanced, with a pleasing ripe plum bouquet and a beautiful finish.