My guest for this episode is Laurel Marcus.

Laurel is the Executive Director of the California Land Stewardship Institute based in Napa, California, which administers the Fish Friendly Farming and Climate Adaptation Certifications for vineyards and other farmers.

Among her many responsibilities, Laurel works with farmers to conduct studies and gather data on farming practices that prevent erosion, preserve soil moisture, increase soil organic matter, and sequester carbon. Her findings provide some conclusive evidence about best practices, as well as eliminate green washing and carbon washing by showing that there are nuances and conditional dependencies for almost every scenario.

Some of the important things we discuss include how soil type and conditions, as well as the type of soil microbe populations, can impact carbon sequestration. And we discuss her findings about how dry farming and no-till systems affect these conditions, as well as some of the realities and misunderstandings about competition between cover crops and vines.

Also, Laurel digs into the seldom discussed topic of how the use of mineral nitrogen, rather than compost, and soil conditions can increase the production of nitrous oxide – the most potent  greenhouse gas… about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

This is an incredibly information rich interview and provides many practical resources – including funding resources – for how to do wine better. Laurel shows how careful we have to be, in the frenzy to do good, to not think that there are one size fits every situation bumper sticker solutions to our problems. This conversation has inspired me to look even more deeply at these issues, and I hope it does the same for you.

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Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Show links:

https://www.fishfriendlyfarming.org/

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/healthysoils/

My guest for this episode is Ryland Englehart. Ryland co-founded Kiss the Ground in 2013 and leads the organization as Executive Director, producer of the Kiss the Ground film, and host of the Kiss the Ground Podcast. As a 15-year entrepreneur, he is also the co-owner and prior Mission Fulfilment Officer of the nationally recognized plant-based restaurants, Cafe Gratitude and Gracias Madre, located here in Southern California. And so much more.

I met Ryland at a vineyard in Santa Barbara that has been purchased for the express purpose of converting it from a conventional and extractive form of viticulture to a regenerative organic ranch. The occasion of our meeting was a fundraiser for Kiss the Ground, the organization. If you haven’t seen the film documentary Kiss The Ground I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the movie that introduced regenerative agriculture to over 10 million viewers worldwide. If you’re a Netflix subscriber you can watch it tonight.

Let me speak plainly: regardless of what kind of agriculture you’re in, whether it’s viticulture, pommeculture, or otherwise, regenerative agriculture is the best solution to industrial agriculture’s degradation of our environment, If you’re wondering what exactly regenerative agriculture is, Ryland gives a great explanation right at the beginning.

Ryland may be regenerative agriculture’s biggest spokesperson. And in this conversation he talks about wine’s unique ability to communicate the story and benefits of regenerative agriculture.

There’s something infectiously hopeful about listening to Ryland speak. He is brutally honest about the realities we face, but he also has a long view perspective that is rare. He’s at the center of a growing global movement that is heading in the right direction. And it’s hard not to come away feeling that he’s just a spokesperson for the earth and vines and plants themselves.

https://kisstheground.com/

Support:

https://www.patreon.com/organicwinepodcast

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Mark Shepard. I’m so excited to share this conversation with you because Mark has a perspective on viticulture and agriculture in general that is revolutionary… while also being incredibly common sensical. He’s as funny as he is passionate and that passion comes from wanting to share an incredibly important message not only for producing wine, but also for our survival.

Mark is the author of Restoration Agriculture which is a top 10 Amazon best seller in multiple categories. Restoration agriculture is his term for ecomimicry permaculture or multi-story perennial polyculture using what thrives naturally in your ecosystems. He practices this at scale on his 110 acre New Forest Farm in Wisconsin, and on several other properties, and he provides agricultural consulting around the planet.

One of the quotes from his book that stood out to me is when he is talking about our conventional, monoculture approach, and says, “We have created the conditions under which pests and diseases thrive, while almost completely ceasing the improvement of the crops’ own resistance to the threats we have created.”

This is so true in wine, where we have a global monoculture of a handful of European grapes that have been propagated by cloning for two hundred years or more. And in the last 50 years we’ve spent literally billions of dollars developing chemicals to enable these clones to survive, while investing very little in breeding new varieties that don’t need the chemicals… or in expanding the idea of wine to include other ingredients besides European grapes.

Mark doesn’t spray his fruit, whether it’s apples or cherries or chestnuts or grapevines, he employs a kind of vitiforestry, and his approach to agriculture illuminates some incredible perspective shifts in how we could think about growing grapevines differently… as well as how we could think about wine differently… as one symbiotic element in a holistic perennial polyculture.

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Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

This is episode is something a little different, and it’s sponsored by Centralas Wine. Centralas is my winery and the first chapter  of this two chapter episode is a recording I made while driving around los angeles, as we angelenos are wont to do, so I apologize for the quality. But the content is pretty fun. The context is that I’ve stopped listing grape varieties on the labels for the wines I make and sell through Centralas. Since I made that decision, I’ve become hyper aware of how important grape varieties have become as handles that we think we need to understand a wine. It is literally the first thing people ask when I present one of our wines. This has led to some pretty interesting discussions and even debates. But Rather than make me think I made a mistake in not listing varieties, I’m more committed than ever to being the lone voice, if need be, calling for an end to our varietal obsession. I’m actually pretty convinced we’ve all been brain-washed by the global capitalist monoculture into thinking that knowing the variety of grape is necessary to understand a wine. So there you go… that should set up Chapter one as a fun and somewhat funny take on varietal labeling.

And chapter two, while very different, is very symbiotic. It’s called Why Wine is Important, and I think you’ll be a bit surprised at the answer I give, because I try to answer that question from a different perspective so to speak. And that perspective is really the same perspective that chapter one comes from. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll leave it at that.

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Episode Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

My guest for this episode is Paul Dolan.

Paul Dolan has always been a pioneer leading the industry towards a more sustainable future.  While a winemaker and then president at Fetzer, Paul proved to the California wine industry that wineries and grape growers can preserve and enhance their environment, strengthen their communities, and enrich the lives of their employees without sacrificing the bottom line.  He introduced Bonterra, the first nationally distributed wine made with 100 percent organic grapes, placing Fetzer at the forefront of organic viticulture.  Paul’s experiences at Fetzer led him to publish “True to Our Roots- Fermenting a Business Revolution” that set forth the simple but powerful management principles that enabled Fetzer to become one of America’s best- known wineries and an exemplar of sustainable business practices.

Through his leadership at the California Wine Institute, Paul introduced the Code of Sustainable Wine Growing and chaired the Institute from 2006 – 2007.  He also served on President Clinton’s Council on Sustainability, Businesses for Social Responsibility, and The Climate Group, was Chairman of the California Sustainable Winegrowers Alliance, and received the Environmental Business Leader of the Year Award from the California Planning and Conservation League in 2006.

Paul has become a spokesman for and practitioner of regenerative winegrowing. He serves on the board of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and farms his family-owned Dark Horse Ranch as a multi-faceted certified Biodynamic® vineyard and regenerative farm, and is a founding partner of Truett-Hurst Winery. He is constantly seeking to enhance his understanding of the restorative capacity of the soil and the farm, and its relationship to the restoration of the health of the planet’s ecosystems. 

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Guest Interviewer Chiara Shannon (@theyogisommelier www.theyogisommelier.com) interviews the creator and producer of the Organic Wine Podcast, Adam Huss. Adam talks about what he is doing with wine and vines in South Los Angeles with his winery Crenshaw Cru and his estate urban polyculture winegarden Crenshaw Cru.

Some of the things that we talk about include: how viticulture is actually a form of agroforestry, how my urban polyculture winegarden known as Crenshaw Cru embodies a vision for the future of wine, how embracing local indigenous fruit can grow a diverse, resilient, and colorful wine culture, how human culture is part of your vineyard, and how all of this results from the revolutionary ecological approach to wine that makes our current wine culture seem completely backwards.

https://www.centralaswine.com/

In this episode I get to talk to the co-founders and winemakers for RAS Wines - Dan Roche, Joe Appel and Emily Smith.

Dan, Joe, and Emily make a dry sparkling wine from Maine wild blueberries, and we talk about some of the incredible aspects of this unique wine culture.

Maine wild blueberries are one of the few fruits indigenous to and perfectly suited to the challenging terroir of Maine. Even though they occur naturally – thus the “wild” aspect – they are actively tended as a commercial crop. I’m fascinated by this kind of agriculture which shows a way that we humans can integrate with natural ecosystems and be instrumental to their health and vitality, while also using them to support our own health and survival.

Working with and selling wine made from a fruit that isn’t grapes and for which consumers have many preconceptions, has given Dan, Joe, and Emily some profound insights into wine in general. They want us to ask ourselves: Is what we think we know about wine actually limiting our experience of it? They have realized how much we need to unlearn, and are part of a domestic wine scene that is locally based, resourceful, creative, as diverse as the land they make wine from, and the most exciting part of wine today, I think.

As they say, we don’t expect wine made from Cabernet Franc to taste like a grape, so why do we have different expectations for blueberries?

I’m excited to share these winemakers with you and the unique world of Maine wild blueberries that they are helping to share through their wine.

https://raswines.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/

Kelly Mulville’s life has been guided by an awe and respect for the natural world and a deep appreciation for its beauty. This led him to want to learn how to farm in a way that protected or enhanced the natural world, and made him a better listener and observer of what made ecosystems work. Through his years of farming he has attempted to answer the question of how we can turn agriculture from one of the most destructive forces on the planet into the method we can use to repair that damage and restore biodiversity and health to ecosystems?

Kelly’s journey has led him to test various kinds of grazing-based viticulture in many contexts throughout the west and south-west US, and to ultimately build a vineyard system that incorporates animals year round in central California at Paicines Ranch. The work he is doing is laying the foundation for what I think will be the future of viticulture, and Kelly lays out the vision and principles that guide it.

Kelly is working with vinifera that he basically doesn’t have to spray because of the system he has implemented and his attention to soil health, biodiversity, and amazing new findings around SAP brix analysis that is revolutionizing our understanding of how we can prevent insect pest issues. We get into the details of the Watson trellising system he uses now to create a kind of vine forest rather than a vineyard, as well as how to potentially integrate sheep year round into an existing VSP trellis system, ground squirrel management, the ecology of birds in viticultural and agricultural systems, and the amazing return of an endangered species for which his vineyard is helping to provide desirable habitat.

If you haven’t heard of Kelly Mulville, or the work he’s doing at Paicines Ranch, this is potentially revolutionary stuff. I could not be more impressed with Kelly’s humble, passionate, and compassionate approach to viticulture. He grounds everything he does in science and real, detailed data, because he sees everything he has accomplished so far as just the beginning, and he wants others to be able to learn from and build upon this work to do even better.

https://paicinesranch.com/

Sponsor:

https://www.centralaswine.com/