New OWJ Wine Selections

Posted by Adam Morganstern on Apr 30, 2008 in News

The Organic Wine Journal and Organic Vintners have joined forces to offer certified organic wine packages for sale online. These OWJ Selections are a perfect way to start your organic and biodynamic wine collection, with handpicked vintages from around the world.

We’re starting things off with our Red Selection; six certified organic wines from France, Italy, Spain, California, Chile and New Zealand.

• France: Domaine du Jas d’Esclans Rose
• Italy: Antica Enotria Sangiovese
• Spain: Can Vendrell Barrica Tinto
• California: Organic Vintners Merlot
• Chile: Nuevo Mundo Cabernet/Carmenere
• New Zealand: Holmes Pinot Noir

According to Paolo Bonetti, President of Organic Vintners, “this is a great way for people to dive in and experience great wines from a wide variety of places.” Jonathan Russo, publisher of the Organic Wine Journal echoed that sentiment. “These wines are affordable, taste fantastic and are good for you and the environment. What more could you want?”

Look for more OWJ Selections coming soon.

Click here to see the Red Selection at OrganicVintners.com.

Biodynamic Winegrowing – Myth or Reality?

Posted by Nicolas Joly on Apr 28, 2008 in Editorials

More and more wine lovers and professionals are discovering a source of complexity, a surge of vitality and an additional purity in the increasing number of biodynamic wines. There is also no doubt that this type of agriculture can be confusing to those who try to understand it. Biodynamic agriculture adds very small amounts or preparations, varying from 1 to 100 grams per hectare, that have usually been dynamized in water. How can such small quantities have any real effect on the quality of wine? Wouldn’t the result be the same with simple biological agriculture?

Let us begin by observing the corpse of an animal that has just died. In a few weeks its simple elements will again be part of the earth. Thus the question to ask is: where are the energies which constructed this organism in such a sophisticated manner? Who took the calcium to sculpt the bone? Who took the silica to form the hair? Don’t these forces exist in other ways besides forming embryos?

A seed. An egg. Are they not simply receptacles of a perfectly organized world of energy which the forces of life give to Earth? Do they not exist independently of their link with matter through which they become visible? By asking these questions, we enter into the discovery of laws that are very real and concrete, but are no longer, so to speak, terrestrial laws. They are not subject to the force of gravity, to this world of weight and volume discovered by Newton. These are laws that can not be measured the same way.

In the third edition of my book Wine From Sky to Earth, I devote an entire chapter to the presentation of tests, and give images of this world of energies in wine and food and the manner in which different types of agriculture can modify them. The microscope does not have access to these realities. What must be understood is that human beings are only a sum of frequencies or rhythms. It’s a vibratory world. There is no life without frequencies and mini-frequencies.

Our society, and each one of us, use this vibratory world on a daily basis. Through satellites, portables, transmitters and microwaves. We use it to such an extent that it becomes a problem. This abundance of new frequencies disturb the frequencies which influence life itself. No one is surprised to hear the voice of someone thousands of miles away on their cellular phone. The call does not even use a thousandth of a gram of waves. Waves are not measured by weight.

In biodynamic agriculture, a few grams of preparations act as relays or catalysts of precise processes indispensable to the life of plant; a life which we have seen is not tangible. Those unaware of the energy world they use every day become offended. Think about how many grams of quartz make your watch work for over a year. So why shouldn’t a biodynamic preparation based on quartz accelerate photosynthesis, which generates the sugars, the colors and the aromas? Why wouldn’t the preparations destined for the earth accelerate mycorhiza; the linking of roots with earth?

Conventional agriculture inundates the vines and the soil with fungicides, herbicides and chemicals to prevent rot, spiders and other pests. Each treatment strangles, a little bit more, the link between the forces which influence our lives. I offer these observations for wine lovers concerned about the quality of wines you collect and cellar:

1. The use of chemical treatments reduces the capacity of vines to receive solar energy through their leaves, and earth energy through their roots. And there is no way to avoid this increasing. Each additional treatment to control disease will bring about collapse on a large scale, which will necessitate even more treatments.

For wine-growers caught in this dilemma, technology is the only way they can achieve the appearance of quality in their wines. Thus, their wines can be imitated in countries where labor is cheaper. In addition, the wine’s capacity to age properly is greatly diminished.

2. The so-called agriculture raisonnée would be satisfied with the 20% reduction of toxic chemicals. This does not constitute any real progress. The life-forces of the wine need to remain in good health to manifest its appellation. This explains why more and more wineries choose biodynamic as the only method which effectively links the vine to its environment.

3. By using this world of energies more directly, biodynamics increases the possibility for the vines to receive the characteristic of the appellation; providing the basis for what we love in a wine. Also thanks to its special relationship with the life-forces, two or three years of biodynamics can wipe out the harmful effects of herbicides. It takes biological agriculture several decades to reach the same goal.

This was proved in Australia. Land saturated with DDT had been forbidden for further cultivation by the government. However, after three years of biodynamics, it was able to be farmed again. Thus more and more serious wine-growers will continue to swell the ranks of biodynamics, even though attempts are made to ridicule it to preserve lucrative conventional markets.

To pretend that biodynamics is not effective is to be part of yesterday’s world. Unfortunately today’s world is just as alarming. The world of energies is an organized world that can be used either for good or bad. Biodynamics uses it without trying to modify it. Not everyone has the same scruples.

Lucky Crow Organic Wine Bags

Posted by Adam Morganstern on Apr 27, 2008 in Green Lifestyle

Lucky Crow Gift Bags, a Portland company that manufactures and markets reusable cloth gift bags, now features a collection of wine bags in 100 percent organic cotton. The eco-friendly beverage bags come in three patterns, all with organic cotton tie closures. Bags are constructed from organic cotton produced without pesticides from plants that are not genetically modified.

The cloth also meets Global Organic Textile Standards, which ensure that the product is organic throughout its production process — from harvesting of the raw materials, through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing and labeling. Lucky Crow bags are sold individually and in collections through the company’s Web site.

“Fabric wine bags are the perfect complement to organic wines,” says Ian Mahaney, who purchased Lucky Crow in June 2007. “The bags provide a hip alternative to wasteful wrap and add an extra touch of class to the gift.”

The company donates 1 percent of all sales to One Percent for the Planet, a global alliance of companies that donate at least 1 percent of their annual net revenues to a network of environmental organizations worldwide.

Lucky Crow gift bags are available for online purchase at www.LuckyCrow.com.

Wild Wines by Dawn Marie

Posted by Adam Morganstern on Apr 26, 2008 in Book Reviews

If you’ve ever dreamed of making your own wine, you probably thought you needed a vineyard. Or, at least, some grapes. According to Dawn Marie, neither are necessary.

In her book Wild Wines she gives a complete guide to making wines from fruits, flowers, roots and leaves. Imagine a quaint afternoon on the porch sipping your own Mandrone Bark vintage.

Dawn Marie takes you through all the steps of winemaking, as well as how to locate and gather ingredients in the wild. The Organic Wine Journal spoke with her to learn more.

How did you get started making Wild Wines?

I always had an interest in outdoors and nature, and what you could prepare from what you could find. When I bought my first house I planted three grapevines and started making jams and jellies. I like to make products out of my own yard.

At a used book sale, I found this really old book on winemaking from England. I wanted to make wines as long as I can remember. They had a section on fruit wines, and when I found fruit outdoors I would think about their individual acidity and sweetness. After tasting I could see this one needed more acid or this one needs more of this. Over decades I’ve been perfecting each one.

My daughter always wants me to make dryer wines. My palate is more sweet. People have to go with their own taste buds.

How did you make the leap from fruits to leaves and plants?

When I lived in Chicago, we had a forest reserve with a 14-mile bike trail. I would go walking and when I saw a plant I had never seen before, I’d snip off a small sample or take a picture. Then I would try to identify it from an edible-plants book. Learn what parts are edible, and then wonder what else can I do with it? Can I dry it and make tea? Can I ferment it and make wine?

What’s your favorite recipe in the book?

Blackberry wine. For some reason it always takes on a second fermentation. I can’t pinpoint why. But it always becomes sparkling and fizzy. My second favorite is oak leaf. Very peculiar and oak trees grow everywhere around the country.

What’s the most unique?

Chickweed. It’s similar to lettuce, with smaller leaves. Very common in America. It makes a good-tasting wine with no lettuce overtones. I like it so much as a vegetable, though I seldom have enough bulk to make it into a wine. That’s how I’m always thinking. I like raspberry wine, but I like the jam better. So what do I have, and how do I want to make it?

Any wines that didn’t turn out well?

Blue Camas. My town was covered in them so I gave it a try. It has a sticky, gluey quality. It tasted good, but it was like sap. There was no good way to thin it out and keep the taste.

The worst-tasting one was Mountain Ash. Early colonists didn’t have much food and they used to eat them. It was in so many books I tried it. Very bitter berry. I can’t understand why people would eat it.

What’s the easiest wine for people to start making?

Blackberry. Easy to make, easy to collect in bulk, and it’s delicious. Any of the tea wines are good to start with too.

Do you ever buy wines from the store?

No I don’t. I love my wine and I make enough that even with giving them away as gifts, and my kids drinking more, I always have some around. I enjoy it in very small quantities and I can always make more.

Purchase Wild Wines: Creating Organic Wines from Nature’s Garden at Amazon.com.

Breakout In The Organic Ghetto

Posted by Jonathan Russo on Apr 26, 2008 in Features

The other day, I had an argument with a prominent importer of artisanal, organic and biodynamic wines. We asked him to advertise with the Organic Wine Journal so our readers can find his wines. He was having none of it. He had three arguments. First, his producers were selling all their wine so they did not need to change their message. Second, they were tradition bound and that change of any kind would fly in the face of family practices going back generations. The third reason was the shocker. “I don’t want them confined in the organic ghetto.”

The organic ghetto. Words that still ring in my ears. I explained the case of organic milk. There’s such a demand now that no one can keep up. Dairies that have converted to organic farming are getting prices double or more than being paid to the hormone-laden antibiotic infused farms. Billion dollar corporations are vying for shelf space in the organic milk market market because their own research showed that parents did not want a toxic mix of chemicals to be in their children’s bodies.

For some strange reason, there is resistance on the part of the organic wine industry to tell its consumers positive good news. To label their wine as organic or biodynamic, to market it as such and to pressure restaurant into revealing the organic choices on their wine lists.

The reason often stated is that a lot of organic wine is not very good and some wine drinkers may have had a bad experience. It’s easy to fall for this if you don’t reflect a little. Who hasn’t had a bad experience drinking conventional wine? Who hasn’t sipped some factory blended Frankenwine and shuddered. Did that stop anyone from drinking wine ever again? Of course not. It only hastened the search for better tasting, better drinking higher quality wines. Who hasn’t had a bad date? Did that end your search for a mate?

By the end of the conversation I got a little like Isaiah and prophesized that a tipping point was coming where conventional wine would be shunned. I told him about the pesticides found in conventional wine, which he knew about and said “that’s all everyone talked about last week in France.” I even said his producers would suffer economically if they did not shout out their organic methods for all to hear.

The call soon ended and I had no support. Yet, going forward I am confident that one day we will. The forces all around us are demanding truthful labeling of everything we eat and drink. Wine lovers are also becoming earth lovers, body lovers (their own) and biosphere lovers. The days of ingesting poison with your fermented grapes and poisoning the world around you is coming to an end.

The irony is that there are wine makers out there hiding their true souls and it’s just silly. Like the fall of the Berlin wall the breakout from the organic ghetto is coming, and it will be very dramatic.

Lease-A-Tree

Posted by Nicki Sizemore on Apr 23, 2008 in Features

I have an addiction. No, not wine (although some might argue otherwise). Greens. Any kind will do: delicate shoots, hardy chard, wrinkled kale, sprightly arugula. After a period of traveling and subsequent withdrawal a couple of weeks ago, I found myself shoveling a verdant mesclun mix into my shopping bag at the farmer’s market like a bank robber stashing her loot. Noting my obvious dependency, an unfamiliar face intoned, “You must love salad as much as I do.” The voice belonged to Billiam van Roestenberg, owner of Liberty View Farm, who was helping out at Evolutionary Organics for the day, since he doesn’t yet have his own stand at the market. We began chatting about all things emerald, and Billiam mentioned that he offers a Lease-A-Tree program on his certified naturally grown apple farm in the Hudson Valley.

I’ve heard of leasing a plot in a community garden, but leasing a tree from a farm? Perhaps it was because of my New York nature-starved state, but I was intrigued. For $50, you get a tree (either Empire or Cortland), and its fruit (80-120 lbs), which you can pick anytime during the fall harvest. You’re also free to visit the tree throughout the year, including right now when the blossoms have just burst.

I’m considering leasing a tree, not only so that I could picture it out there on its hillside, waving to me on days when the soot of New York seems especially thick, but also because my Earth Day’s resolution (forget New Year’s, people!) is to start learning the valuable trade of sustainable farming—even though I’m currently a city dweller. Sure, I’ve got pots of herbs sprouting in my windowsill, but I want to learn what it really takes to grow the food that I eat. Buying bags of greens from the farmer’s market is one thing, but actually visiting the farms where my food is produced, learning the skills for growing organically, harvesting the fruit that will go into my cobblers, well, that’s another (and the Organic Winemaking Adventure is going to be my continuing education in sustainable winemaking). In Michael Pollan’s rousing article, “Why Bother: Looking for a few Good Reasons to Go Green,” from last weekend’s The New York Times Magazine, he states, “The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that … may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards.” For me, the rewards may come in the form of my own organic garden someday, or in the ability to better articulate what policies need to be implemented to best support those farmers who are conserving not only the environment, but also our foodways.

I don’t have room for 80 lbs of apples in my apartment, but even if I brought home only a bushel or two from a tree that I had cared for (if more in mind than in body), I’m sure they’d produce some of the tastiest pies and chutneys I’d ever prepared.

Benziger Appoints New Directors

Posted by Adam Morganstern on Apr 22, 2008 in Press Releases

Leaders in certified Biodynamic®, organic and sustainable winegrowing, Benziger Family Winery believes biodiversity plays a key role in wine quality. They are currently expanding their Sonoma Mountain estate insectaries to include working fruit and vegetable gardens. They also tend a growing herd of estate sheep and cows. Organic landscape designer Colby Eierman, who recently joined Benziger as director of gardens, was hired to spearhead the estate’s gardening and husbandry programs, which are now open to the public.

An accomplished horticulturist and gardening educator, Eierman comes to Benziger from COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, where he worked as director of gardens, responsible for the planning, planting and maintenance of the center’s 3.5 acres of organic ornamental and edible gardens in Napa.

At Benziger, Eierman is helping to lead the 85-acre Demeter-certified Biodynamic estate’s evolution to a self-sustaining farm—one that not only cultivates 42 acres of site-expressive winegrapes, but also grows food and raises animals. By creating vegetable gardens in the estate’s three insectaries (gardens designed to attract beneficial birds and insects) and tucking smaller plots around the vineyard rows, Eierman is changing more than the Sonoma Mountain landscape.

“Diversity is the name of the game,” he says. “When you’re growing six different kinds of broccoli, fennel, mustard greens and lettuce alongside Cabernet Sauvignon, and then preparing the soil with your own compost, you’re enhancing the terroir of that vineyard. The result in the grapes is subtle, but invaluable.”

Eierman, whose professional experience includes growing micro-greens for celebrated Bay Area restaurants like Chez Panisse and Roxanne’s, is also working with local chefs to develop menus featuring produce from the Benziger estate. The winery’s first such partnership, which was forged with Sonoma County’s famed General’s Daughter restaurant in 2007, continues today.

Consumers interested in exploring Benziger’s expanded gardens are invited to take the winery’s new Partners Tour and Tasting*—a behind-the-scenes tour of the winery’s water reclamation ponds, estate cows and sheep, and terraced hillside vineyards. The experience includes wine in the gardens paired with fresh-picked vegetables and concludes with an intimate tasting of estate wines in Benziger’s private tasting room.

To promote the continued growth of these environmental efforts and more, Benziger has named Mimi Gatens its director of sustainability. Gatens, who joined the winery in 2003 as vice president of marketing, became Benziger’s director of sustainability in 2007. She now oversees the winery’s green business practices, including its energy efficiency and recycling systems, environmental business partnerships, educational outreach and certified-sustainable farming program. Additionally, as the administrative director for the Biodynamic Trade Association, Gatens works with the organization’s Vice President Mike Benziger and other industry leaders to increase public awareness of Demeter-certified Biodynamic farms, gardens and agricultural products.

Eileen Crane of Domaine Carneros

Posted by Adam Morganstern on Apr 20, 2008 in Features

After receiving their organic certification, Domaine Carneros President and Chief Winemaker Eileen Crane spoke with the Organic Wine Journal about the transition and the history behind it.

Organic Wine Journal: What sparked the interest in going organic?

Eileen Crane: Our vineyard manager has been with us a number of years. He had a very naturalistic approach, and early on tried to eliminate as much harmful chemicals as possible. We started looking at going organic in the early 90’s. We had a small new vineyard and said let’s try doing it organically. It was harder to be organic back then. Now there’s more people involved and it’s easier to share information.

Domaine Carneros has a history of doing things conscientiously. In 2003 we built our new Pinot Noir facility with solar power. We use skylights, insulation rather than refrigeration. It’s ingrained in us. You want to be a part of something that’s not just for the moment. It takes care of the earth and our employees. We want people to enjoy their jobs and the vines.

We thought it would make a difference, but the difference is phenomenal. The intensity. The balance. The vines look happy, they have this great vibrance.

OWJ: Was the certification process difficult?

EC: It wasn’t difficult at all. What we were asked to do made sense to us. In fact, it was really easy and reasonable.

OWJ: Why do you think there’s an image that it’s hard to do?

EC: It’s resistance to anything new. It’s also more expensive. It adds about $200 per acre to farm organically. But that may go down. When you start doing something you’re not as efficient. The more you do it the more effective you get at it.

We have mealy bugs, so everyone said you’ve got to use these heavy duty chemicals. Our vineyard manager noticed chickens like to eat these bugs so we got some chickens. Now, of course, we have to protect the chickens from the coyotes. If you think outside the box, some experiments might not work out. But you learn from them what the next step should be. Organic farming is at that stage. We’re still experimenting.

OWJ: Will organics play into your marketing?

EC: Some people want to know if you’re farming organically. There are restaurants that let you know on the wine list. There’s a desire from consumers to know, so you have to get the information out there. We didn’t do this to attract customers, though. We thought we would make better wine this way.

OWJ: Will “organic” be on your label?

EC: Not yet.

OWJ: There are many wine drinkers who will be happy to have another organic sparkling wine for their meals.

EC: Yes, though I suggest before dinner, not after. Sparking wine was created in the mid 1600’s. There were sugars from the new world, and they were using it everywhere, even to brush their teeth. They got carried away and made it a sweet wine and served it in small glasses at the end of a meal. Some continue to do that, although most are dry and are better at the beginning of a meal.

Visit Domaine Carneros online.