It takes years to bring a vineyard to full production and more years to create fine wine, so by the nature of their trade, grape growers and winemakers tend to be immune to fads. Recently, though, a trend born in France, that cradle of couture, has been spreading widely through the world of wine. It goes by the name biodynamisme, and surprisingly for a folk at no loss for native ideological innovation, it is deeply rooted in the ideas of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
Steiner is best known in the U.S. as the inspiration behind the Waldorf School movement, but his grand and misty thought system called anthroposophy has something to say about every aspect of humankind and its relation to the universe (agriculture and diet emphatically included). Biodynamic agriculture goes far beyond conventional organic growing methods, looking to bring the piece of earth under cultivation into mystic harmony with the cycle of the seasons and the music of the spheres. It’s full of colorful faux folk practices like burying a cow horn stuffed with manure in the autumn or lacing 10 tons of compost with a teaspoon of valerian extract matured in a stag’s bladder.
Such weird rituals are easy to tease, but they certainly have helped publicize the biodynamic movement. Moreover, they seem to “work,” in some dangerously extended sense of the word, if only by focusing the farmer’s attention on the intimate relations among soil, season, and growing things. Understandably, most biodynamic operations are quite smallit’s pretty hard to farm even 200 or 300 acres for the commercial produce market and keep every commandment in the biodynamic code.
But most vineyards run only 20 or 30 acres, so biodynamism is easier to put into practice, and recently a fair number of ambitious French vignerons have begun to follow strict biodynamic practices. Most of them are in the drier southern part of the country; mildew and other fungal diseases are hard to deal with biodynamically. But in the south, the label, if not the practice, has helped put wines and winemakers on the map in a region long looked down on as fit only for growing cheap red table wine.
But not only in the south. Walla Walla vigneron Christophe Baron first became interested in biodynamism after reading an article on the subject by the celebrated Loire Valley winemaker Nicolas Joly, and his interest was fired by a blind tasting of wines from a single Burgundy vineyard, half produced conventionally and half biodynamically. “I was blown away by the difference,” he says, “by the originality, the authenticity, the expression of a specific terroir.”
Baron insists that he is primarily a farmer, not a winemaker, and he has followed organic practice in his Cayuse vineyards since planting them in 1997. But an October meeting with another superstar of French biodynamism, Philippe Armenier, led him to go all the way and become the first considerable Washington vigneron to plant, cultivate, fertilize, and harvest the Rudolf Steiner way. Baron’s wines, all created in the robust Rhône tradition with traditional Rhône varietals, are already among the area’s most distinctive. It will be fascinating to see how they evolve under the influence of earth, air, and stars.
