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Wine Facts: Biodynamic Wines
Biodynamics – Healing the vineyard
From The Great Organic Wine Guide (Chapter Six) by Hilary Wright
Picture the scene: a biting January day in the Loire valley in northern France, sun shining but wind howling and bitterly cold. I'm coming to the end of my first wine research trip to France. This is the last estate visit and part of my brain is already wondering what time we"ll have to leave to catch the ferry home. But, though I didn't realise it at the time, I'd stumbled onto something that would change my life forever. This was a biodynamic wine estate, and at the end of interviewing the winemaker I walked out into the vineyard. In January, of course, the vines are dormant. No growth, just rows of neatly-pruned bare woody plants, sleeping.
Yet, standing alone among the bare vines, I had an overwhelming sense that the vineyard was alive. It positively hummed, vibrated with life. It was an extraordinary sensation, quite unlike anything I had experienced in a vineyard - or indeed on any patch of land - before. How could it possibly be full of life in January? Yet the evidence assailing all my senses was undeniable. I realised that there had to be something different about biodynamics, and from that moment I wanted to know more.
As I began to write books on French wine tourism I would prick up my ears whenever someone suggested visiting a biodynamic estate. I had a long discussion on the subject with Michel Chapoutier in the Rhone, and he lent me a copy of the seminal text on the subject – Agriculture, by Austrian scientist and seer Rudolf Steiner.
This book was nearly my undoing. Agriculture is not light bedtime reading. I just couldn't get my brain round it and it nearly put me off altogether. I now know that this text is not recommended for the beginner (too right) but it does contain the basic principles that biodynamic grape growers follow today.
Rudolf Steiner: creator of biodynamics
Steiner was born in rural Austria in 1861, at a time when the new world of science and technical understanding was colliding with ancient peasant wisdom. What Steiner did was to synthesise these two apparently warring worlds. He studied modern science and philosophy and then integrated this learning with his own clairvoyant spirituality. Out of this he developed a "spiritual science" he called anthroposophy, meaning the inherent wisdom of humanity. Many people find in this vision of human potential much hope for the regeneration and renewal of the planet, and his work is now studied and implemented all over the world.
Steiner's influence is visible today in such areas as education (Waldorf schools), adult education, medicine, eurythmy (movement and gesture) and the Camphill communities, which support adults with learning difficulties.
The impetus for biodynamic agriculture came from a group of farmers active in anthroposophy who were deeply concerned about the decline in seed and soil fertility. In 1924, the year before he died, Steiner delivered a series of eight lectures to them called "Towards a spiritual renewal in agriculture", and it's these lectures that are published today as Agriculture.
How biodynamics differs from organics
Organic grape growing is (as I do hope I"ve demonstrated) a very Good Thing. It takes the laboratory out of the vineyard, ignoring chemicals and artifice in favour of working with nature. The organic grape grower observes what nature does and tries to follow it – combating insect pests with predator pests, companion planting and so on. Many growers express the wish to do as little damage as possible to their environment, so they can pass the vineyard on to their children in good condition. Walking lightly on the earth and all that.
Biodynamics takes a different jumping-off point, and moves one step beyond the organic stance of following nature's lead and working in harmony with it. In biodynamics, the belief is that all the chemical inputs and bad practice of conventional intensive viticulture have damaged the planet. The decline in soil and seed fertility was noticed a hundred years ago and now we"re witnessing a decline in human fertility too. This, the theory goes, needs to be counteracted. Don't simply let nature run its course, but instead support and intensify natural processes to heal vineyards damaged by decades of pollution. There are several ways biodynamics does this:
"Biodynamics" comes from two Greek words meaning life and energy and it involves working with all the energies that create and maintain life. In this system you want to harness all the forces around you – not just the sun, but the moon, stars and the earth itself. (The whole cosmos, really.) See all these as one constantly interacting whole and it becomes clear that there's more to draw on to get the best out of the grapes.
Focusing on life forces
Key to it all is life force energy. That, perhaps more than anything, is what marks biodynamics out from organics. We"re talking about spirit here, the energising force, consciousness, the thing that makes us who and what we are. It's the difference between being alive and being dead, basically. You know that sad moment when relatives go to pay their last respects at the undertaker"s, then come out saying, "it wasn't Grandma – she's gone"? The body, the shell, is still there, but what animated it, made it who she was, has departed.
What's the difference between an apple eaten straight from the tree, and one that's been picked green, ripened in a gas house and irradiated to stop it rotting? The seeds of an irradiated apple can never germinate. You could say it's dead. Biodynamics puts a value on the quality of what we eat in terms of its life-force – it's not just matter to be consumed, not just a question of calories and carbs.
The other key thing is to focus on life not death. The more I talk to conventional grape growers the more obsessed they seem to be with killing off every last pest and weed and fungus that dares to invade their precious patch. Biodynamic and organic grape growers tend to take a more relaxed view of weeds and pests. As Bergerac winemaker Richard Doughty points out, a few insects pose no problem:
"I don't do anything to them and they don't do any significant damage to my vines. It amazes me to see winemakers spending lots of money on nasty poisons to eliminate bugs. When you start killing predators the surviving bugs, now minus predators, will overfeed and you get problems. If you let nature get on with it the absence of problems is quite stunning except for ICI shareholders."
As they say in these circles, what you think, you grow. Focus on disease and what will you get? You"ll get what you focus on, so you might as well focus on what you want rather than what you don't want. And in viticulture it's a good idea to focus on ripe, healthy fruit, not on your brave, lonely battle against pests and diseases.
Biodynamics is also interested in the opposite of gravity, woefully translated as "levity" (mind you, I think a bit of levity around such a complicated subject is no bad thing.) That's to say, gravity is what makes the apple fall off the tree; levity is the study of how it got up there in the first place. Funny how we trust science based on gravity and don't allow for exploration of a possible counterpart; gravity is the only scientific concept which doesn't have a polar opposite – positive and negative electricity, hot and cold, wet and dry, gravity and...
Cycles and rhythms
The whole of the growth cycle of grapes, and of everything else on the planet, is one of expansion and contraction. See the earth as a living organism in its own right and this begins to make sense. The astronauts, when they left the planet and looked back at it as an entity, felt this most strongly.
So imagine the earth breathes, has a circulation system, a pulse and a skin. Water provides the circulation system: rain to rivers to seas to mists. The movement of the seasons acts as a kind of pulse, expanding in spring and summer then contracting in autumn and winter. The earth's skin consists of soil and plants, spreading like scar tissue across barren landscapes – look how fast the side of a motorway cutting will green over, or your freshly-hoed vine rows, or even the sides of a slag heap.
The earth itself is said in biodynamics to have a daily as well as an annual contraction/expansion cycle, so the first rhythm to observe is that of the day: as the earth breathes out in the morning and in again in the afternoon. Flower petals open and close in precise patterns according to this daily rhythm, so accurately that in the 18th century they planted flower clocks in gardens which told the time by the opening and closing of the petals. We have these daily (circadian) rhythms, too, as any daysleeper who's struggled to overcome jet lag after crossing several time zones knows only too well. So, to work with this rhythm, biodynamic grape growers lift the young vine plants in the morning, and put them aside for planting out in the contracting period of the afternoon.
The Sun
This star gives us all the warmth and light we need to grow. At it gets higher in the sky from midwinter to midsummer it draws the growth cycle of plants up with it. Then as it starts to wane we move to harvest, and the earth itself draws in the life force received from the sun in the summer. The sun is the biggest example there is of "levity", the expansive force.
The angle of the sun's rays focus deep into the earth in the short December days. As the days lengthen the angle gradually rises until it arrives on the surface on March 21, when day and night are of equal length. From here it moves out into the air, along with the rapidly-growing plants, reaching its highest point at the summer solstice. Then it sinks slowly back down, touching the surface again at the autumn equinox, back into the soil.
These four cardinal points of the year form feast days and celebrations all over the world. Pagan festivals occupied these slots in the UK until Christianity supplanted them. For example, December 24th/25th are the first days when there's a perceptible increase in the length of day over night, which is when Christians celebrate the arrival of the Light of the World.
Easter Sunday always falls on the Sunday nearest the full moon after the spring equinox. This is the time when levity, the rising principle, is strongly in operation – plants defy gravity and rise out of the earth, mirroring, as Christians point out, Christ's resurrection.
Each year, biodynamic experts issue planting calendars telling vineyard workers what to do when, because it's quite complicated. And each year, the calendar says do nothing at all to the vines on Good Friday and Easter Saturday. Some say that this is because Christ's suffering is so deeply imprinted into the earth. Others point to the adverse planetary arrangements on those two days. I just think it's really interesting that it should be so, year after year. And what about that old folk wisdom that says the best day to plant your potatoes is Easter Monday?
The Zodiac
Each year, as the earth moves round the sun, the sun appears in front of each of the twelve signs of the zodiac in turn, and the sun is held to have a different quality depending on which constellation it is in. The weak December sun has a very different quality to the fierce heat of midsummer, when it is in Gemini. As the sun begins its descent, passing through fiery Leo in August and the quieter Virgo in September, the sun touching my skin feels very different to the gathering warmth of the springtime sun.
If you think people are different according to their birth sign, ruled by the sun, then it isn't much of a stretch to think that the sun will itself radiate perceptibly different kinds of heat as it moves through each sign during the year.
The Moon
If the sun controls the light and heat on earth, the moon controls water – and not just the tides. Humans, grapes, all plants and animals, consist mostly of water. We spend the first nine months of our lives suspended in it so it's not surprising it's familiar.
The moon moves through several simultaneous cycles each month, each taking more or less 28 days, all of them weaving around each other. The first and most obvious lunar cycle is the waxing and waning moon. The effects of the round full moon are clearly experienced by many. Police, bar staff, nursing staff in mental hospitals can all attest to differences in human behaviour when the moon is full (and of course we all know about werewolves.) More babies are born just before a full moon than afterwards. Repeated tests have shown it's best to sow seeds shortly before the full moon, in the second quarter of the lunar cycle, and weed or prune in the "rest period" of the fourth quarter.
Another cycle is apogee/perigee, which looks at the distance the moon is from the earth. Closest to the earth (perigee) or furthest away (apogee) in each cycle makes a difference to what you do in the vineyard. It's held to be best not to sow or plant on either of these.
Then, of course, you have the effect of each of the twelve constellations. While the sun passes through these only once every year the moon passes through them all every twenty-eight days; you get, in effect, a year in every month. This is very handy for biodynamic grape growers and winemakers. Certain processes are best carried out during certain moon phases, and each constellation has a different effect on what you do on the land.
The four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water
Each of the twelve signs of the zodiac is assigned either to air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) or earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn). This gives them a special connection with one of these four life forces.
Plants, too, have connection with one or other of these life forces. Biodynamics classifies plants according to which part of them is most developed and harvested: fruit, flower, leaf or root. Roots such as potatoes and carrots are, not unnaturally, connected with the earth element; flowers are connected with the air element; leafy vegetables and salads connect with the water element; and fruits – such as grapes – link up with the fire element.
Thus, as the moon passes through each of the twelve constellations each month, gardeners work on whichever types of plant the moon is currently governing. Twelves into twenty-eight only go two and a bit, so you get just two or three days a month in each sign. Grape growers focus their attention on the times when the moon is in a "fruit" phase.
And I haven't even mentioned the effects of eclipses (bad, do nothing outdoors) or the intersections of various planetary paths, called nodes (ditto). So it's really just as well that each year you can buy the annual planting calendar, Gardening by the Stars and Constellations, in which Maria Thun, a German farmer and researcher who has spent forty years observing and testing these phenomena, has helpfully detailed what you can do when. Mind you, even then you have a lot of astronomical symbols to decipher before it makes sense. There's no doubt that this regime requires a level of dedication and commitment not required in more straightforward organic viticulture.
Take picking, for instance. If you hire a team of grape pickers it can take them several weeks to move through the vineyards, depending on size of plot and team. Yet in the calendar you only have three picking days each cycle – fruit days during an ascending moon, to be precise. So what do you do? Hire a huge team and pick then, regardless of conditions? Watch the weather and pick when the climate is right irrespective of calendar correctness? Or maybe bring out the picking machine and get it comfortably done in the lunar time frame, and worry about soil compaction from the machine's tyres later.
The planting calendar extends into the wine cellar, too. You should bottle the wine on a fruit day in a descending moon, because, as Veronique Cochran of Chateau Falfas in Bordeaux explained, if you bottle during an ascending moon all the aromas that belong in the bottle will leave the wine and fill the cellar. If you bottle during a descending moon, she added, you keep the aromas where they belong. In the bottle.
The planting calendar can act as a wonderful motivator for the experts at procrastination among us. Noticing that you can only prune the vines in the next four hours or you"ll have to wait until next month (which will be too late) concentrates the mind wonderfully, and out come the secateurs. As James Millton in New Zealand points out, however: "it does tend to intrude on the pleasures of life and although work is pleasure we still need to eat, drink, talk and be merry."
The Earth
Soil – tiny particles of minerals, humus, and micro-organisms. Conventional viticulture more or less ignores the soil. It sees it as something that cannot sustain life on its own, needing to be fed with large doses of water-soluble chemicals. The organic grape grower turns his or her back on synthetic chemistry, favouring a sustainable, ecologically sound approach, nurturing a healthy soil and sturdy, healthy vines. The biodynamic grape grower, while also emphasising ecological soundness, widens the scope to include all the influences that stream into the soil from the universe. They look to expand consciousness – not just in themselves, but in the soil and the vines they tend, looking into the deeper spirit of nature.
Biodynamics is possibly the finest antidote available to all those who despair that wines are all starting to taste the same, worrying that they could come from anywhere (and, indeed, if genetic modification of vines goes the way it's currently heading, they will come from anywhere). Biodynamics focuses intently on the particular patch of soil that you call your own, and works to intensify its uniqueness. The French call this "terroir" but unfortunately this is an elastic concept which they stretch to mean whatever they want it to mean. What I think "terroir" should mean is uniqueness based on that site, a sense of "somewhereness". If you"ve ever had the happy occasion to wander round top vineyard sites, you do get a sense of why that land is special. Especially if it's cultivated biodynamically.
Composting
One way of nurturing the soil is through the use of manure and compost, and there are complex instructions for the preparation of compost heaps. The Loire winemaker Nicolas Joly has taken the care of his soil to the final conclusion: wanting only to use biodynamic manure he keeps his own herd of rare-breed cattle to provide it. He even grows corn for their straw - biodynamically, of course. This approaches the biodynamic ideal of the self-sustaining farm, which grows all it needs, recycles its own wastes, takes next to nothing from the environment and gives back as much as possible to the land and the surrounding community.
The use of cow manure is widespread in biodynamics, valued for the effect the cow's slow digestive process is held to have on the "digestive process" of the earth, linking the vein roots to the soil. Vines, after all, grow where little else will; indeed, you don't want a rich soil or they"ll overcrop like mad things. Joly has experimented with the effects of manure from different animals. Local people told him that if you are replanting vines, pig manure is best. He realised that pigs root for food underneath the soil, so this would give the vine roots a tendency to burrow deep. On the other hand, he said, you"ll miss out on elegance in the wine: "a pig is a pig after all, you can't change that."
Enhancing nature: homeopathy
One of the main ways biodynamists support and heal a land stressed and weakened by the damage caused by intensive agriculture and industrial poisoning is by applying homeopathic sprays. The science of homeopathy is based on treating like with like to support nature's own processes. Its key principle, the Law of Similars, states that substances that produce specific symptoms in healthy individuals will cure the same symptoms in chronically ill patients. The homeopath's aim is to discover what natural substance, suitably "energised", will restore balance in a particular individual.
To make a homeopathic preparation, make a solution of the herb in water or alcohol then progressively dilute it, shaking it each time to energise it. Keep on and on diluting and shaking, until at some massive dilution point the molecules of the original herb are not even present any more. All that's left is the energised, "potentised" water.
Just water? So it can't work, can it? But it does. I"ve experienced it for myself, taking homeopathic belladonna which dramatically reduced a fever; and I"ve seen it work in others, too. (Incidentally, biodynamics and homeopathy meet in the natural remedies company Weleda, who grow 300 species of plants for their medicines biodynamically in Derbyshire.)
Water and the biodynamic preparations
Biodynamics calls for the use of several different sprays, to be used on the vines at different times and for different purposes. Several of the ingredients are also used in homeopathy – yarrow, camomile, nettle, dandelion, oak, horsetail, valerian. These sprays are used on the compost heap at various times to activate different elements in it.
Biodynamics prefers its preparations stirred not shaken, a distinction Pierce Brosnan would no doubt appreciate, and calls the process "dynamising". To dynamise a biodynamic preparation, add a pinch of the herb to a bucket or barrel of water and stir it, vigorously and precisely, until a crater is created right to the bottom of your bucket. Then immediately reverse the direction of stir until a deep crater is formed again, whereupon you briskly reverse direction once more. For an hour. Keep reversing the direction quickly so the water seethes and tumbles, like water bursting forth from a dam or leaping down rocks.
Water worked upon in this way opens up a far greater surface area than a still surface; and that, they say, is what lets cosmic energy forces in, what dynamises it. It's a crucial part of the process, but it's quite a lot of effort. Stirring on this scale doesn't appeal to everybody, and some grape growers set up Heath Robinson-like contraptions to do it for them. I"ve seen paddles suspended in half-barrels, beating away. Romantically, I fancy that your connection to your soil will be enhanced if you stir by hand, but let's be pragmatic: whatever works.
Then there are two sprays to be used directly on the vineyard. One is made with ground quartz and is sprayed on the vines to enhance light and warmth; the other is made from cow dung (and known as the horn-dung preparation).
First prepare the material to make the preparations from by burying them; all of them are buried over winter, except the quartz, which is buried throughout the summer. This preparation is known as "horn quartz" or "horn-silica". These last two are buried in cows" horns.
Then spray the preparations on the vines at times determined by the calendar for particular effects. The horn manure stimulates the connection to the earth, so it's the first one to use, at the start of the growing season. Horn quartz aids the light and warmth transmitting cosmic forces, so spray it, in the morning, directly onto the vine leaves or young grapes.
I don't think it's any coincidence that homeopathy grew out of the medieval science of alchemy, which sought to transmute base metal into gold. These preparations work an alchemy of their own, turning cow dung into humus and maybe even a sick and ailing vineyard into one teeming with life again.
The homeopathic principles of treating like with like are also invoked when it comes to dealing with insect pests. Simply collect a few specimens of the troublesome pests from the vineyard; then burn them and make a homeopathic solution with their ashes, or macerate them in water and make the solution from that. Then spray the solution on the vines, and the pests stay away. No, really, they do. It's as if a message flies round the bush telegraph: "look what happened to all our friends and relations. Better keep clear." Or maybe it's the same principle that stops horses grazing near their own manure, though they"ll quite happily forage near cow dung.
Science and biodynamics
Biology, physics and chemistry, and indeed all areas of scientific research, are moving towards the idea that all science is simply part of the same thing. The basic building bocks of everything on the planet - you, me, that plant, that bottle - are just bits of energy. Know how that works, some say, and you"ll know everything. So the most helpful viewpoint seems to be that everything depends on everything else. And that's a view shared by biodynamics.
Some aspects of biodynamics don't seem to have a rational explanation. But science can't explain everything either, and sometimes when new ideas and discoveries are first propounded, those in the current scientific establishment ridicule the proponents (or excommunicate them. Or burn them at the stake as heretics.) I think we've moved on somewhat since Copernican times, but anyone who wants to make spirituality a factor in science is still in for a very rough ride.
But how did science unfold? As a series of logically-evolving discoveries, each built securely on the foundation of what went before? Far from it. Instead it seems to be a series of often wildly opposing points of view, the latest orthodoxy obliterating all that went before it. It's reasonable to assume that this process isn't over yet, and current orthodoxies could be swept away in the light of the next round of discoveries. That isn't to say that biodynamics has all the answers, or even that it's right; simply to note that just because it all sounds so unusual, that doesn't mean it can't produce excellent results.
Biodynamics in action
Some people are unimpressed with biodynamic theory and have to be convinced by seeing the results in the vineyard. Veronique Cochran encountered some resistance from her workers at Chateau Falfas to begin with: "The workers weren't very warm to biodynamics but after two years they could see the difference in the quality of the soil."
Seeing biodynamics in action is also what convinced Thetford wine merchant Trevor Hughes of its effectiveness – so much so that he now devotes a two-page spread in his wine list to producers working biodynamically. "For years I had a house just down the road from the Guillemots (see wine review, page xx) in Burgundy. I'd bought their wine for several years, and we became friends. They discussed their proposed changeover from organic to biodynamic, but I didn't become fully convinced that it works until I saw the changes in their soil and their vines. It all looked so alive, as if it had body and life and vitality. When they farmed organically it never shone like that. When I compared their soil to that of their neighbours – especially those who had just sprayed - there was such a difference that I knew this must be the way to go."
Trevor is quick to point out that farming biodynamically doesn't automatically produce good wine, citing the example of one prominent biodynamist who, he feels, produces terrible wines. But, as he says, "The amount of effort biodynamic producers have to put in means you don't do it for effect or for publicity, you do it for pure love."
It's remarkable how many of the all-time top wine estates in France are converting to biodynamic winemaking. More than anything else, this is what proves to me that the winds of change are blowing. These people are moving over to biodynamics because they know it works. And the proof of that that is in the glass.
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