Certifiable

Cynics often claim wineries get certifications as a marketing ploy. They’re right, but not in the way they think. We are selling something — an idea. That idea is regenerative agriculture. Those that think it’s a slick wine marketing concept need to have a conversation with our accountants. 

That’s not to say that biodynamics and regenerative agriculture can’t be profitable, indeed they can be, should be, and better be. As they say, you can’t farm green if you’re in the red. However, you may need to be patient for the profit — it’s worth the wait.

There are many reasons to get organic certifications — all of them good for the planet. You need a framework, a foundation to get started on a complex project based on long-term goals. Rigorous certifications like Demeter Biodynamic® and Regenerative Organic Certified™ (ROC) give a farm an outline of how to move forward. The process sets goals and milestones that help define the work that needs to be done and how to do it. This is critical when you are held to a high standard that demands you progress and improve. 

There is no endpoint in the process — you never reach agricultural nirvana. Even if you improve every year, you’re only taking small steps forward for the next generation. There is no finish line, this is a race where the leaders are the ones not moving backward. Continual, gradual improvement is the mission. Building an additional one-percent organic matter in our soil may not sound like a lot to you, but for us, it’s a cause for celebration. 

The certification process is a time of introspection and planning. We thoroughly reviewed what we accomplished and discussed what worked and where we fell short. We then plan out strategies for the next season and beyond. By the time the inspector arrives, we are prepared in a way you can never be without a formal process and demanding standards that must be achieved. The challenge is always planning how you will improve and move forward. Each year we add additional layers to our practice. 

Your first certification, while an achievement, is only the beginning. It means you have finally arrived at the starting line. Ultimately, you have to build on the outline that the certifications have developed and discover the ideal framework for your farm. While the overall concepts of regenerative agriculture are the same everywhere, you need to sculpt them for your farm — an art that takes years, even generations, to develop fully.

There’s a lot of greenwashing out there. Many “sustainable” certifications sound good on paper but still allow far too many poisons and shortcuts in the field and cellar. While many sustainable certifications are focused on the needs and problems of the producer, Demeter and ROC are concentrated on providing the consumer with a logo on a label that can reliably mean something to them. While I cannot doubt the best intentions of most involved in the many sustainable certifications, their programs fall short of what is needed to save our planet and have been co-opted by big agriculture. These greenwashed logos on labels dilute the meaning of all similar logos on wine labels and only confuse the consumer — which is often their intention. Why achieve a more demanding certification when you can slap a sustainable certificate on your brand without giving up Round-Up and so many other dangerous applications in your vineyard?

Every major grocery chain features organic vegetables, but those sections are dominated by big agriculture, and big organic ag is often not regenerative agriculture. This dilution of the term organic combined with corporate greenwashing of the term sustainable makes more meaningful certifications a necessity. 

There are many uncertified, perfectly legitimate practitioners of regenerative agriculture who are just as dedicated to that vision as we are, but by not getting certified and putting those logos on their labels, they are not pushing the movement forward. Yes, they are improving their soils, and capturing carbon, and touching all the bases except one — evangelicalism. Our job is not to change just our farm, but to change all farms. 

Putting your certifications on the label is a means of communication, and any brand messaging can be construed as marketing. But the Demeter and ROC logos are essential to communicate to consumers that are devoted to supporting producers who are committed to both the environment producing fruit, vegetables, and livestock that meets both their standards of quality and integrity. Connecting with those customers is an essential element for those that practice regenerative agriculture. With no margin, there is no mission. There are customers who share our values and want to support them. It is our job to connect with them and certification logos clearly carry our message and mission to them. Those consumers consider that a service, not a marketing hack. 

Wine has advantages as we have labels to display logos and produce products that can sit on a shelf for extended periods, an advantage not open to many biodynamic farmers. Shipping perishables is challenging for small farmers. This puts winegrowers in a unique position to promote the idea of certifications beyond organic. Telling the story of how we farm is a responsibility, communicating to customers about why they should buy regeneratively farmed products is how we build demand for all ROC and Demeter products — and that’s a sure way to convince more farmers and retailers to change their ways. 

Regenerative agriculture is not just about your farm — it’s about all farms. 

Talking About Biodynamics at Troon Vineyard

Biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy and I had a great conversation about Biodynamic farming with Chris Sawyer on The Varietal Show!

The Pace of Knowing

“The pace of knowing on our part does not alter how creation works,” Michael Phillips in Mycorrhizal Planet

A recent article in the New York Times revealed that the Moon has a tail, much like a comet. “It almost seems like a magical thing,” said one of the astronomers. For a few days each month, like clockwork, a stream of sodium particles from the Moon wraps around the earth’s atmosphere. That tail is dusting the Earth with sodium. 

“But even invisible, knowing the Earth has a meteor-fueled moonbeam is satisfying enough — a reminder of the Moon’s dynamism.” Says Dr. James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist, “I think we definitely take it for granted.”

While we can’t sense the passage of this beam around the Earth, It does not mean that other beings on the planet cannot. There is much we still do not understand about the cycles of the natural world. Nature’s smallest beings sense many things that are invisible to us. 

The more you pursue the science of regenerative agriculture, the more connections to biodynamic practices you discover. That is not to say the reasoning behind those practices are the same, but the practices themselves often closely align. 

“As the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust and the soil, silica has been largely ignored by agronomists. Silica is crucial, however, as it provides plant defense against pests and fungal/bacterial disease and reduces plant stress. It is a cell-strengthener and an activator for many plant functions,” says Nicole Masters in her thought-provoking book For the Love of Soil.

“Soil application of colloidal silicon increased plant-available Si, but only foliar application increased the total silicon concentrations in leaves, yield, and cluster weight. Moreover, the wine produced from the silica-treated grapes were ranked better in sensory evaluations,” states the Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the article Effects of silicon amendments on grapevine, soil, and wine

One of the biodynamic preparations that raises most eyebrows (although all of them do for some) is BD 501 — the silica mentioned above. Silica is now routinely applied in many crops throughout the world. I’m sure most of the silica applied in agriculture is not buried in a cow horn first. Is the biodynamic method better than simply applying silica? I don’t know. However, I do know that silica prepared in the biodynamic way does make a difference in the vineyard. Our neighbors and good friends Barbara and Bill Steele at Cowhorn Vineyard have refined this practice over almost two decades of biodynamic farming. They use multiple precisely timed applications of BD 501 to encourage their Rhône varieties to reach higher brix levels in their cool Applegate Valley site. The proof is found in their exceptional wines. 

While Rudolf Steiner got a lot of the “hows” and “whats” right in his lectures, the “whys” are clearly not always on the mark. Steiner saw cow horns as kinds of radio telescopes that captured cosmic energies and transferred them to their contents. He was clearly right about silica, but cosmic energies? I think terms like “energies” and “forces” are just names for things we don’t understand. There was a lot that was not understood about plant biology in the 1920s, when Steiner gave his lectures (he died a year after giving them), while we understand much more today, there is still much that is not known. 

Having made our own BD 500 and BD 501 at Troon Vineyard for several years now we’ve had our own experience with burying cow horns to make these preparations. One thing is clear — the cow horns work in the sense that the final product is ideal for the job. Do they work because they are the perfect size and material or because of those cosmic forces? I admit there is a little bit of the “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” mentality here. Will other containers work just as well? I look forward to others doing that research and letting me know. I’d be happy to change, but I would prefer to not be the one experimenting as my immediate concerns are getting great fruit quality in the vintage at hand. 

There is one cosmic energy that no one doubts — the Sun. Apparently, now the Moon can join that club. Not only does the Moon’s gravity gives us tides, but once a month the Earth is enveloped in its tail. Like a timepiece, the moon showers us not with mysterious cosmic energies, but a dusting of sodium. We can’t see it or feel it, but to the microbiology in the soil and plants, it may sound like Big Ben striking noon. 

There are so many aspects of biodynamics that are now entering the mainstream of agricultural science. Composting at lower temperatures to increase fungal and bacterial populations. State-of-the-art compost tea brewers aerate compost tea overnight, which also builds those populations, as does the biodynamic practice of dynamizing. Even farming by the Moon may have to be reevaluated. It was obvious to many of us that biodynamics worked. All you had to do was to taste the wines. While we knew it worked, we were not very comfortable with the “whys” as presented by Steiner. Slowly, but surely those gaps are being filled by the new science of regenerative agriculture. 

It is my hope that the new Regenerative Organic Alliance and Certification will bridge those gaps. It embraces both USDA Organic and Demeter Biodynamic Certification, but fully incorporates the rapidly advancing science and knowledge that is happening in agriculture today. 

It’s not magical forces, but the Sun, soil, Moondust, mycorrhizal fungi, and manure that make agriculture work. As Michael Phillips wrote, “Nature does what needs to be done if we let her.”

Humble — something we should be when it comes to the natural systems. There is so much we do not know. Nature works, that’s truly magical.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Well, that was interesting. Goodbye 2020.

I was really looking forward to 2020. It was going to be a benchmark year as, after three years of intense effort we were going to receive our full Demeter Biodynamic® Certification. Finally, Troon Vineyard, always a vineyard with unfulfilled potential, was going to show what it could do.

Obviously, far, far more important, and more terrible, things happened. 

In late February, I was on the Slow Wine Tour as we had achieved another Slow Wine award at Troon Vineyard. San Francisco, Seattle and Denver in four days. Then, during the first week of March, while I was in San Francisco for the Oregon Wine Trail tasting event, I was unnerved to see the desk clerk at my hotel was wearing a mask when she checked me in. Then, at the packed event, people made nervous, feeble jokes about not shaking hands, while making clumsy attempts at bumping elbows. COVID had arrived. 

Then everything imploded. 

Our tasting rooms and our restaurant customers were closed down, sales events were canceled and the world came to a stop. Or so it seemed at first. 

While everything else closed, the farming just kept going. Farms can’t stop for pandemics. The winery became an eerie place. Most days I was alone in the offices and vineyard crew was spread out over the entire farm. It is easy to social distance on one-hundred acres. The cellar team would alternate days so only one person at a time was in the cellar. Despite the challenges, the work got done. 

Actually, the work in the vineyard was a comforting thing. With the entire world in an uproar, the quiet and beauty of the vineyard and the surrounding mountains made it a calming and safe place.

Selling wine was not a safe and calming place. A major segment of our customers simply vanished overnight as restaurants and wine bars were shuttered. For a small biodynamic winery producing wines from varieties that are not mainstream commercial pop hits, this was not a good thing. 

But then something very special happened.

Our regular customers, wine club members and locals, stepped up to support their local businesses when they needed it most. Our walk-in and online orders took off. Then there were our retail store customers who could have settled for the big, well-known commercial brands, but stuck with small producers like us. It is a favor we will do our best to repay forever. 

Then, thankfully, good weather arrived. 

In summer things felt lighter as we could have outdoor tastings at our tasting rooms and the energy that our guests brought to Troon revitalized our team. We are lucky to have a large patio and lawn at the winery and a courtyard at our Carlton tasting room. Outdoor tastings were not going to be an issue, as even in normal summers everyone prefers to be tasting outside. Social distance was not a problem as we easily spread out tables across the lawn. During the long, warm sunny days of summer in the Applegate Valley we were busy as outdoor wine tasting felt like a safe option. 

Then the fires arrived. 

The winds were predicted, but their actual arrival was unnerving as everyone was aware of the danger — a danger that was more than realized. Our neighbors in the towns of Talent and Phoenix saw their communities destroyed. Simple Machine Winery in Talent lost everything. Many winery and vineyard workers lost their homes. The first day of the fires, the skies were blue at Troon, but then the smoke settled in for a few weeks. Once again, we had been luckier than many. The main problem we experienced was that the smoke curtailed our outdoor tastings. Certainly a minor inconvenience compared to what so many suffered. The wine community came together with the Rogue Valley Wine Country Cares fundraiser to raise $57,000 to support housing costs for those that lost their homes. The wine industry is filled with good people. 

Then it was time for harvest. 

There is never a day filled with such unbridled optimism at a winery than the first day of harvest. We all did our best to maintain that facade. As dawn broke on that first day, we started picking in particularly heavy smoke. I wore both a N95 and a surgical mask and the pickers struggled to work in their masks and the smoke making an already difficult job that much harder. The cellar crew all wore N95 masks, now to ward off both smoke and COVID. Not one person complained. While we could not see each other’s smiles, you could still could still hear the jokes and laughter. 

When we briefly removed our masks as Troon Vineyard winemaker Nate Wall made the traditional Champagne toast as the first grapes arrived, it was clear that neither the smoke or COVID could steal our optimism for this new vintage.

Finally, the smoke cleared and most of the vintage was completed under blue skies surrounded by beautiful vistas of the Siskiyou Mountains. Once again we were lucky as our wines were not affected by the smoke. The fires were too far away from Troon so we were not covered with the fresh smoke that can impact the wine.

It is always strangely quiet when the vintage is over.

Harvest interns always bring a lot of energy, fun and enthusiasm to the harvest crew and their departure marks the official end of harvest. It also makes the winery feel quieter and a bit empty. It is always a time for reflection and looking forward. Now that the smoke had cleared the late October weather was unusually warm, customers returned to our tasting rooms and their support once again buoyed our spirits. 

Then in November everything imploded — again.

Just as other businesses had done, we had carefully planned how to keep our tasting rooms open for indoor tasting during the winter months. The social distance between tables had been carefully measured, firm mask requirements and disinfecting strategies had been put into action. Everyone on the team was committed to the safety of our guests and each other. I have been inspired by the commitment of everyone at Troon during this year. You could always see their deep respect for each other on their faces — because they were always masked. 

Then, as COVID dramatically spiked we once again were limited to outdoor tastings. Winter outdoor wine tastings are not an inviting prospect in the mountains of Southern Oregon.

But then something very special happened — again.

Yet again the Troon team pivoted and recreated our outdoor patios with heaters, blankets and windbreaks to make guests as comfortable as possible. Once again our customers have come through for us braving the elements to taste and buy our wines. You can never look at these people that supported you during this difficult year the same way again. We are very lucky.

All of us are looking forward to 2021. 

As you look to the next vintage you are always filled with optimism. I know 2021 will be a special vintage. We learned many things this year. We know more about each other and more about our customers. We are better than we were at the start of 2020. Both more efficient and more empathetic. Smarter and more creative. Tougher and more humble. 

Most of all we have to treasure our good fortune in 2020. We were able to hold our own while so many others had the business that they had dreamed of and sweated over for years devastated. We were able to make exciting wines in challenging situations. More than anything we did not lose anyone to this terrible disease, although some of our team lost extended family members. The lessons of vintage 2020 are to count your blessings. 

We practice regenerative agriculture at Troon Vineyard. Regenerative means to put in more than you take out. In 2020, that did not only apply to the vineyard. 

Well, this will be interesting. Hello 2021.

Video: Talking Biodynamics and Troon Vineyard Wines with Amy Gross on Wine4.me

It was a pleasure to spend time with Amy talking about our wines, Biodynamics and Oregon’s Applegate Valley!

Interview on the Organic Wine Podcast

I spent a entertaining hour discussing biodynamics regenerative agriculture at Troon Vineyard and life in Oregon’s Applegate Valley with Adam Huss on his Organic Wine Podcast.

“Today we take a trip to the country to meet Craig Camp, the General Manager of Troon Vineyard in the Applegate Valley AVA of Southwest Oregon. Troon is a certified organic and biodynamic winery and estate vineyard that focuses on blends made from the grapes of Southern France, which seem to do extremely well in this northern area with a hot Mediterranean climate.

Craig was brought in to regenerate every aspect of Troon, and we had a very enjoyable conversation about everything that is happening there that he has helped implement. From soil testing and replanting and staff education to sheep dogs to organic vegetable gardens and more, even from the outside it’s exciting to hear about what he’s doing, and you can hear the excitement in the way he talks about it.

Craig has a personal story in regards to wine that I can relate to as well. He fell in love with wine far away from where it was grown, and over the course of his life and several career changes, he worked backwards toward an understanding of how the finest wine begins in a healthy, probiotic soil.”

— Adam Huss

Listen to My Interview on The Organic Wine Podcast

Dirt is Not Terroir

It was the early eighties, and I was yet again rereading several chapters of Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s tome The Wines of Bordeaux. I had just spent the day tasting in Graves and Sauternes from the tank and barrel with renowned French wine exporter Christopher Cannan. Now it was night, and I was getter ready for bed in a small, dimly lit guest room above the offices of his company Europvin in the city of Bordeaux. We were visiting the Chateaux he worked with throughout all the appellations of Bordeaux. Each night before sleep I would review the appellations we had visited that day and those we would visit the next. That week long visit to Bordeaux was followed by a week in Burgundy with Becky Wasserman and my nightly reading changed to Burgundy, then a brand-new book authored by Anthony Hanson.

The next year I made a similar trip to Italy. Setting off with famed Italian wine exporter Neil Empson, we visited almost every wine area of Italy to taste at nearly every estate in his extensive portfolio on a three-week tasting marathon. In my bag was a well-worn copy of Burton Anderson’s Vino, the Italian wine bible of the day. My reading pattern was the same as when I was in France, reviewing each night on where we had been and cramming on where we were headed the next day.

I have been lucky over my career to have made multiple such trips to France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Australia. Top that off with many, many trips through the wine regions of California, Oregon and Washington. On each trip I would devour the current wine literature of each region before, during and after each visit.

I was obsessed with wine books and literally would buy and read whatever came out each year and my bookshelves overflowed with dog-eared, wine-stained volumes. This was the era of my life when I was a wine importer and distributor based in Chicago. Then, two decades ago, I made the transition from wine distribution to wine production and my reading list began to change. Slowly but surely instead of reading books about wine, I began reading books about farming. I recently realized this when I noticed that the last five books I’ve read all have the word soil in the title.

Even though my reading materials have changed, I am still as obsessed by the concept of terroir as I was decades ago in that small room in Bordeaux. However, what that means to me has changed significantly.

Those books presented terroir as something magical. That each site is a unique expression of the soil where it was grown. Then you actually start to grow wine and a new reality presents itself.

Take Oregon and Burgundy for example. In the Willamette Valley the soils are volcanic or sedimentary acidic soils. Summers are almost desert-like with no rain for months. Burgundies are grown on alkaline limestone soils and there is rain throughout the growing season. There’s not much in common here except one thing — outstanding pinot noir. Time after time experienced professional tasters find it difficult to tell which wine is Willamette Valley and which is Burgundy.

Burgundy and the Willamette Valley are not alone in this for the same experts can confuse California and Washington Cabernet with Bordeaux and California Coast and Oregon Syrah with Rhône wines. Each of these areas are very different from each other. How it is possible that all can produce wines whose provenance confuses the experts?

The reason is we have always made the cornerstone of terroir the type of soil the vine grows in — limestone, volcanic, granitic, sedimentary and so on. But it turns out that it’s not the exact type of soil that matters as much as the life in the soil itself. It has been this realization that changed my reading from wine books to soil books.

Terroir is not an expression of inert dirt, it is the individual expression of living soil and how a healthy plant intertwines with that soil. Dirt is not always soil. Soil is a system teeming with life.

Obviously, there are distinct sites. Terroir is a combination of many things. Climate and mesoclimate are critical, then there is the human element — row spacing, trellising and picking the right variety for the right place. For example, planting cabernet in a cool climate and pinot in a warm climate is not a great idea. But it takes grapes grown on healthy vines on living soils to make an expressive wine with a distinct character.

What makes for a living soil? Here is where you find the reason that biodynamic wines have a unique liveliness that stands out. Sustainable agriculture is not enough. That only means that you are killing the life in your soils more slowly than industrial agriculture. It is only with regenerative agriculture that you can build soil that creates distinctive, individualistic wines.

Plants and the microbiology in the soil have a complex symbiotic relationship. The plant takes a large percentage of the carbohydrates it produces through photosynthesis and pushes this exudate out through its roots to attract the microbes it needs to extract nutrition from the soil. It can change the mix of exudates depending on its requirements at the moment. A healthy plant decides the microbiology in the soil by the mix of gourmet microbe treats it sends out through its roots. That microbiology then returns the favor by processing the nutrients in the soil into a form the plant can utilize. The healthier the plant, the healthier that microbiology becomes. The healthier that microbiology becomes, the healthier the plant becomes. Not a bad system.

Then we come in and screw it up. The application of pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers destroys nature’s well-tuned system. In that system is to be found what makes a vineyard unique. It is an essential element of what we call terroir. The grapes that make distinctive wines come from vines in vineyards where nature’s system is humming along. Our job as farmers is to assist the plant and soil in regenerating that balance year after year. This is vital when you have a perennial crop like vines that do not lend themselves to crop rotation.

Coming back to the Willamette Valley and Burgundy comparison, perhaps their shared qualities come more from the life in their soils than their geological provenance.

I still read before and after vineyard visits. However, these days they are not wine books, they are soil books. It is in the soil you find great wine.

Demeter Certification

It started in a grown over abandoned cow pasture three and a half years ago and ended with Champagne on the patio at Troon Vineyard last week. 

The start was picking the site for the compost piles. The Champagne toast was to celebrate what we have achieved in these years in-between. Troon Vineyard is now one of only twelve wineries in Oregon to be certified Demeter Biodynamic® in both the winery and vineyard. To add a bit of icing to the cake, both the vineyard and winery are now also certified CCOF Organic. 

Searching with me for a compost site in an abandoned and overgrown pasture over three years ago was biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy. The new proprietors of Troon Vineyard, Dr. Bryan and Denise White had fully committed to the concept and investment required to transform Troon Vineyard from industrial agriculture to biodynamics. Now Andrew and I started the project forward. If you were standing there that day with Andrew and me and then came back to Troon Vineyard today, you would not recognize you were on the same farm. Only Grayback Mountain, still majestically towering over the Applegate Valley, would tell you that this spot was Troon Vineyard. The distressed, dilapidated and diseased vineyard that was Troon Vineyard in 2016 has been replaced by a living farm. Today, everywhere you look is activity and, most importantly, life. 

While media tends to focus on buried cow horns and other photogenic aspects of biodynamics, the heart of biodynamics is the people who practice it. A farm is not a natural occurrence in nature. Mother Nature does not plant grapevines in nice neat rows. Our goal and I believe the goal of biodynamics, is to let the natural systems of nature function as normally as possible in the rather unnatural environment that is a farm. 

It takes a village to achieve a goal like Demeter Biodynamic® Certification. Fortunately we built a dynamic team to accomplish this goal. Proprietors Bryan and Denise White have provided a solid foundation for us to build on. Biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy and viticulturist Jason Cole provided the framework for our vineyard crew, led by ranch manager Adan Cortes, to transform not only the vineyard but the entire property. Our cellar team, winemaker Nate Wall and assistant winemaker Sarah Thompson fully embraced biodynamics and daily keep us moving forward as we expand and deepen our practice of regenerative farming and winemaking.

Troon Vineyard CCOF Organic Certification

For me, I will admit this is an emotional moment as I remember first seeing this vineyard in 2016. Today, when I stand in the same spot where I first surveyed this vineyard, surrounded by the majestic beauty of the Siskiyou Mountains, I can clearly recall feeling that this was a special place and a special vineyard. To see the possibilities I saw transformed into reality sometimes seems like almost a dream, but it is a dream come true.

Certification was a goal and now it is a goal achieved. It fact it just means that we have arrived at the starting line. So much of the work over the last three years has been repairing and restoring and we are far from done with those jobs. Now the goal is to more deeply understand this vineyard, this farm, and to make the practice of biodynamics our own. To achieve certification you are given a set of rules to follow. If you check off all the boxes you achieve certification. Now, as a jazz musician must master the scales before they can improvise, that we have learned to work within the framework of biodynamics, we must learn to go beyond that framework and discover the natural system of this farm. That will be our ultimate goal. Our job is to learn what this farm needs and then do our best to provide for those needs. The next years will be focused on building biodiversity. We will be welcoming some new members to our biodynamic team as next spring a flock of sheep, more chickens, and the requisite guard dogs (Pyrénées of course!) became part of our farm.

We celebrated our certifications with a Champagne toast. We toasted not only to what we accomplished, but what we will accomplish in the future. Becoming one of the few Demeter Biodynamic® Certified wineries and vineyards is a true milestone. Now, on to the next one. 

Rebirth, Regeneration, Rediscovery

“Troon Vineyard is a story of rebirth, regeneration, and rediscovery,” reads the lede in the Oregon Wine Press article “Troon Renaissance” in their July issue about the transformation of Troon Vineyard. The author, Barbara Barrielle, could not have better captured the spirit of what has been accomplished at this small vineyard in the Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon. 

When I first visited Troon Vineyard in 2016, I felt a connection to the vineyard from the first day because I could feel the potential of this site. I can still clearly remember that day as I stared at the vineyard with the dramatic backdrop of Grayback Mountain and the Siskiyou Range. I felt that this was not only a site with potential, but with soul. The serene beauty of the Applegate Valley is unmatched by other American wine regions and, while the site and the valley were beautiful, the condition of the vineyard was not. This was a vineyard that needed to be born again. 

In 2016, the rebirth of Troon Vineyard began. This was no easy task as the owner at that time did not share my vision of the potential of the vineyard and the wines. For years, Troon had been focused on what I would call “gimmick” marketing. Funny labels and contrived marketing spin were the strategies. Also, key staff members had been driven off by, shall we say, less than enlightened management practices. I still cringe when I think of the loss of one, particularly talented staff member due to insensitive treatment. Fortunately, at least, she moved on to another winery in the Applegate Valley and remains a friend to this day. I had been brought in to put the business in order so that it could be sold. I saw it as a short-term project, and I was getting ready to move on when Denise and Bryan White arrived and decided to purchase Troon. In the meantime, I'd fallen in love with this vineyard. Thankfully, they did too. For it would demand a labor of love to not only restore the vineyard but to restore honor to a tarnished brand.

Troon Vineyard had been in a dark period for some time. To say the brand was tarnished would be an understatement. I was brought in to put a bandaid on it and then to move on once first-aid was applied. That’s all the owner at that time wanted, and I just wanted to get out of Napa and have some time to find a compelling vineyard in the Willamette Valley. It did not take me long to realize I had found that vineyard, but it was in the Applegate Valley. Without an owner that is connected to the vineyard and the soil, there is no hope. The vineyard convinced me to hope anyway.

What is now Troon Vineyard was divided at that time. The west ranch was being farmed using the nuclear option by the family that had purchased it in a sale that had broken the property apart. Knowing little about farming, they pushed the vines to their limit using every chemical trick and allowing the vines to overproduce and exhaust themselves. I’ll always remember reading their spray list and seeing a product called Venom. Any product with such a name needed to be checked out. The first thing I saw on the product label was that it killed bees - all of them. These poor plants would never completely recover from this abuse, but, hopefully, the soils and the bees could. Fortunately, the east ranch was still under our control, and there I pulled the plug on chemicals in the vineyard and the cellar. It was not an easy task as the winemaking and vineyard team at the time had never been asked to aspire to make great wines, so they had not.

We had to not only regenerate the site, but the people that worked it.

In 2017, the regeneration of Troon Vineyard began. The essential step was the purchase of the Troon Winery and the west ranch by the Whites. They had already purchased the half of the original property that had been sold off and then they purchased the Troon Winery site to reunite the entire estate. The other big step was the arrival of biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy. A huge leap forward was made as, now that both vineyard blocks were under our control, we were able to move immediately and totally to organic and biodynamic agriculture on the entire estate. Then plans were initiated for a range of research projects to dig into every aspect of the vineyard. There was a lot to learn.

This year also was the start of our compost program, which required us to produce over two hundred tons of biodynamic compost a year. That’s a lot of manure. Fortunately for us, our neighbor here in the Applegate Valley is the Noble Organic Dairy with thousands of cows eager to contribute to our cause.

Regenerative agriculture became the foundation of everything we did, and biodynamics provided the framework to build on. We were searching for the soul of this vineyard. It had been there all along, but we had to rediscover it. 

In 2018, the rediscovery of Troon Vineyard began. Vineyard Soil Technologies from Napa Valley arrived and dug over seventy five-feet deep soil pits. A team of soil scientists spent a week in the pits researching every aspect of the vineyard. At the same time, we began our project with Biome Makers, as they created an annual database on the bacteria, fungi, and yeasts that made our soils unique. Master viticulturist Jason Cole came on board to manage the redevelopment of the vineyard. We wanted to understand how every aspect of the vineyard changed as we implemented biodynamics. We needed all the data we could obtain to help us make the right decisions. 

There were a lot of decisions to be made as we had decided to replant the entire vineyard. The existing vines were simply beyond saving. The biggest issue was extensive red blotch virus infection, but the vines had also been weakened by the years of conventional farming. Weak vines are easy targets for other vine diseases, and these vines had become an encyclopedia of afflictions. As devastating and expensive it was to have to replant the entire vineyard, there was a silver lining as we could now choose the right varieties for this site and plant them the right way. Instead of having to deal with a hodgepodge of varieties, some less than ideal for the site, we could replant with a plan. That plan would be to focus on the varieties of southern France. Those varieties would include syrah, grenache, mourvèdre, cinsault, counoise, tannat, malbec, negrette, bourboulenc, marsanne, roussanne, viognier, clairette blanche, bourboulenc, vermentino (rolle) and picpoul. Many of these varieties will not appear as single-variety wines but will be part of blends. 

Blends are to become the heart of Troon Vineyard as we create the new Troon.

In 2019 we recreated Troon Vineyard as the replanting project began as we planted ten new acres of vines. Some of these were new areas, never before planted, and others were replanting of vineyards we had removed the year before. It is always a sad experience to remove vines - even sick ones. Planting new vines is the flip-side of that emotion as there is nothing that fuels the spirit of optimism more than putting vines in the ground. We are planting not only for ourselves but for future generations. There are few things that “pay it forward” more than planting a vineyard. These vines will produce wines we’ll never taste, made by people we’ll never meet.

The work that began in 2016 was recognized in 2019 as we were awarded our first Demeter Biodynamic® and CCOF Organic certifications. There are separate certifications for the winery and vineyard. Therefore, we received our full certifications for the winery, but our “in-transition” certifications for the vineyard. We’ll get the final Demeter Biodynamic® certification for the vineyard in 2020 as it takes three full years of biodynamic farming, and in 2019 we were a few months short of that goal. 

The older vines were now really showing the impact of our biodynamic regenerative agriculture program. They were healthier and producing better fruit. Our good friends in the Applegate Valley, Barbara and Bill Steele, at Cowhorn Vineyard, had graciously agreed to sell us some of their biodynamic syrah, grenache, marsanne, roussanne, and viognier to get us through the shortfalls of our own production as we replanted. So we had grapes from our own estate that were dramatically improved in quality combined with excellent fruit from Cowhorn to work with, but, as with a great violin, you need a virtuoso to play it to show what it can do. That talent arrived as this vintage was made under the guidance of new Troon Vineyard winemaker Nate Wall. Nate is an incredibly sensitive and passionate winemaker whose love for the site equals the Whites and my own. His background in science (B.S. in Biology and M.S. in Environmental Engineering) was ideal for our philosophy of searching for the science in biodynamics. His extensive experience making pinot noir in the Willamette Valley provided the light, minimalist touch needed for wines from the Applegate Valley. 

The confluence of a healthier vineyard, better fruit, and the right people made the 2019 vintage a milestone vintage for Troon Vineyard. The wines from this vintage finally give a glimpse of what this special vineyard is capable of producing. The first of our new generation of wines included wines released in 2020: Piquette, Pét tanNat (100% tannat pét nat), and Kubli Bench blends that included an Amber (orange wine) and a Rosé. Another orange wine, Amber Amphora Vermentino, has been aging on the skins and stems in three amphorae for the better part of a year and will be released this fall. While most of the 2019 red wines (which we are equally excited about) will not be released for a few years, we did produce a 100% carbonic maceration Grenache, which we are enjoying chilled this summer.

So in 2020, Troon Vineyard has been reborn, we have regenerated the vineyard and the wines and created a team that has rediscovered the soul of a vineyard. Joining that team in 2020 is the energetic and creative assistant winemaker Sarah Thompson. This will be the year we receive our full Demeter Biodynamic® certification that will recognize years of hard work and investment. But these achievements only mean that we have arrived at the starting line of a race that never finishes. There is no such thing as a finish line in winemaking.

Regeneration is a constant. Every year it begins again only building on the work of the preceding years. Agriculture is a relay race. We can only do our best for the land, the plants, and our wines and then, finally, pass the baton on to the next runner. Hopefully, they’ll run the race with the same intensity that we ran our leg.

The 500 Milestone

Troon winemaker Nate Wall filling cow horns with fresh organic manure

You start with dung and end with humus. Newton was right, alchemy exists. What was worthless becomes gold. A concentrated collection of fungi and bacteria to inoculate our soils. This is not magic, just good bugs. 

We mark significant progress towards goals by celebrating milestones, events that measure our progress. Milestones should be recognized and remembered as you strive towards your goal. Some milestones are hard to measure, but in this case the achievement was very clear. Six months ago at Troon Vineyard we placed raw manure into some cow horns and last week we dug them up and out came soil - humus. The production of your first BD 500 is always a milestone for a Biodynamic farmer.

Why do you have to bury the manure in cow horns? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but we do know that no other container has successfully transformed manure into this important soil inoculate. Maria Thun, in her seeming endless research on all things Biodynamic tried to use other containers, but none produced the same results. For whatever reason, the cow horns are the only known container that transforms raw manure to the rich humus that is BD 500. Rudolf Steiner thought the cow horns channeled the power of the Universe into the manure. Personally, I believe that fermenting manure does not require quite that much energy. The fungi and bacteria are already here just waiting to do their jobs if given the proper opportunity. Right now, the cow horns do the best job of creating just the right environment for them to do their work. Perhaps in the future other containers will be discovered. 

The process of making BD 500 is actually quite simple. Last fall we gathered some very, very fresh cow manure from the pastures of Noble Dairy, our organic next-door neighbor (a great project for our harvest interns) and simply filled the cow horns with the fresh manure. The cow horns themselves came from the Josephine Porter Institute, perhaps the premier supplier for the Biodynamic farmer. Then we buried them last fall and dug them up early this summer. The transformation may seem magical, but it’s not as this is what the microbes in our soil do and all we did was provide them an opportunity to do their work in particularly pleasant conditions. 

So often we use mystical excuses to explain things we do not understand and there is still a lot we do not understand. Science and agriculture have had a difficult relationship. All too often, most scientific research focused on simply making more as bigger harvests promise more profit. The situation worsened as Big Ag took over the world. Quantity not quality generated the funding for most research with predictable results. In his book The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber relates the tale of university researchers being offered commissions by Monsanto to create wheat that was resistant to Roundup so that more of their product could be applied to grain on the way to a bakery near you.

Fortunately, things are changing and the microbiome of soil is the hot “new” topic being pursued by researchers. Many think what winegrowers have been calling terroir for centuries is actually more defined by the soil’s microbiome than the type of soil the vine is growing in. One thing for sure is that vines cannot take their nutrition from the soil without their mycorrhizal partners. The goal of Biodynamic farming is to build this natural balance in our soils. Healthy vines can handle many of the things Mother Nature throws their way without our help. In fact, often “our help” makes things worse for them. For some reason, we humans assume we know more about ripening grapes than grapevines do. 

After harvest this fall, our own BD 500 will be applied to our soils. There are those in Biodynamics that believe elemental beings are at work among their plants. I believe in them too. However, not the gnomes and such that some followers of Steiner believe in. The real elemental beings are the fungi and bacteria that work the real magic in the vineyard and are elemental to life itself. When we apply BD 500 to our soils we are just bringing more of those elemental beings to the party. 

Milestones are worthy of celebration and rituals. As a group, we gathered to fill and bury our horns and then again when we dug up the finished BD 500. We will all gather and celebrate again when we apply our own BD 500 to our vineyard this fall. We all come together to celebrate our milestones as we bring Troon Vineyard back to life.

In Biodynamics, the people are elemental beings too.

Freshly filled cow horns being prepared to be buried

Planting New Vineyards at Troon - Hands

It was before 6 a.m., but there were already a lot of holes. Dawn had not broken, but a dim light was just starting to flow over the mountains. Hundreds of holes had already been dug. Around thirty people moved their spades rhythmically, almost silently, as they dug twelve-inch holes, one after another. This is how you plant, or should I say, how they plant a vineyard.

Last week at Troon Vineyard in Oregon’s Applegate Valley, we planted about a third of the vines we need to plant this month. That was over four thousand holes, dug by hand in less than two day’s work. But digging the hole was only the beginning. Once the holes are dug, they must each receive, by hand, a shovel full of Biodynamic compost mixed with Azomite and Calphos and then a vine needs to be dropped in each hole. On each vine, the biodegradable root cover had to be removed by hand due to the requirements of our organic certification. Then, on their knees, with their hands, each hole is filled and the vine is in its new home.

One day these vines will give birth to wines served in some of the best restaurants in the world. But it is these people in the pre-dawn hours with their spades and on their hands and knees that brought these vines to live in this vineyard.

Winery tours and articles like to feature barrels, tanks, and machines, but it is the hands of the people that craft them that make wines of place come to life. From the moment the vines are planted, to when they are tended in the vineyards, to the cellar work that turns grapes into wine, the best wines are handmade wines.

Hands, not things make memorable wines. Hands hold the spades that dug the holes to plant them, hands shovel the compost to help them grow, hands prune and position the shoots as they grow, hands pick the grapes, hands sort the fruit that arrives at the winery and hands hold the glasses when it’s time to savor the hand labor that put the wine in those glasses. Making and enjoying wine is a hands-on experience.

The thousands of holes dug by dozens of hands will start to produce wine in three years. Many hands will touch each of these vines as they grow over the next years. Your delight and pleasure in the wine they will one day produce will be the result of the work those hands. Hand to hand to hand and, finally, to the glass in your hand.

Wines of place, with terroir, touch you because of the many touches that have brought the wine to you.

Planting grenache noir at Troon Vineyard  

Placing new vines one-by-one in the freshly dug holes. Each of the wrappers on the roots also had to be removed.

Planting New Vineyards at Troon - Getting to Know You

Standing there looking at the now real Troon Vineyard block 9, newly planted with mourvèdre, was an emotional experience. So much planning, work and investment transformed from an idea into a vineyard. There in front of me, I could finally feel the wine that would come from these vines. Putting a plant in the ground that hopefully will be producing wines long after I’m gone is a very different experience than planting a crop that will be replaced after one season. But it was the day before that we got to know each of these vines.

The process of preparing these vines for their new home begins the day before planting. Troon winemaker Nate Wall and assistant winemaker Cary Willeford and I spent the day preparing and applying a series of Biodynamic Preparations to the new plants. First was Biodynamic Barrel Compost, which we dynamized for twenty minutes by hand before applying to the roots of each plant to give their microbiome a head start. Meanwhile, we had been preparing a tea of Biodynamic Preparation 508 (equisetum or horsetail).  Which was also dynamized by hand then sprayed on the leaves and graft junctions. This preparation helps the plant ward off fungal diseases like powdery mildew. The time, care and intention that went into this process I believe are integral to what makes Biodynamics such a powerful agricultural system. The culture we built by providing care and attention to each plant changes our relationship to them and to each other.

Biodynamics achieves many goals. Your soils are healthier, your plants are healthier, your fruit tastes better, your wine is better and, obviously, its better for the environment. It is a lot of work, but it is also a lot of fun. You feel good about what you’re doing everyone feels pride in a shared worthwhile endeavor.

Yesterday afternoon all of our existing vineyards were also treated with Biodynamic Barrel Compost, we did not want them to feel left out. After all, plants do talk to each other you know.

Troon assistant winemaker Cary Willeford and winemaker Nate Wall apply Biodynamic Barrel Compost to the roots of the new vines. 

Planting New Vineyards at Troon - It Only Looks Like the Beginning

New vines arrived at Troon Vineyard yesterday from Inland Desert Nursery in Washington - mourvèdre, grenache noir and marsanne all neatly packed into shipping boxes. Next week more classic southern French varieties will arrive and within the next ten days, we’ll have planted over 14,000 vines to create ten new acres of vineyard.

Stacked in their shipping boxes they look like the beginning of a project, but it only looks that way. This project started a year and a half ago and the arrival of the vines themselves is closer to the end than the beginning of the project of planting a vineyard. The first step was extensive soil studies as Vineyard Soil Technologies dug more than seventy five-feet deep soil pits to create detailed soil profiles. Based on that data we selected ten acres as ideal for vineyard development. Combining the soil data and climate data with our experience we selected the varieties we felt would be best matched to each vineyard block to be developed. We then begin working with Inland Desert Nursery to obtain the clones of the varieties we chose to focus on. The varieties we were looking for are not the most popular so ordering from the nursery long in advance is required.

Planting does not begin with plants. First, there was the soil work and that filled most of the last year and a half. Once the blocks to be planted were identified the ground had to be prepared. That meant heavy equipment as a D8 ripped the ground to a depth of thirty-six inches. Prior to the ripping, we applied five tons per acre of organic compost along with other soil amendments that we discovered were required by our soil studies. This was followed by discing then yet another finishing discing. When the soil was prepared we seeded a specifically designed cover crop to add nutrition to the soil. As Biodynamic farmers, we also did our first application of Biodynamic Preparation 500.

Over the winter and spring, the cover crop prospered. This was then mowed, then disced into the soil as green manure. Then the vineyard begin to take form as we put in end posts, stakes for each vine (head-trained vines) and irrigation tubes for the soon to arrive young, and very thirsty vines. In addition, another application of Biodynamic preparation 500 was applied to both the blocks to be planted along with all existing vineyard blocks.

Only after all of this investment and work did we arrive at last Friday, when the first vines arrived. Their arrival was the culmination of all of this work, not the beginning. However, these vines mark the beginning of new wines that will come from the grapes they will yield. In that sense, they are truly a new beginning for Troon Vineyard.

As you see, the plan for planting these new acres at Troon was built upon scientific research, extensive viticultural experience, the principles of Biodynamic agriculture and on a vision to make wines with a unique character defined by our soils and the climate on the Kubli Bench in Oregon's Applegate Valley.

Over the next weeks, I will be documenting the process of planting these new vines at Troon Vineyard in words and images. I invite you to share that process with us as we build a foundation for a new generation of wines at Troon.

Taking the Parking Lot Back to Paradise

 Hey farmer farmer

Put away that D.D.T. now

Give me spots on my apples

But leave me the birds and the bees

Please

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

'Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

• Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

I felt like I was walking on blacktop. Hard, hot and lifeless it looked like a place where a parking attendant would work, not a farmer. But this was a vineyard. Each vine looked like it was a weed growing out of cracks in the blacktop on some worn parking lot.

Living soil gives life. In this vineyard the soil was dead and the vines were dying. Yet, it was a beautiful site and the vines were giving some good wines even as they struggled to survive. They deserved better.

There seemed only one route back to health that could provide the opportunity to make the wines I believed we had the potential to produce. That path was biodynamics, which is the best existing framework for regenerative agriculture. To craft the wines we aspired to make, our soils, indeed our entire farm needed regeneration. It is never just the soil that needs regeneration, but also the spirit. At Troon, not only our soils were abused.

How was a vineyard transformed into a parking lot? Only through the abuses of industrial, thoughtless farming can soil be so decimated. Sick soils make sick plants and these poor vines were overcome with viruses and fungal diseases that stronger plants could have resisted. It became our mission to bring them back to health so they could live out their remaining years doing what Mother Nature intended them to do with their lives - ripen grapes.

Then there is intention, perhaps the key to regenerative agriculture. Previously their intent was to extract all they could from the land and extract they did. Today our mission is to give back more than we take. To be a good farmer you must work for the farmers who will farm the land in the future with the same fervor you work for yourself.

The path from parking lot to vineyard started with science. We did extensive soil studies with Vineyard Soil Technologies and worked with Biomemakers to establish a complete cross-section of our vineyard microbiome through genetic sequencing. To know where you need to go, you first have to know where you are.

Then came the proactive part - biodynamics. The essence of biodynamics is building healthy soils. The main tool in the biodynamic toolbox is compost. Over the last years we have been applying tons of biodynamic compost to our vineyards. In addition to the compost, now that chemicals were eradicated and weed control was returned to manual methods our soils began to change, the microbiome bloomed. Today you can walk into our vineyard and easily dig your hands into healthy arable soil.

That parking lot has been replaced by paradise - a vineyard.

Looking at Steiner in the Rearview Mirror

Rudolf Steiner gave his agricultural lectures, the beginning of biodynamics, in 1924. There were eight lectures over thirteen days given to a group of over one hundred farmers. He died in 1925. During the last of the agricultural lectures he said, “I am in entire agreement with the strict resolve which has been made by our farmer friends here present, namely, that what has been given here to all those partaking in the Course shall remain for the present within the farmers' circle. They will enhance it and develop it by actual experiments and tests. The farmers' society — the “Experimental Circle” that has been formed — will fix the point of time when in its judgment the tests and experiments are far enough advanced to allow these things to be published."

Here are some discoveries that happened from 1924, when Steiner gave the agricultural lectures and the five years after his death in 1925:

1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle

1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies

1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)

1925 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Discovery of the composition of the Sun and that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe

1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)

1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang

1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)

1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe

1929 – Alexander Fleming: Penicillin, the first beta-lactam antibiotic

1929 – Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics

1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers his eponymous limit of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star

There was a lot Steiner and his compatriots did not know in 1924. What they did know was that the new chemical farming strategies that were taking over the world were destroying the land and our food. They may not have known why, but they knew something was wrong. At least they had the courage to seek a solution.

To take a frightening hypothetical, suppose you were diagnosed with cancer tomorrow. Would you want to be treated by a doctor with the knowledge that existed in 1920 or one armed with all the knowledge acquired in the last one hundred years? I think farmers should make the same argument when it comes to Steiner and biodynamics . We need to build on the wisdom of the past and it is our job to push that knowledge forward. We need not be held back by their ignorance nor condemn them for it - they knew what they knew and no more, just like us. Future generations will find us as ignorant as we find those that came before us.

Steiner clearly identified the problem and outlined an answer, but he was locked in a world that was not only in chaos after World War I, but in an era where modern science and new knowledge was exploding. His answer was to reach back and there was true wisdom in that when it came to farming. However, we must take Steiner’s world into consideration when evaluating his solutions. It is always wise to question the wisdom of your gurus. Much of what we call biodynamics today has little to do with Steiner. Names like Maria Thun, Herbert Koepf, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and Manfred Klett established the liturgy of biodynamics. They took Steiner’s outline, then left it behind. We should do the same to them.

Steiner may not have known there were other galaxies or that the universe was expanding, but he did understand there were problems down on the farm. His ideas created a framework to build upon. He expected us to build on it, not leave his lectures frozen in time. Our job as biodynamic farmers is to continue the experiments as he requested until we find why biodynamics works, which it does. The problem right now is that we do not know the parts of biodynamics that work and those that don’t. Does every preparation work as he described? Of course not. Yet, there is something clearly working here and in the face of climate change we better figure out what works. There are no gnomes out there in the vineyard, but there are fungi and bacteria and in them we will find the real magic that makes biodynamics work. Are there Elemental Beings? Of course there are, they are just microscopic. 

The ultimate expression of biodynamics is when you go beyond it and craft the right solutions for your farm. Striving for Demeter certification is like a jazz musician practicing scales over and over again. It is only after they master their instrument that they can improvise and truly create something new. 

The next iteration of biodynamics is already in motion. People like Kevin Chambers at Koosah Farm and Ted Lemon at Littorai Wines are already moving beyond biodynamics to find new expressions of the preparations born of their direct experience on their farms. Practical biodynamics is being being taught to farmers (like us at Troon) by consultant Andrew Beedy, who was mentored by the famed Alan York. The practice of biodynamics has been and always will be evolving. 

What Steiner said in the agricultural lectures was meaningful, insightful and important in the maelstrom that was Europe in 1924. In the almost one hundred years since the lectures, we have learned a lot. It is our role as farmers to meld the insights of the past with the knowledge of today and to build a foundation for the future. That is the essence of biodynamics. Seeking truth and building a relationship with our planet and our place in the Universe is both a spiritual quest and a commercial one. Steiner is of the past, but biodynamics is of the future. What biodynamics will become is yet to be discovered. 

Steiner would have loved quantum physics. The uncertainty principle Is very biodynamic.

Biodynamic Fake News

It’s not their fault, but you see it every week. Fine wine writers printing misconceptions and flat-out wrong information on biodynamics - yes, fake news.

It’s not their fault, it’s ours. Those of us who farm wine grapes biodynamically are not doing a good job of getting out the real story. That could be because the biodynamic movement is not a monolith, but a complicated web with divergent branches and diverse self-interests. That makes for a muddled message and creates an information issue biodynamic winegrowers have to confront. While there may be divergent opinions and methods within the biodynamic community, all share a common final goal.

Here are some random recent examples of the media muffing biodynamics. The authors and publications are irrelevant as inaccuracies like these are more the rule than the exception.

”And if you’ve heard of one thing to do with biodynamics, it is probably that cow horns filled with fermented cow manure are buried in the vineyards to encourage soil fertility." "Cow horns are buried throughout the vineyard."

Biodynamic winegrowers do not bury cow horns “filled with fermented cow manure…throughout the vineyard”. In this case, the reference is to the production of Biodynamic Preparation 500. To prepare BD 500, you place very fresh, raw organic cow manure in cow horns in the fall and bury them in a single pit in a specially selected site. There they ferment over the winter and the horns are dug up in the spring. The finished BD 500 is mixed with water and applied to your soils. It assists with the formation of humus, increases available phosphorous, soil mycorrhiza and the water and nutrient holding capacity of the soil. The goal of BP 500 is to regenerate the natural microbiome and raise the quality of your soils.

“Naturally occurring cycles like moon phases dictate when to harvest ”

Moon phases do not “dictate” when we harvest at Troon Vineyard. That the phases of the moon have an impact on the natural rhythms of agriculture is a time-tested (and scientifically proven) reality. Following the ascending and descending cycles of the moon is something any natural farmer tries to do. However, the operative word here is “tries”. It’s one thing to follow these cycles in your home garden, but it’s another thing on a commercial farm. We certainly try to follow the lunar cycles, but often the realities of Mother Nature means you have to move forward. When you have to prune fifty acres of vines by a specific date, and you can’t prune when it’s raining (due to disease pressure), you can only do your best to hit the right days. When the fruit is ready to harvest, but it’s not a fruit day, but it’s going to rain three inches tomorrow your choice is easy - you pick. Any positive attributes you gain by picking on a certain day will be more than negated by the next day’s rain. We try to follow these lunar cycles whenever possible as we are seeking every advantage, no matter how small, to add that extra bit of nuance and life to our wines. The biodynamic calendar identifies ideal days for certain types of vineyard work. You try to prune on fruit days and cultivate on root days. As our goal is exceptional fruit quality, doing work on certain days is a way to fine-tune the quality of our fruit. However, we do not seek viticultural management from the man-in-the-moon, we just want a little advice, and will make our decisions based on what experience, common sense and science have taught us.

”Special concoctions of herbs, minerals, and manure may also be planted in the soil to aid fertilization.”

“Herbs, minerals and manure” are not planted in the vineyard soil to help fertilization. A range of plants (BP 502 to 507 - yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion, valerian) are fermented then added to compost piles to aid in developing the right bacterial and fungal balance in the finished compost, which will then be applied to the vineyard - back to the microbiome again. It is important to note that while compost contains some beneficial minerals, it is not fertilizer. The point of biodynamic compost is to build the humus and microbiome of your soil. A healthy plant in healthy soil does not require additional chemical fertilization. This is the cornerstone of biodynamic practice. When we need to fertilize due to soils depleted by years of conventional agriculture or when growing a perennial crop like grapes, we add natural fertilizers like fish emulsion (think SNL’s Bass-O-Matic) and kelp. No biodynamic farmer would add raw manure to their field without fully composting it first. Besides the obvious health concerns, raw manure cannot do the job of properly made compost. Our compost is made from organic cow manure from our next door neighbor Noble Dairy, organic hay and our own pomace (grape skins and stems after pressing during harvest), which is then carefully composted for the better part of a year before being applied to our vineyard.

"there’s even a calendar for optimal wine-tasting days”

Then there is the currently fashionable calendar for “optimal wine-tasting days” - there’s even an app for that. However, the flower, leaf, root and fruit day thing is not part of Rudolf Steiner’s original agricultural lectures and was only added to the biodynamic culture in the 1950s by Maria Thun in Germany. Her concepts were built on research in her garden and, while her results have never been supported by independent research, there is strong anecdotal evidence that something is indeed at work here when it comes to the inner workings of plants. The base of these theories is that the moon’s gravity has an influence on the liquid in plants and soils much the same as it does on tides. A reasonable assumption. To me it is a stretch, at best, to apply this same theory to a glass of wine on your kitchen table. However, those same influences could affect the tasters themselves. Whatever the case, these concepts are a not a required part of Demeter Biodynamic certification, which is a statement in itself. Optimal wine-tasting days may have sprung from biodynamic ideas, but they are not part of biodynamic practice. However, it can be a useful excuse in a pinch if a customer is less than happy with your wine.

Biodynamics is a work-in-progress. When Rudolf Steiner gave his lectures in the early 1920s in Germany, he was living in a world in chaos, the same chaos that gave birth to the Nazis. World War I had just devastated Europe and, on the farm, the introduction of chemical, industrial agriculture terrified many people. It is in this climate that Steiner gave his agricultural lectures at the request of a group of concerned farmers. What is called biodynamics today was only outlined by Steiner himself in his lectures, and he died just a few years after giving them. Many of the practices considered essential practices of biodynamics today were layered on by those that came after him. While Steiner gave voice to the fears of that era, what we call biodynamics today is more the work of a movement than one person.

That work continues today and the growing number of winegrowers adopting biodynamics is having a tremendous impact on the movement’s future. Each year more is learned about biodynamics, and now modern agricultural science is moving towards the fundamental farming practices that define biodynamics - that the key to a healthy plant is healthy soils. Everything today is about the microbiome - in our guts and our soils. Biodynamic farmers have been giving their soils probiotics for decades. Science is just now catching up to us.

From what I have been able to read and understand (not always the same thing when reading Steiner) in Steiner’s books, he saw his concepts as only a beginning of an individual’s quest for spiritual and intellectual growth. While he did not approve of alcohol, I still think he would approve as winegrowers the world over push the pursuit of biodynamics forward. Today winegrowers are at at the forefront of connecting science and biodynamics. The winegrowing community is creating what I call practical biodynamics. Voodoo vintners we are not.

Who is to say what biodynamics will mean fifty years in the future? The only sure thing is that it will be as different from today’s practices as we are from the first practitioners in the 1920s. It will always be a work-in-progress as we will never understand everything. Mother Nature will always keep some secrets to herself.

Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder that writers struggle with understanding the practice of biodynamics, so do we. Agricultural knowledge is always evolving. There is much we don't know and much we will never know. Bringing science and biodynamics together will be the next chapter.

That’s a story worth telling well.

Some recommended reading on biodynamic winegrowing

Biodynamic Wine by Monty Waldin - certainly the most complete book available on the topic

Voodoo Vintners (in spite of the title) by Katherine Cole

Investing in a Stranger’s Future

Agriculture is cyclical. Season flows into season. Vines flower then a hundred or so days later you harvest their fruit. Animals and farmers live their life cycles together on land that sustains them both. Nature wraps us in the cycle of life.

In January we begin to think of pruning and worrying about frost. What happened last vintage is behind us and only the potential of the next fills your minds. After all, the wines in the cellar are committed to their course and it is only our role to shepherd them home. That vintage is over.

There are few things other than agriculture where you so firmly press the reset button on the first of January. Of course, we build on the experience bestowed upon us by Mother Nature each year, but that’s all nuance compared to the cycles of Nature, which make all the most important choices.

We are facing a lot of new hurdles at Troon Vineyard as we begin a ranch-wide replant designed both to correct the viticultural sins of the past and to proactively move forward by selecting better varieties and then planting them in better sites. To move forward you must be willing to break ties to the past. At Troon we’ve decided to race towards the future.

New plantings will be decidedly focused on the varieties made famous by the Rhône Valley, Languedoc and Provence. These vines have proven their proclivity for our Kubli Bench terroir. Now it’s our turn to take what we’ve learned and focus on creating some truly special wines - some of which may be a decade or more away.

To some it may seem odd to embark on a voyage knowing you will not arrive at the destination, but that is farming and winegrowing. There is never any end to the cycle of seasons and you are only part of a chain that passes the baton ever-forward in a never-ending relay race. Nothing fires my passion more than knowing that I can make a perfect baton pass to the next generation. If they can make great wines from the vines we plant, I will have done more than my job. That is my goal.

For the time remaining to me, I will become a small part of the life of this vineyard and hope that I am still around to taste at least the potential of the vines we plant over the next years. We each get our vintages and it is our responsibility to enjoy every one and to hope that our work today will be rewarded with wines we will never taste made by people we never knew. They may not know us, but the vines we plant today will speak for us in the wines they make.

Every glass of wine we drink from an old vineyard carries the voices of those that planted and worked it over the decades. Listen to us, we deserve your attention.

Harvest 2018 Photo Album - Troon Vineyard in Oregon's Applegate Valley

Mother Nature was very kind to us in 2018. Rain and cool weather are things you expect during harvest in Oregon, but not this year! All during harvest we were given warm, dry weather under beautiful blue skies. This perfect weather meant we could harvest each variety at the ideal moment. There was no pressure from the weather so our pace was almost leisurely compared to a normal vintage. It was a harvest to remember as will the wines!

Picking tinta roriz, this is our last vintage of this variety as these vines will be pulled and replanted next year.

Picking starts at dawn with the vines still in the shade of the Siskiyou Mountains, which are already brightly illuminated.

Some picure-perfect vermentino.

Banele and Jesus picking malbec as dawn breaks.

The Applegate Valley during harvest.

In a biodynamic vineyard, the leaves are fully turned color and falling off when it is time to pick the fruit. This is the natural cycle of a vine.

Vineyard manager Adan Cortes bundled up against the morning cold as he harvests vermentino.

Associate winemaker and biodynamic team leader Nate Wall fills cow horns to make biodynamic preparation 500. They will buried until next spring. Making BD 500 is something you do during harvest in the fall.

Banele, our harvest intern from South Africa, places the filled cow horns in pit to be buried until next spring. The BD 500 they will produce will be sprayed on our vineyards.

Grape pomace, fresh from the press, is added to our compost pile. All the leftovers from harvest are added to our biodynamic compost piles and returned to the vineyard.

Life Feels Good

It’s just after dawn, and we’re spreading fresh cow manure with pitchforks. Our biodynamic consultant, Andrew Beedy, looks at me and jokes, “see why people use chemical fertilizers?”

Andrew is, of course, correct. It would be so much easier to buy drums of fertilizers and spray away. However, as I stand on this pile of cow dung, I am firmly convinced we’ll get the last laugh.

At Troon Vineyard when we talk about compost, we’re not talking about a few buckets of manure to fill some cow horns to make BP 500. When it comes to composting, we’re talking some serious shit as we need to generate over 200 tons of finished biodynamic compost every year.

The raw materials are simple: fresh organic cow manure, organic hay and the organic/biodynamic pomace from our own fruit. Combine these basic ingredients and let nature take its course and you end up with a magical substance. Not that there’s any magic involved as bacteria do the lions share of the work. At a biodynamic winery, you are surrounded by ferments. Right now we are fermenting wine, compost and some buried cow horns to produce BP 500. Some of the smallest things in nature are doing all the heavy lifting at Troon Vineyard.

The transformation is quite amazing. First, the manure arrives from the organic dairy next store. Dump truck after dump truck arrives along with the flies that crave their cargo. Then our crew goes to work. Starting with a layer of hay, followed by a layer of manure, followed by another layer of hay and so on. Most of the work is by hand as when the front loader dumps a bucket of manure you spread it out with shovels and pitchforks. The bales of hay are broken up and spread by hand. During the harvest season, layers of pomace are alternated with the hay and manure. We build the piles into windrows about 130 feet long and five feet high. Then come the biodynamic preparations 502 yarrow, 503 chamomile, 504 stinging nettle, 505 oak bark, 506 dandelion, and 507 valerian. The first five are applied to specific parts of the pile while the 507 is sprayed onto the entire pile. Over the next six months, the pile will be turned several times, which means all the preparations are well mixed into the pile by the time composting is finished. Just a few weeks after the manure is delivered the flies that come with it disappear as the pile quickly transforms from something that draws flies into something that attracts earthworms. Now we’re talking.

While much is made of the very photogenic burying of the cow horns to make BD 500, and 500 is indeed essential and a foundation of biodynamics, you can’t avoid the fact that out of nine biodynamic preparations six are added to the compost pile. People may debate biodynamics, but no one who knows anything about agriculture questions the value of compost. However, biodynamic compost takes things to the next level. Study after study confirms that biodynamically treated compost is higher in every key nutritional value than standard compost. Every year we will be producing enough of this elixir to apply several tons per acre. Combined with our applications of BD 500 we expect to find dramatic improvements to the microbiome of our vineyard, which will lead directly to improvements in our wines. There is nothing you can do to your vineyard that is more important than this type of composting.

After six months, the raw manure, hay, and pomace transform. What started as smelly fly food becomes rich, dark humus. The smell and flies slowly disappear and in the end you end up with something that looks and smells more-or-less like high-end, organic potting soil - two hundred tons of potting soil.

Composting is such a great experience as you can readily see the results of your efforts. What goes in is very different from what comes out. There is a real sense of accomplishment, and investment in the future of your soils, vines, and wines.

Next spring we’ll be applying BD 500 and compost - both created on our farm. While we have farmed 100% biodynamically this year, we had to purchase the BD preparations and organic compost while we went through the long process of making our own. As excited as we were in our practice of biodynamics this year, applying our own preparations and compost will be a real milestone.

There’s life everywhere. In the compost, in the BD 500, in the vines, in the wines and in us. Life feels good.

Vineyard manager Adan Cortes, with Andrew Beedy’s son Levon along for the ride, sprays BD 507 Valerian onto a compost pile.