Now, thirty years later, he seems like an unlikely cross between a professor and a farmer as he drives through the vineyards, repeatedly stalling his Pathfinder because he’s in the wrong gear. He stops to taste the grapes, which are almost ready to harvest, as he expounds on the history of the place and the principles of medieval science. He has decided to start picking the day after my visit and will send his pickers through the vines at least five times, selecting only the ripest clusters. He likes to wait until some of the grapes on the clusters are shriveled and is more than happy if a little botrytis, or noble rot, has set in.
When he returned to Coulée de Serrant, he threw himself into the wine business. “I tried modern farming for two years,” he says. On the advice of a consultant, he used weed killers and fertilizers. “Big mistake,” he concludes. He was distressed to observe the effects on the vineyard, which he says had become a biological desert, devoid of microbial and insect life. In 1979, Joly stumbled on a book in English about biodynamics, a holistic approach to agriculture based on a series of lectures given by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924. The following year, Joly began applying biodynamic principles in his vineyard. He’s been studying them, writing about them, and teaching them to an expanding band of disciples ever since.
I first encountered his wine more than twenty years ago when I ordered a bottle of the 1982 Coulée de Serrant at the Union Square Cafe in New York. I can still remember the stony intensity of that wine, and I have sought it out ever since, but it’s not easy to find. In a good year Joly produces fewer than two thousand cases, about a quarter of which comes to the States.
As special as it is, Coulée de Serrant exemplifies many of the qualities of Savennières, a tiny appellation (with about a three-thousand-case annual production) in the Anjou region of the Loire, which seems to be superbly suited to the Chenin Blanc grape. Coulée, like all Savennières, is made entirely from Chenin Blanc, and some connoisseurs think Savennières is the ultimate expression of Chenin Blanc (granted, it’s a narrow field of competition). Quince is a flavor that recurs in tasting notes. The wines are often almost fierce in their youth, but they can age gracefully and improve for years, even decades. Whether Coulée is the finest Savennières or a unique expression of the seven-hectare vineyard—the correct answer is both—Joly is adamant that its quality has almost nothing to do with his wine making. “I really do almost nothing to the wine,” he says. “It pretty much makes itself. Press it, put it in barrels, that’s about it. All the work has been done before, in the vineyard.” He doesn’t add yeast—it’s already there on the grapes—and he doesn’t control temperature.
It’s a cliché of winespeak 4.0, 2012 version, to say that wine is made in the vineyard rather than in the cellar. After years of increasing reliance on technology in the cellar, even New World wizards have started talking more about the importance of good raw material, (that is, grapes) and focusing more on the vineyards. But the cellars of many top wineries from Napa to Bordeaux have some very high-tech equipment designed to whip those naughty grapes into shape. Joly’s cellar, by contrast, is eerily minimalist: a shiny pneumatic press, twenty-five or thirty old oak barrels, a small room stacked with unlabeled bottles of the 2009 vintage. Old school.
The French appellation contrôlée system, which came into being in the nineteen thirties to codify hundreds of years of regional practice, is based on the idea that wines should uniquely reflect their place of origin, and Joly fiercely defends it. But he believes that a wine is unlikely to convey the unique aspects of soil and climate—what the French call terroir—if you bombard the soil with pesticides and fertilizers and then manipulate the results in the cellar. “There are lots of good wines today,” he says, “but there aren’t that many unique wines.”
The specific practices of biodynamic viticulture can sound a little wacky—like burying a cow horn packed with manure in the vineyard—although many of them have an intuitive logic. The rabbit skins, for instance. In biodynamics, pesticides are verboten; instead, the pest in question (when large enough) is discouraged by the ashes of its deceased brethren. When Joly developed a rabbit problem, he burned a skin or two and spread the ashes in the vineyard. He says it worked. While Joly emphasizes that these principles need to be adapted to a vineyard’s specific conditions, there are common practices. Teas made of nettle and other plants are sprayed on the vines, and manure is used in lieu of fertilizers.
Critics of biodynamics point out that Coulée de Serrant has always been a highly regarded wine, and some suggest it was an even greater wine before the adoption of the biodynamic regimen. I have tasted only a few of the older wines and would hazard that they were excellent, if leaner and less rich. The two latest vintages I tasted were both wonderful and utterly unique wines: the 2008 was very plush and full-bodied, almost sweet but vibrant, a youthful and powerful beauty like Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil. The 2007 was more voluptuous and decadent, with a honeyed quality that put me in mind of Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa.
In 2000, Nicolas founded Return to Terroir, a group for likeminded organic and biodynamic producers that includes such heavy hitters as Zind Humbrecht, Domaine Leflaive, Movia, and Araujo vineyards. If this philosophy borders on the mystical, tasting these great wines seems to present fairly compelling empirical evidence of its success. Coulée de Serrant would be on many connoisseurs’ lists of the world’s greatest wines, a white that can combine great richness with piercing intensity, a wine that is a compelling expression of a particular place and the personality of the man who denies he made it.
Is Biodynamics a Hoax?
Burly, heavily bearded Stuart Smith has been tending his vineyard atop Spring Mountain with his brother Charlie for more than forty years. The Smith brothers have gained a quietly loyal following for their Smith-Madrone wines, despite eschewing such Napa conventions as new French oak, irrigation, and Robert Parker raves. Stu, the more loquacious of the brothers, has been known to complain about the alcohol content and prices of many Napa wines—both too high in his estimation. Recently, he has directed his contrarian streak at a fashionable new target: biodynamic viticulture.
Biodynamics is a system of organic agriculture based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian theosophist, and specifically on a series of lectures he delivered to a group of farmers in 1924. Biodynamics uses many of the basic principles of organic farming—no pesticides or chemical fertilizers—but goes further, relying on practices like planting and harvesting according to solar and lunar cycles. Some of the most revered domaines in France, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine Leroy, Coulée de Serrant, and Zind Humbrecht, adhere to it, and in recent years it has been gaining converts in Napa and Sonoma—Araujo, Benziger, Grgich Hills, Sinskey, and Quintessa among them. In 2009 Stu Smith created a local stir when he published a letter in Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat charging that “biodynamics is a hoax and deserves the same level of respect we give witchcraft.” He has continued his assault on a Web site called Biodynamics Is a Hoax.
“Rudolf Steiner was a complete nutcase,” he writes, “a flimflam man with a tremendous imagination, a combination, if you will, of an LSD-dropping Timothy Leary with the showmanship of a P. T. Barnum.”
In order to demonstrate his point, he quotes Steiner at some length—something he claims proponents are reluctant to do—and there’s some wild stuff to quote, about ghosts, Lemurians, and the jellyish beings who inhabited Atlantis. The most emblematic and controversial practice of biodynamics involves burying a cow horn stuffed with manure at the time of the autumnal equinox; on or around the spring equinox, the horn is disinterred and the manure diluted in water (a mixture known as BD 500) and sprayed over the vineyard.
“You see, by burying the cow horn with the manure in it,” Steiner wrote, “we preserve in the horn the etheric and astral force that the horn was accustomed to reflect when it was on the cow. Because the cow horn is now outwardly surrounded by the Earth, all the Earth’s etherizing and
astralizing rays stream into its inner cavity. The manure inside the horn attracts these forces and is inwardly enlivened by them. If the horn is buried for the entire winter—the season when the Earth is most inwardly alive—all this life will be preserved in the manure, turning the contents of the horn into an extremely concentrated, enlivening and fertilizing force.” To which many oenophiles might well respond, “What the fuck?”
In my experience, Smith is correct that most biodynamic proponents would rather talk about results than quote Steiner (with the notable exception of the voluble and erudite Nicolas Joly of Coulée de Serrant). Robert Sinskey of Sinskey Vineyards in Carneros is a case in point. In 1990, he told me recently, he and his winemaker, Jeff Virnig, went to look at one of their Carneros vineyards that was in decline. “One look at the soil told us that life was out of balance,” he said. They couldn’t penetrate the surface with a shovel, so they broke it up with a pick. They couldn’t find any earthworms in the ground, and there was little humus (organic soil matter such as decomposed leaves and other plant material). Until then, they’d tried to kill off anything in the soil that might compete with their vines and to add back anything the vines needed by applying fertilizers. “We had, in essence, sterilized the soil,” he said.
They applied BD 500 prep to that vineyard the following year. “The microbe-rich concoction jump-started life,” Sinskey concluded. “Within a few years, the soil rebounded with microbial activity, earthworms, and mycorrhizal fungi. The original vineyard that motivated this journey turned around to become one of our favorite sites and produced one of our most distinctive wines.”
The obvious question for biodynamic producers is whether organic farming, which eschews herbicides and pesticides without reference to Steiner or to cosmic forces, would yield similar results. A research paper titled “Soil and Winegrape Quality in Biodynamically and Organically Managed Vineyards,” published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture in 2005, compared the two approaches and found few differences. But most of the certified biodynamicists I’ve spoken to over the years, none of whom were obviously certifiable, started with organic farming before moving on to Steiner’s methods, which all of them claim to have given them superior results and healthier vineyards.
Jeff Dawson, who works as a biodynamic consultant with Araujo and Quintessa vineyards in Napa, considers the fact that Araujo’s Cabernet has ripened well ahead of its neighbors in recent years “a tribute to biodynamics.” (A skeptical neighbor insists this is because the site is warmer than most.) Dawson became interested after working at a biodynamic garden at Fetzer Vineyards in Mendocino and marveling at the quality of the produce. After studying Steiner’s teachings, he created a biodynamic garden for Steve Jobs. “He was a raw-food vegan, and he loves sweet fruits and vegetables,” he says of Apple’s founder, and quotes his former boss, whom I presume to have had a scientific cast of mind, as saying, “Steiner knew what he was talking about.” Stu Smith would be rolling his eyes by this point and declaring there’s no scientific basis for the claims of biodynamics. And he’s right. There isn’t.
Dawson paraphrases Steiner when addressing such skepticism. “Science has cast its net on the world of nature,” he tells me. “That net is not fine enough to catch all the aspects of creation.” Many proponents seem to believe that science will eventually catch up with the tenets of biodynamics, particularly with regard to the influence of the solar and the stellar systems on plant and animal behavior.
The minimal claim to be made for biodynamics, it seems to me, is that it fosters a more intimate approach to the land and that its products are less likely to contain the toxins that have for many decades been commonly employed in conventional agriculture. Then there’s the question of the quality of the congregation. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Leroy, to name just two examples, are widely acknowledged to be among the greatest wineries on the planet. Many people want to belong to the same church, even though critics like Stuart Smith would argue that these properties were already great before they made the switch. Biodynamics certainly dovetails with the now inescapable green consciousness. Whether it is a manifestation of an original holistic approach to nature or a crock of BD 500, wine lovers will be hearing about it more often in the years to come.
The Modigliani of Healdsburg
David Ramey was driving on a dusty road through the land of tequila and mescal when he had what he describes as his coup de foudre—otherwise known as his road-to-Mexicali moment—and realized, improbably, that he wanted to make wine. “I suddenly thought, wine makes people happy,” he says. “And it’s the intersection of art and commerce.” For a California guy who’d recently graduated from Santa Cruz with a degree in American literature, there wouldn’t seem to be anything preordained about this choice, which entailed returning to school to catch up on chemistry and other courses he’d disdained as an undergraduate before enrolling in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis, the West Point of the California wine industry. But in retrospect it was a brilliant decision.
Ramey turned out to be a natural. After a stint at Château Petrus in Bordeaux in 1979, he returned to northern California with a more nuanced vision of wine making than the technocentric version he’d been steeped in at Davis and eventually became a leader of the post-Mondavi generation who helped make the nineties a golden age for Napa and Sonoma. Unlike some of his contemporaries’, Ramey’s style always favored balance over power. His wines were never the fattest, or the ripest, or the most alcoholic—his aesthetic more Modigliani than Botero. Tasting a Ramey Chardonnay alongside a Kistler—as I did when I first visited him in the late nineties—was a fascinating study in contrast, the Ramey vibrant, chiseled, and fresh, the Kistler tropical, buttery, fleshy, and sweet. It was the difference, I thought then, between Kate Moss and Pamela Anderson. In the nineties the super-rich style was ascendant; now balance and freshness are the new buzzwords, and even Steve Kistler is preaching the gospel of restraint and finesse. Ramey never lacked recognition, but he’s now beginning to look like a prophet. Not that he didn’t sometimes question the wisdom of his principles.
“Could I get higher scores by making riper, less acidic wines?” he says, as he sips a glass of his 2008 Russian River Chardonnay at Spoonbar in Healdsburg, the ridiculously picturesque town in Sonoma where he lives and works. “Absolutely.” Gruff tends to be his natural tone of voice. He pauses to check out the fashionable, exuberant crowd at the bar. After years as a sleepy backwater frequented by farmers and ex-hippies, Healdsburg is suddenly the kind of place where you see people in Prada eating tapas. “You can’t drink these heavy, fat wines,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t have to go to the other extreme just because there are wines of excess.” Which is to say that his wines, for all their precision and restraint, tend to be more come-hither than their Old World counterparts, his Chardonnays just a little more voluptuous than the average Puligny-Montrachet, his Cabs less tannic than the typical Médoc. Ramey is proud to be a California winemaker, happy to be the beneficiary of the climate, and while he loves French wines, he’s not trying to imitate them.
He seems equally adept with both whites and reds. After his stage at Petrus, the mother ship of Merlot, he went to Matanzas Creek and made some of the first serious Napa Valley Merlots. Moving on to Chalk Hill, he garnered attention for his Chardonnays. He then went on to make acclaimed Cabernet-based wines at Dominus and Rudd, while founding his eponymous winery in 1996. Ramey Wine Cellars initially specialized in Chardonnay, made from grapes purchased from some of the cooler vineyards in Sonoma. I still remember the first one I tasted at the French Laundry in Yountville, a racy, mouthwatering Hyde Vineyards Chard, having been steered to it by the sommelier.
Ramey continued to work for Rudd, receiving some stellar scores from the critics, before finally devoting himself full-time to his own wines, at a winery he built in Healdsburg. And he’s justifiably proud that he and his wife, whom he married at Petrus, own the whole operation
and that they didn’t start with a large fortune derived from another industry. “You’ve got mega-millionaires buying their way in,” he says, “and you’ve got scrappy young winemakers making tiny amounts of wine that’s hard to find on the market. Then there are your big corporate conglomerates. By contrast, we’re like a chef-owned restaurant.” Fortunately, it’s a chef-owned restaurant that, though not huge, has enough seats to accommodate demand.
Ramey Wine Cellars is too big to qualify as a cult winery and too small to make the owners rich. But the conservative business model, which might have seemed a bit frumpy five or six years ago, might be the perfect one for the post-crash economy. Like his wine making, his pricing has always been restrained compared with that of his competitors, given the relative critical acclaim. Now, when wineries that once turned away customers for $200 bottles of Cab are secretly cutting deals and accumulating inventory, Ramey is more than holding his own. His delicious 2007 Napa Valley claret, a Cabernet Sauvignon–dominated Bordeaux blend, sells for around $40, and it’s ready to drink at this moment, unlike many of the big Cabs from that excellent vintage. (He makes more complex and expensive Cabs, too, the single-vineyard Pedregal from Oakville being the rarest and dearest.)
“I’ve lived through three cycles of the California wine industry,” he says. “We had recessions in ’91 and ’92 and again in ’02 and ’03.” While he admits that the recent economic meltdown briefly depressed sales, he had his best year ever in 2010. It doesn’t hurt that the man whose name is on the bottle is on the road much of the year, meeting restaurateurs and retailers. “A lot of my colleagues,” he says, “haven’t worked hard enough to establish themselves in the market.”