December 2022 Wine Club
Biodynamics and the origins of the Natural Wine Movement
Welcome back to the last wine club blog of 2022, friends! It’s been a wild year and we’re grateful to everyone for riding it out with us. We’re rapidly approaching the darkest night of the year and we’re solidly in the holiday gathering season that we alluded to in our last blog post. This energy of gathering creates a time and space suited to reflection and orienting to the year ahead, which also prompts us to look more deeply into the past. As we work with that energy in this blog post, we’re going to tie together some historical threads of the natural wine movement by looking at biodynamic practices, starting with their origins in Austria and experiencing the results through this month’s producer: Schmelzer’s Weingut.
Biodynamics and natural farming
The biodynamic movement has its origins in late 19th and early 20th century central European counterculture. Specifically, it can be traced to a series of lectures given by prominent Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner in 1924 in Silesian Germany, near Dresden. Steiner’s work was, like many others at the time, an attempt to reassemble a view of human participation in the world that had been disintegrated by the transition into modernity.
Steiner’s key contention and the heart of his method was his insistence on the use of alternative ways of knowing such as intuition, metaphor, and relationship to balance the hegemonic role of mechanistic models in decision making. This caught the attention of farmers who were struggling to manage their farms in a healthier and more sustainable way than they had inherited, and a series of experiments on private farms became a movement to construct an alternative method to industrial agriculture.
Techniques which emerged from the biodynamic movement include pollinator-focused coplanting, polycultural management, and onsite manure production. Although biodynamic agriculturalists were far from the first to practice these techniques, their view of the role of these techniques is significant and sets it apart from organic agriculture. The biggest difference between biodynamic and organic agriculture is that biodynamics considers itself to be a spiritual discipline, and I think this epistemic shift is actually critical to a practice which is responsible and accountable to the land.
Agriculture and Epistemics
Biodynamics gets attention as a set of techniques and a certification program that has become increasingly popular in the natural wine scene. But the persistent power of biodynamics comes as an organizing force for inquiry and the development of alternative agricultural projects.
Specifically: biodynamics, in contradistinction to organic farming, restores the subjectivity of the land; rather than treating the network of relationships mechanistically, as a productive object, biodynamics uses spiritual metaphors to relate to the land as a subject — breaking a frame that has hampered the composition or restoration of ecologically and culturally appropriate, i.e. sustainable, methods of agriculture.
The original lectures on biodynamics predate modern ecology based on systems theory, which developed out of failures of statistical models in the postwar period to accurately describe population dynamics. In them Steiner accurately grasps the principles of what we would now describe as punctuated equilibrium and complex systems of nutrient flows. He does so using a natural history approach — by placing observation in a descriptive, rather than prescriptive role. Although the metaphors that he uses would now seem dated, even downright medieval (i.e. we would describe carbon and nitrogen cycles and intracellular chemical signals instead of “the influence of astral forces”), he aims to describe and predict the observed phenomena first, and then seeks a mechanism once the description is accurate. We see this approach returning in modern machine learning with the use of hidden variables to expand the power of models.
Even so, it would be a mistake to assume that a sufficiently complex mechanistic model can outperform or even replace detailed and open-ended human observation. Although machines are indeed improving dramatically in their ability to accomplish specific tasks, it comes at an equally dramatic cost, and we are already seeing this in attempts to automate highly skilled agricultural work — such as viticulture.
Furthermore, there is a crucial element of agriculture which cannot be reduced to a deterministic model, and that is human desire. People cultivate the land into a form which suits their needs and desires, and this is where biodynamic wine shines as a way of understanding ecology. The main scientific critique of biodynamics is that the approach doesn’t affect yield or nutrition — but it’s worth questioning whether these are valid criteria for comparison. One study of the ability of biodynamic wine to satisfy human desires — a tasting panel conducted by Fortune Magazine in 2014 — showed biodynamic wine outperforming in this respect. And more importantly than satisfying our aesthetic preferences, biodynamic practices connect communities to the land they work with. For this month’s example, we turn once more to Austria, in the town of Gols on the northeast shores of the Neusiedlersee, to taste stunningly original wines from Schmelzer.
Producer Focus: Schmelzer’s Weingut
Brothers Horst and Georg Schmelzer are modern practicioners of biodynamics. Carrying forward Steiner’s method of inquiry, they spend a great deal of time doing field observation and learning from the land. The fertility of their fields comes from domestic and wild animals:
As well as from herbs grown and fermented on site into the 9 preparations required for biodynamic certification.
This includes the famous quartz and horn manure, which involves burying ground quartz in a cow’s horn — intended to amend the interaction between silicon and organic matter in the soil.
The Wines
Both of these wines are incredibly unique. Both are wild fermented in stainless steel, finished in neutral oak on lees, and bottled unfined, unfiltered, and unsulphured. Both are loaded with personality and complexity.
The Grüner Veltliner is a 2019 single vineyard vintage from the Reitäcker Weingarten. Two hours of skin contact after crush to start fermentation gives this some of the enzymatic funk of an orange wine. The initial impression is all mineral, but rather than Grüner’s typical limey acidity, this one gives way to a darker, more rustic and earthy quince tart mouthwateringness.
The Zweigelt is a 2017 vintage which got a full 12 months on lees in neutral oak. I imagine it was necessary to tame it a bit — the aromatics are in this are truly wild. My tasting notes read like a walk down a country back road: “cow, deer, petrol, and blackberry.” Despite plenty of time to rest, it’s loaded with grippy tannins. I highly recommend decanting and serving this chilled.
Don’t forget — next year we will be moving to quarterly releases!
