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Monday, March 28, 2022

Organic Is Easy, Says Frog's Leap Vineyard Manager Frank Leeds in Post Film Discussion Following Screening of Documentary Filmmaker Brian Lilla's "Children of the Vine" in Sonoma

Napa filmmaker Brian Lilla (left) and vineyard manager Frank Leeds
(right) of Frog's Leap in Napa at the Sonoma screening

When Brian Lilla moved to Napa to have a family, he and his wife never thought about pesticides and spraying, until he saw ATVs spraying vines. Concern for the health of their two little girls spurred him to make a documentary about the widely used herbicide Roundup. The resulting film, Children of the Vine, debuted in Sonoma Thursday as part of the Sonoma International Film Festival. 

The documentary is a great introduction to what Roundup is, who uses it and the health concerns it can lead to. Lilla captured interviews with a who's who of the glyphoso-rati, the experts who testified in recent court cases and have studied the herbicide's main active ingredient–glyphosate–and Roundup as a formulated product. 

These include Carey Gillam, the journalist who tracked the Monsanto trials in 2018 and onward, writing the major book about the subject; Brent Wisner, the lead attorney for many of the plaintiffs in court cases; first hand stories from cancer victims and California families where cancers were shown to be caused by exposure to Roundup (the McCall and Barton families); medical experts and farmers. (There have not been any lawsuits involving vineyard workers, to date, that I have heard of–most of the people who got cancer used a lot of Roundup regularly to keep poison oak at bay or were farmers or landscapers fighting weeds frequently with Roundup). 

Local vintners Ted Lemon of Littorai in Sonoma and Frank Leeds of Frog's Leap, both of whom are organic, are both featured in the film. 

Monsanto is now owned by Bayer, which lost as much as 50 percent of its stock value as a result of the lawsuits. A widely anticipated St. Louis based lawsuit is about to start in April. Since St. Louis is Monsanto's former headquarters, many executives who have not been available to testify previously will be called to the stand. The proceedings will be televised on Courtroom View Network. The lawsuits were the result of Monsanto's failure to provide warning labels that the product could cause cancer, when internal company documents show it knew the product caused cancer, starting with initial studies conducted when the product was first formulated.


In 2018, the state of California reported that wine grape growers used 666,953 pounds of glyphosate-based herbicides on 402,184 acres of vines. (California has about 550,000 acres of wine grape vineyards). 

According to the Dept. of Pesticide Regulation, Napa used 38,870 pounds on 23,219 acres (out of about 40,000 bearing vines in the county) in 2018 and Sonoma used 60,492 pounds on 43,156 acres (out of about 60,000 bearing acres) that year. 

Source: Data from California Dept. of Pesticide Regulation, mapped by Tracking California (California Dept. of Public Health)

As Lilla said in Q and A with the audience after the screening, "The big question people always ask me when I've finished a film they say, 'What's your greatest hope? What do you want to do with this?' 

"My goal with this project is just to generate dialogue."

And action.

Lilla shared that a group of teenagers in St. Helena found out that their high school was being sprayed with Roundup. "They went to the school board, and, long story short, they now ban it throughout the entire school district," he said. "My hope is maybe someone from Bayer might see this and say, 'Hey, maybe we should rethink our product?' Or maybe a farmer might see it and maybe just start thinking about other ways to go about it. And so my role is not only the storyteller, but get the story out there."

To help educate people about organic farming vineyards, the alternative to using Roundup, vineyard manager Frank Leeds of Frog's Leap winery in Napa was on hand to provide authoritative answers to audience questions. Frog's Leap has been the organic poster child in Napa since the 1990's. 

One audience member wanted to know why more vineyards weren't organic. 

Said Leeds, "A lot of it has to do with the perceived costs, but those are changing. There's a lot of information out there on how to farm organically. But a lot of our universities don't even have classes. So that's problematic. 

"Another issue is so many of our major Napa and Sonoma vineyards are run by management companies. And they perceive it [herbicides] as being short term cheap. They don't use mechanical weed control."

Leeds, who advocates for tilling vines, isn't a fan of what is being called regenerative farming (which often includes no till as a defining characteristic) these days. 

"The minute you start not tilling in the vineyard, it is very hard to manage weeds. So you see a lot of vineyards that won't mow the centers of the vine rows and then use herbicide and then just pour water on to try to get them to grow. So it's a totally different way of farming. Why they're going that way–I mean, in Napa Valley, it's the most expensive cropland in the United States. It's the highest value crop that you grow at scale."

While Sonoma's marketing machine prominently promotes "sustainable farming," Leeds says sustainable as term is misleading. "You might as well forget when you hear 'sustainable, because it doesn't mean much," he said. He's even on the board of California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, the sole organic guy. "When there's a vote, I am always the one in every 12 to one vote," he said.

"Basically, there's a small list of things you can't do to be called 'sustainable.' So they talk about cover crops and not tilling the ground and using drip irrigation. They'll talk about all this stuff. But they don't talk about organic in sustainable–that is zero part of it.

"So when you hear 'sustainable,' it doesn't have anything to do with organics.

"A lot of organic growers will ensure that they're not labeled sustainable," he said.

Lilla said he was not prepared for the answers he got on a recent Napa winery visit to a sustainable winery. 

"A few years ago about I went wine tasting with my wife, and we're at this vineyard, and they had this certification and it said 'Napa Green. 'And I was like, 'Oh, this is great.' And so we're walking around with the winemaker and it was wonderful. So I asked, 'you guys can't use Roundup, right?' And he kind of looked away and said, 'Actually, we do use Roundup.' 

"And I said, 'Well how do you have a Napa Green certification?

"He goes, 'well, we have solar panels on the winemaking facility.' 

"That was a real eye opener for me."

"So sometimes we see these labels, and there's just a lot of greenwashing, I guess you could call it."

Leeds, who is one of Napa's most experienced organic vineyard managers, farms 200 acres in Napa. In response to audience questions, he explained some of the nuts and bolts of organic farming. 

"Farming organically isn't a big financial burden, if it is done correctly. The biggest cost in grapevines is the distance between the row. As you narrow that distance, it requires more trips with your tractor. If you've got a five foot row with 1,500 vines or 2,000 vines, this is a big, big expense. It gets comes very, very hard to manage that area under the vine when you're having these narrow vineyards.

"And then you start irrigating all summer long and then you've got all this weed pressure. 

"So what we do is when our vines far enough apart–you need about 50 square foot per vine in North Coast–so that gives you about 850 max–about 850 vines per acre–and enough room between the vines so that you can mechanically work under them, take care of those weeds under the vines. Then the cost is all driven by the amount of tractor passes and everything. It just gets insurmountable. And the amount of stakes and the amount of vines, and you don't end up with any more grapes. 

"We do it organically with the 600 to 800 vines per acre."

Irrigation is another issue for Leeds, who dry farms. 

"I don't know how everybody got hooked on drip irrigation or irrigating grapes, I don't get it. Because grapes want to go deep. But instead, the current way of thinking is, you plant on a special rootstock that doesn't want to be deep, so that you can control the moisture. So the vine doesn't ever really get down deep and have a nice big root system. 

"And then you have health problems. 

"The vineyards don't last as long as they used to. I mean, a lot of guys have trouble getting more than 20 years out of a vineyard.

"I don't get it. When we put vineyards in we're looking to get 40  years out of it."

Napa has about 10-11 percent certified organic vineyard acreage while Sonoma has roughly 3 percent.

Lilla's film is available for group screenings. Find more information at his website or see the trailer here.


The biggest known health risk in terms of exposure is from dietary consumption–eating foods which Roundup has been sprayed on. Here's the latest study on that topic

The highest risk foods are generally potatoes, grains and wheat based products which are often sprayed right before harvest. 


While the film includes findings that glyphosate has been found in organically grown wines, experts say that is because glyphosate is now found even in rainfall, according to studies including from the U.S. Geological Survey. (Here's one.) 

While it is true that trace amounts have been found in organic wine, conventional wines have been found levels of glyphosate that are 50 times or more than the levels in organic wines. So far, none are above the limits the EPA in the US has deemed safe although experts are questioning those standards as new studies show glyphosate impacting the gut bacteria and subtly changing DNA across generations.


Studies have found that switching to an organic diet can reduce glyphosate intake quickly.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Ram's Gate Becomes Latest Carneros Winery to Go Organic: Winemaker Joe Nielsen Shares the Journey

Winemaker Joe Nielsen, Ram's Gate

UPDATE

The day after publishing this blog post, Ram's Gate won both the Bohemian's top wine tasting room award and top winemaker award. Congrats!

You're owned by some savvy investors–including a private equity guy and an owner of multiple wine brands who has deep industry connections. You've got a very visible hillside location on a main road, across from the Sonoma raceway, where weekend traffic can easily backup. You've got your own 28 acres of vine on clay soils on a hill where ocean breezes keep disease pressure down. You use sheep to mow the vines in the spring. And, to top it all off,  you've built a stunner of a tasting room, created by a world famous wine country architect, Howard Backen. (Think "rustic elegance," Restoration Hardware style). Heck, you're even featured in his coffee table book From the Land

What next?

Well, for Ram's Gate, it was hiring winemaker, Joe Nielsen, in 2018, who upped the winery's game on both the vineyard and the winemaking fronts, launching organic farming practices and, in the cellar, going in for native fermentations (for the estate red wines) and whole cluster winemaking. 

After embarking on the multi year journey to convert the vineyards to organic farming, later this year, after the paperwork is complete, Nielsen says the estate vines will be certified organic (in 2022). 

(The estate vines provide the grapes for a quarter of the wines–all of the wines labeled Estate. The other wines come from prestigious, but non-organic vineyards). 

SONOMA'S CARNEROS SIDE UPS ITS GAME WITH TWO ELEGANT, ORGANIC, LUXURY WINE TASTING ROOMS

Ram's Gate's move raises the organic ante for fine wines and tasting in the Carneros. 

At last count, I think there were about 67 acres of organic vines in the Sonoma side of the Carneros–Larson Family has 13 and Nicholson Ranch 31 plus 28 from grower Sangiacomo. The two wineries offer a casual wine tasting experience.

But for luxury tourists, there will now be two top end hospitality sites on the organic side to visit–Donum Estate (121 acres, ETA on certification 2022), with its famous sculptures and Pinot Noir focus, and Ram's Gate, with its spacious architectural forms, oversized fireplaces, and culinary program.

JOE'S JOURNEY

I visited Ram's Gate for the first time last week and interviewed Joe. Here is our conversation about the conversion to organics and what's happening at the estate. 

"Once we had done the CSWA (sustainability certification) from the vineyard side, it was pretty simple to go organic. I felt like there was a lot of opportunities that we could do that weren't that difficult as a business, So in 2019, we started the process of becoming organic. 

People say organics is difficult, and there are a lot of reasons not to do it. But what I found out about this property is that we have really low vigor because of the [clay] soil. And we have the wind that dries things out all summer. We have low weed pressure, and we have low disease pressure as a result of those two things. So in many ways, we have ideal conditions for organic. 

So in 2019, we started with organic herbicides. And then in 2020 we went to mechanical weed removal only in the vineyard.

We have the sheep that come through in February for about a month. We pull them out after bud break or by bud break. So they do our first mowing. They eat underneath the vines. And then we come back through with a mechanical rototiller that goes underneath the vines, and which has catch arms to keep it from all those vines. That was number one. So that was pretty easy. 

It's comes down to timing, which in organic farming is very important. 

Then for pesticides, because we're so windy, last year we sprayed less than I've ever done conventionally prior. It just depends on the vintage and some vintages are gonna have more problems, but so far so good. So we just completed our [required] three years of organic farming. Now we just need to go through the CCOF [certifier] process, which is just a lot of paperwork. But to me, the hard part is doing the farming. The easy part will be the paperwork.

A BIGGER PICTURE

In 2018 and 2019, I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe, seeing brands that have really made a commitment to a 100 year or 200 year plan. Part of that has been to be as sustainable as possible. So the idea is everything that we do here…it's not just going to be bandaids and it's not going to just be for short term gains. It's long term planning and long term outlook in general–thinking multiple steps ahead, not just what's going to help us tomorrow.

We're in the midst of replanting, trying to match rootstock to clones to the soil and really being thoughtful about that. I'm bringing back heritage selections of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. So instead of using Dijon clones which aren't really accustomed to our climate, we're looking at Calera and Swan–clones that have been worked in our California soils for 40-50 years and they're sort of climatized–what was cool then is cool now. 

So in 2020, we did soil pits to understand what are the limiting factors in the soil and thinking about how to replace nutrients if we can. We've been doing compost. And the sheep obviously help with manure, but just trying to do the right practices to to make this as good as possible.

Part of it is trial and error. That three year transition to organics is probably to make sure everything in your soil has been organic for a while, but I think those multiple years of going through that process is also helping that part of you yourself transition–turn over a lot of stones and understand the timing.

We've also extended organic to our landscaping; we don't use any herbicides anywhere. I just want it to be something for our guests–that for those who are concerned about it, it's won't be here. Glyphosate is not being used anywhere.

WATER, RENEWABLES AND BIODIVERSITY

So outside of that, we do not rely on well water. We have 100 percent rain collection. So this year, we've gotten a little bit of rain but still half of what we need. But that rainstorm in early December was enough water for us to fill both ponds, so we have 7 million gallons of water for this year. We use about three for a season. 

The whole building (when it was reconstructed in 2011), was designed to that all of our drains from the roof go to the pond. 

Renewable energy is on the way. We have all the infrastructure to do it and we're working with PG&E to assess our energy usage. We want to get our building as green as possible, and get solar. We have a spot already out in a field that we're going to put it in. 

On the gardening front, we have some pollinator gardens around the property which are being expanded for insectiaries and whatnot. We are trying to break up the monoculture. And we have a new chef, and I said, 'give me all the fruit trees that you want. we'll make orchards.' It's nice to kind of break up the grape thing. 

THE ESTATE WINES

When it comes to winemaking, I prefer freshness, precision. So my instinct is to pick on the earlier side of things. We really want to maintain natural acidity. 

I am from Michigan originally, studied winemaking in Michigan, so the inspirations for making wines from Alsace, Germany, Switzerland, came from that experience. I like those cool climate, higher acid refreshing whites. [Ram's Gate's Pinot Blanc has gotten significant praise in reviews from Esther Mobley and Slow Wine's Deborah Parker Wong.] So we've definitely carried that here. So it has been stylistically stuff I enjoy. 

[The Alsatian groupies in the Carneros are few and far between, but Robert Sinskey's Abraxas, a perennial favorite, a blend of Alsatian varieties, is proof positive of the region's affinity for Alsatians.]

For me when I came here, it felt like a kid in the candy store in that I've got quite a few acres to play with. The setting had already been set for a sustainable path. And now it's just there's really no end to what we can do. I think the organic process has been pretty straightforward. They don't require you to have livestock. They don't require you to do a lot. So it's basically if pesticides and herbicides are the only two things that they're worried about, and maybe any imputs are organic. That's really not that hard. 

So, in California, so what else can we do? The sheep are important. We want to start composting ourselves. We have a kitchen that gives us leftovers, which we're trying to maintain and reuse.

In the process of going organic, you learn so much about your property...it becomes sort of its own personality. And everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Once you identify that, then you can play to those strengths and work on those weaknesses just as we do as people. It just keeps compounding. Okay, well, we really liked this, let's do more of that. For the last three years we've not been using herbicides and really thinking about ground cover, cover crops, whatnot. Our shepherd says, 'Oh, your soil and your pasture just look so alive and healthy and happy. '

So if that happens in three years, what does it look like in 10 years?

WINES

I tasted all the estate wines and would call out the current release estate whites as the most exciting for their lightness, freshness and vibrancy. 

---------------------------

APPENDIX | Who's Organic in the Carneros

NAPA WINERIES

Robert Sinskey | 172 acres 

Madonna Estate | 140 acres

Grgich | 88 acres 

ZD | 31 acres

Adastra | 12 acres

SONOMA WINERIES

Donum - 121 acres (in transition; ETA 2022)

Nicholson Ranch | 31 acres

Ram's Gate - 28 acres (in transition; ETA 2022)

Sangiacomo (as a grower) | 23 acres

Larson Family | 13 acres

Thursday, March 17, 2022

Starring Everyone's Favorite Herbicide, Roundup: Napa Filmmaker's Documentary Children of the Vine Screens at Sonoma Film Fest March 24 and 26

When filmmaker Brian Lilla moved to Napa several years ago, he was surprised to see Roundup being sprayed widely. He decided to do something about it and make a movie. 

His film, Children of the Vine, is showing at the Sonoma International Film Festival Thursday, March 24, and Saturday, March 26 at 11:30 am both days. 

He's scored interviews from an impressive roster of people who have been involved in the ongoing law suits against Monsanto. That includes: 

 • Carey Gillam, the former Reuters reporter who followed Monsanto's abuses (and who was targeted by Monsanto) and then wrote the definitive book Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science 

 • Brent Wisner, the attorney who represented several of the people suing Monsanto over exposures that led to getting cancer (NHL) I'll be attending the film on Thursday and look forward to learning more. 

Edwin Hardeman was a Sonoma resident who sued Monsanto successfully, after using Roundup repeatedly to control poison oak on his Santa Rosa property.

Most of those who sued the company and won were residential users or landscapers. (I asked the lawyers involved for instance of vineyard employees who were victims and could not find information about any cases that fit that profile).

The primary risks for glyphosate documented in peer reviewed literature show that ingesting it affects gut bacteria adversely. The biggest risks to date appear to be conventionally grown foods–grains, which are often sprayed at harvest time with Roundup as a desiccant, and potatoes. Eating an organic diet is the best defense, experts say. 

Organic vintners from Napa are also featured in the film. 

Napa continues to use Roundup widely as does Sonoma. Here are maps from the California State Dept. of Public Health showing where both types of glyphosate are sprayed on wine grapes (2018 data, the most recent available) in northern California. You can search for other regions here: https://trackingcalifornia.org/pesticides/pesticide-mapping-tool

Sustainability programs in Napa and Sonoma do not prohibit wineries from using herbicides except for a new "Gold" designation for Napa Green which includes 7 wineries which do not use any herbicides on their own grapes or grapes they buy. Five additional Gold members of Napa Green do not use herbicides on a portion of their vineyards but do grow or purchase grapes that do, making this attempt at a consumer friendly classification system confusing to use. Therefore consumers would have to ask those producers on wines on a wine by wine basis.

The only guarantee that consumers have that toxic herbicides (and fungicides, insecticides and synthetic fertilizers) are not used is organic or biodynamic certification. Even then consumers need to know whether the winery is 100 percent organic or not. About half of the producers in the US who make organically grown wines also make conventionally farmed wines, so consumers need to research this carefully. 

While labeling provides certainty, many organically grown wines in Napa and Sonoma are not labeled with organic certification. Those who do label (applause, applause) include: Grgich Hills, Horse & Plow, Neal Family, Ridge, Storybook Mountain Vineyards, and Volker Eisele.



Enjoy the trailer here:


And, lest we forget, it's not just the Roundup and glyphosate based herbicides that we should worry about. There's paraquat...1 in 8 acres of California wine grapes are sprayed with paraquat, which we know much more about (and its history of causing serious, obvious cancers) and bee- and bird-killing insecticides, including imidacloprid and other neonics.

In 2018, the state of California reported that wine grape growers used 666,953 pounds of glyphosate-based herbicides on 402,184 acres of vines. Glufosinate ammonium was also widely used, with 254,928 pounds used on 291,835 acres of vines. (California has about 550,000 acres of wine grape vineyards). 


Growers used 40,669 pounds of the fungicide boscalid, a bird and bee toxin, on 163,741 acres across the state.

Other parts of the wine world are showing us that successful wine growers are getting rid of Roundup, especially in France. 

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

The Best Storyteller in the Room: Mark Arax's EcoFarm Keynote on Monoculture and Misusing Water–"We've Got to Find Our Way Back to a Better Agriculture"


One of the highlights of the year is the annual EcoFarm conference, a gathering of organic farmers held at Asilomar. Covid disrupted the last two years, but this year, an online gathering is taking place and the prestigious keynote address was given by one of my favorite authors–Mark Arax, best known as the author of The Dreamt Land, a brilliant book on California, ag and water. And it's very, very fun to read, with a cast of real life characters as entertaining as any book I've ever read. (No dry tome this.)

Here's how the Ecofarm site describes him: 

...a “21st Century John Steinbeck” for his books that pry open the soul of California. No writer has devoted more pages to the story of California agriculture—small farmers and big farmers, conventional farmers and organic farmers, the migrants who work the crops—than Arax. A two-time winner of the California Book Award, he eloquently chronicles the “culture of extraction” that has leveled valleys and drained rivers and lakes. He confronts a peoples’ defiance of drought, flood, wildfire and earthquake that has invented and reinvented California and now imperils its future. Arax’s books include In My Father’s Name, a memoir of his father’s unsolved murder, the essay collection West of the West and the bestselling The King of California, which was named a top book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. His newest book, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, is being hailed by critics as one of the most important books ever written about the West which has also become a national bestseller. [You're going to want to read this–or listen to the Audible version, read by Arax himself.]

Not only has he got a helluva story by the tail, he's a helluva writer. He spoke this morning to the Ecofarm conference attendees on Zoom. That video will soon be posted to the Ecofarm YouTube channel. (Subscribe to the channel to get a notification when new videos post there). But I thought it would be good for a transcript of his talk to be posted online somewhere, and so here it is (posted with Ecofarm's permission). 


"Water, Land, and Power in the Central Valley | Towards an Ecologically Sound and Just Agriculture"

Mark Arax

I often get asked what possessed me to write to, dare I say seminal books about California agriculture. You know the stories of J. G. Boswell the biggest cotton farmer in the world, the story of Stewart Resnick, the biggest farmer in America, and then the small guys, John Kirkpatrick, who grows citrons with Orthodox rabbis from the East Coast along the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. And stories of the Pandols and how the Pandol's farming was changed by Amigo Bob. 

What's that all about? Where does that where does that stem from? I don't really know. it's kind of a mystery to myself, but I have a guess - my grandfather. 

My grandfather was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. In fact, he hid in an attic in Istanbul and, in 1915-1916, after he outlasted three years of the genocide, he came down from that attic. He had gone up there with books of French literature and his goal, his dream was to study French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. 

And when he came down from that hiding spot, he went to work at an Armenian bookstore, one of the last surviving bookstores that an Armenian owned in Istanbul, and he met some people who were going to actually pay his way to the Sorbonne. This was around 1919. 

So as he was getting prepared for this journey, these letters came from Fresno, California, from his uncle, who was a survivor of the Armenian genocide–lost his entire family, his wife, his children–and didn't know where to go, and landed in the San Joaquin Valley, and was writing these letters to my grandfather. 

"You must come here, this is a new Armenia," [he wrote] and he started singing the virtues, the myths of California. He told my grandfather that the grapes hang here, “like massive jade eggs and the watermelons are so large, that when you scoop out the meat, you can actually ride down the rivers and the irrigation canals in what was left of the rind.” 

So my grandfather had this choice in 1920. He was 18, 19 years old, and it was either Paris, France or Fresno, California. He chose the latter. 

And so he landed here and went right to work in the fields on his hands and knees, picking the crops, the valley. 

Back then it was possible, with three or four years of labor–especially after his mother and brother and sister joined him, together as a workforce–they were able to stack enough coin to buy 20 acres of vineyard on the west side of Fresno. And that's where my father was born. 

By the time I came along, 40 years later, we had sold our last farm, along the San Joaquin River, and I grew up in suburbia. 

My only real exposure to farmland was my grandfather's backyard. He had this 25 by 25 foot plot that yielded an extraordinary amount of vegetables and fruits. He used only two things–sulfur and compost and a little manure. He just worked that ground. And out came this miracle. 

I don't think this is the imagination of a young boy, but I remember one year among the tomatoes, the eggplants, the Armenian peppers, the Armenian cucumbers, the melons and everything else, he planted okra. And this okra grew–first it grew taller than me, then it grew taller than him, and then it grew taller than everyone in our family, past the roof up into the sky. It was like watching a real life Jack in the beanstalk. 

He had great pride in this. And then he would take me to the homes of this kind of army of Armenian backyard farmers in Fresno, who couldn't quite make it on the real farm…maybe couldn't afford it. Maybe the depression years took their farms, but they were doing something in their backyard that was remarkable. And I remember they were very competitive, about the size of their tomatoes and peppers, and everything else. 

I remember my grandfather taking me to a man who was legendary among backyard farmers. His name was Donabed. And I remember walking in Donabed's house and he pulled my ear. I mean, he pulled it hard. And then he took a 50 cent piece and handed it to me as a kind of gift for enduring the pulling. 

And then we went into his backyard, and I couldn't believe it. It was twice the garden of my grandfather's. 

Back in the day, my grandfather and grandmother were getting magazines published by Rodale–Prevention Magazine and Organic Farming and Gardening. I remember in the early 60s seeing these magazines. My grandfather was very committed to that way of of growing stuff. Donabed, I assumed, was committed in the same way. But I couldn't believe how prolific his garden was. 

So we got the tour of his garden. And we went back in, had a glass of tea, and then we left. And then my grandfather–I sat next to him in the car, and he was just shaking his head. And he said, "That damn Donabed. He's a cheater." 

And I said, "What do you mean he's a cheater?"

And he said, "Miracle Gro."  

I said, "What's Miracle Gro?"

And he goes, "Miracle Gro."

So apparently Donabed was taking shortcuts to get his garden. And this was my introduction to farming. 

Fast forward, years later, and I'm a journalist with the Los Angeles Times. And I happen to have come back home to cover the middle of California–almost as a foreign correspondent.

A flood hits in 1996. 

I get a call from a colleague in our Sacramento bureau, and he said, "Mark, Tulare Lake has come back to life."

I said, "Tulare Lake. What's Tulare Lake?"

He said, "Pull out your map." 

So I pulled out the map and he said, "Trace Highway 43 out past Hanaford to the town of Corcoran."

And I did that. And there was, on the map, this lake. 

And it was painted blue–as lakes should be painted. The damned thing–it was in the shape of a perfect square, almost. A square lake. A couple days later, I got in the car and I drove out that highway and I passed Hanford, and as I came up to Corcoran, I went along the road and at the end of the road, it kind of ended. It just stopped. And there before me was this huge levee, this big dike–something that you might see in the Mississippi Delta, the Florida Everglades, or Holland. And I stopped the car, parked it and started walking up this levee. 

As I got to the top, the air had changed. The smell of the air had changed. And I looked out and what was cotton fields had become this inland sea. There were...the wind was whipping whitecaps past these telephone poles. And the speed with which nature had found itself–after just five six days into a flood–was astounding. I mean, birds were stabbing at fish. It looked like the New Jersey shore or something like that. 

If you look close to the telephone poles, you could see these marks, and I didn't know that at the time, but I later learned that these marks were the high water marks of previous floods. And so the story of Tulare Lake was that man had drained this lake dry–first by the diversions of ditches and canals–and then later by dams and siphons and huge pumps that actually made the four rivers that fed into the lake run backward. 

The Kings River, one of the mighty rivers of California, the powerful pumps of the Boswell cotton company, that actually stopped that flow, and make it run backwards. 

So, as I was driving back to Fresno, I thought, "What is the story of this lake? What is the history of this lake? Why did I grow up dumb to this lake?"

There were irrigation canals that latticed Fresno when I was growing up. One went by my grandfather and grandmother's house. It was just three doors down. My grandmother said never go near that ditch. If you go near that ditch, you will lose your balance and fall in and no one will fish you out. And that was actually true because every summer the children of the Mexican migrants in the 105, 110 degree heat would swim in those irrigation canals. And sometimes they would drown. 

I never thought, I never wondered why these canals were completely unfenced and accessible. Or what they were doing there in the first place? 

Where was that water coming from? Where was it going to? Who was getting the spoils of that water? And by what right? These were questions I never asked myself as a kid but as I went out to Tulare Lake and came back, I started thinking about the valley in a different way. So I decided to delve into the history of Tulare Lake and to write a book about it. 

About a year into the book, when I knew that it was going to be an epic story, I had a friend named Rick Watzmann, who was working for The Wall Street Journal. He was visiting me in Fresno and he asked how that book is going. 

And I said, "it's going to be slow. It's going to be a 10 year project." 

And he said, "Do you need some help?" 

He was covering the Clinton administration. And he was in Washington, and part of this story of the draining of this lake took place in Washington, when the decision was made to dam the lake, to have the Army Corps dam the lake. The justification was that the lake was a flood zone. 

So that began this journey. Rick joined me and we ended up finishing the book in five years. 

My job was to really delve into the valley to tell the story of that lake. That lake begins in indigenous times. 

There were four distinct tribes of Yokut Indians who lived along its shores in the tules, the bull rushes. They made their rafts of tules. They would fish...The women would wade into the lake–it was a shallow lake. 

Remember, this is four rivers–the Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule and the Kern River. In flood years, they drain into that depression in the earth. They do not go out to the ocean. 

The lake is shallow, and it ebbs and flows, given California's inherent weather, from flood to drought. It was so shallow the women would wait in, and fish clams and mussels with their toes. This was 500 to 1,000 years of history that was erased first by the Spanish missions, then by the 25 year seizure of California, the takeover of California by Mexico. And then finally by the taking that happened in 1846, by the United States.

So when you trace the history of Tulare Lake, you really trace the history of California, the capture of water, the defiance of nature and the rising of agriculture.

So, that book [The King of California] told that story–of the Southern Confederates who came here in the wake of the Civil War, who started diverting from those four rivers. In 1920, the Boswells and the Salyers, and other people from the south, were chased out of the South by the boll weevil. These were slave owning families, plantation owners. 

They ended up coming west to Tulare Lake and then buying that floodwater and draining the rest of it by buying up rights in the canal companies and siphoning the water out of the rivers, out of a lake and eventually building a dam. This is the story of how the plantation South came to the middle of California.

It explained to me why growing up this place felt like South–the politics, the people, the racism. It was built right into our real estate codes. It just didn't affect [inaudible] as they call them, or Mexicans. Along with those they wouldn't let in–we Armenians live in certain parts of Fresno. So my people were colorized, racialized. They called us “black Turks,” which is probably one of the worst things you can call the Armenians who had just survived a genocide at the hands of the Turks. 

And so that explained that kind of question. That mystery of me growing up in Fresno a little bit, why we lived in a certain part of town. 

Let's take a little break and let's cut into that for a second and go take a look at my notes and we'll pick it up.

The King of California is a book that helped me explain California before we arrived, before I was born–the whole cotton culture, the plantation culture coming west.

I thought that once I'd written that book, I was going to go back to my other books and I didn't want to write about water or agriculture again. 

And I didn't. My other books weren't about water agriculture. But then the drought came–the worst drought in recorded California history. 

And a lot of the journalists who were kind of parachuting in from the east coast of the places just didn't seem to be getting the history right. So I thought, okay, it's time to tell this story from a drought perspective. 

So I decided in 2013-14 to write The Dreamt Land, and that was a five year journey that extended beyond where I kind of dug in–my first book was about my father's unsolved murder. Basically, the story of our journey out of genocide, and the story of Fresno, and its corruptions and everything else. 

The next book was the King of California, so I went 50 miles south, and extended beyond my own backyard. 

And then I did a third book called West of the West, a bunch of essays about California. 

The Dreamt Land was going to be a journey following water throughout the state. I was going to focus again on what I call the most intensive agricultural experiment in the history of man. That is the agriculture that we did in the San Joaquin Valley. And how drought shined a certain light on it, and what was going on in drought. 

So I put my boots on, started driving down Highway 99 and finding farmers and others to talk to. Something very odd was going on. 

Here we were in the midst of this record drought–fast forward–this past decade has been the driest decade in recorded history. 

We basically had eight to nine years of drought interrupted by a flood–maybe one year average in between.

So you would expect in that time of water scarcity that the footprint of agriculture would probably be reduced. At worst it would stay the same, but it should get reduced, because the water was so dramatically reduced–the snow melt. 

Instead, something quite surprising was happening. 

In that driest period in California's recorded history, the farmers of the San Joaquin valley added 660,000 more acres of permanent crops–almonds principally, pistachios and mandarins. 

And as this drought was happening, they were pulling off record crops. 

So it was with that mystery in mind that I went into vineyards and fields in the middle of California to figure out what was going on. 

You know the story by now. There was some water that was being taken from one area, that had better groundwater, and was shipped via pipes to an area that was dry. Those pipes extended two to three counties. The farmers are going deep into the earth. I mean, the Boswell company was building wells that were going 2,500 feet into the ground–so much so that the levees that I was standing on a decade earlier were sinking.

The aqueduct itself–that 444 mile concrete river that we built to move the rain from where it fell to where it didn't–that was sinking, too, because so much water was being extracted out of the ground that the clay was collapsing on itself and drawing the earth downward. It was almost as if... I mean imagine termites eating at the structure of your house. It's not something –that kind of ravage is not something you hear. It's not even something you see. It's almost imperceptible. It's so small–and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. 

So this is what was happening. We were extracting at a level that we had never extracted before. So that question took me backward, as it always does, because history answers those questions. 

So where did the ethos of extraction begin? 

Well, my editor thought–he's an East Coast person–he thought logically that it's the Gold Rush. But no, actually the first taking of California was the taking of the body of the indigenous. 

It was that taking that allowed the Spanish missions to tap into the first flows of river, to build the first canals, and ditches, and the first crude dams. And this gave rise to a profusion of the first vineyards and orchards in California. That experiment was all because they had captured the body of the Indian, which allowed them to turn that into a workforce, which then captured the flow of the rivers. 

We have a California conceived in genocide. 

Then you move to the Gold Rush, and you see that same ethos playing out. This time you're capturing water–its force–to now unearth riches gold. And that whole extraction was basically to the benefit of a handful of industrialists who came here from afar. California gets shot out of a cannon. We don't need Manifest Destiny to make California. We have the Gold Rush and it does it almost overnight–80,000 people arrive and they're from all over the world. It's probably the most diverse origins of any state in America. 

So that experiment goes on for 20, 25 years and then what happens is it culminates in the destruction of mountainsides, that are washed down–all that debris is washed down the rivers. And the silt, the mud then cover the early experiments of agriculture. 

Those experiments reveal plains that were the richest soils. 

So in the 1880s, California has a choice. Do we continue mining gold or do we mine the soil? The California Supreme Court ruled that one industry cannot destroy another industry. And basically the gold mines were for all intents and purposes shut down. And this gave rise in the 1880s to agriculture on an epic scale. 

It began with the wheat farms, the wheat growers. In fact, the wheat king back then was a man named Isaac Friedlaender. A giant of a man–six foot seven–more than 300 pounds. They said his stride was the stride of two men if not three. 

He had made his money selling flour to the gold mines. And now he decided that he was going to basically corner the market on wheat–growing it, harvesting it and sending it to Europe via clippers.

And so began these millions of acres in the middle of California turned into wheat, a monoculture and, as all of you well know, a monoculture has an Achilles heel, and that is what it robs from the soil. And wheat robbed so much, that as fast as that whole thing rose, it kind of withered. The yields came way, way down. Friedlander, Chapman and some of these other industrialists decided that it was time now to break up their vast holdings of land and sell it to smaller farmers. 

So from the 1890s to the 1930s, we have a lot of small farmers coming here. This is where my grandfather arrives–1920. And we see this rise of a diversified kind of agriculture, on a scale that the world's never seen. 

My grandfather arrived in a very important year–1920 was the year that the turbine pump was put out into the agricultural fields. 

And this allowed farming now to move from the alluvial plain, the reach of canals and ditches, to somewhere beyond that. And the ground was not as primo as the alluvial ground. 

So we see a huge expansion in the 20s, 30s, and 40s of agriculture. The footprint going out from primo ground to marginal ground. 

To pump it, the aquifer gets lowered so much that the pump can't reach it. It's too expensive. The costs are too high. Farms start to wither and a cry comes up from the valley in the 1930s. 

Basically, we have to steal ourselves a river. To grow agriculture more, we need to import water. 

Now this would have sounded like a very fanciful idea except that, a decade and a half before, the city of Los Angeles had done just that. They had run out of their puny river–the Los Angeles River. They went up and over the mountain 230 miles to Owens, and they stole themselves a river. 

So the farmers of the San Joaquin Valley decided that they would lobby their politicians in Sacramento to try to do the same. And this is what gives rise to the Central Valley Project–that drought of the 1920s and 30s. 

So agriculture takes floodwaters from the Sacramento River and brings it north to south. And then the farmers of Kern County and Tulare, they take the flow of the San Joaquin River which runs through Madera and Fresno. They dam that and send that water to a place that it never went–130 miles south to Tulare, and eventually Bakersfield. 

So we see this incredible shifting of water. Twenty years later, more floods come and this gives rise to the State Water Project, which ends up taking more flows out of the north and the Delta and moving those flows to the west side of Kern County, where farmers want to grow more–and then up and over the mountains to the faucets and swimming pools of Los Angeles. 

And these two systems, the CVP and the SWP become what I call the [inaudible] system–the grandest water moving experiment in the history of man. 

So what we see is those two projects didn't satisfy the farmers who were growing then. They actually whet the appetite of farmers to come, for farmers to expand even more. 

And so the footprint of agriculture starts creeping outward ever more. 

And then comes not the turbine pump but something along those lines. It's drip irrigation. And drip irrigation is sold as a water saving device. In actuality it's a yield enhancing device, as you well know. 

And in the aggregate, there is kind of a paradox of drip irrigation. In the aggregate, we use more water because drip now allows farmers to grow crops on ground that should never be farmed. If you came here, I could drive you to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres that shouldn't be farmed, but are because of the miracle of drip. 

You know that little line delivering a precise dose of water and chemical so that the tree you're growing could almost be growing hydroponically. Really the dirt is there just to hold it up. 

And then we see uphill expansion of orchards. Furrow irrigation could never go there.  So now we have a situation where the system we built–which was a miracle system, in its defiance of gravity–what it brought to California–we now come up against a limit line. 

When the system was conceived, there were 10-13 million Californians. There are 40 million now.

On top of that limit line and the inherent swings that we have from drought to flood which give that system problems...That system is not able to deliver the water that it should because of extended droughts. 

Now we have climate change, hitching on to drought, and we are seeing a kind of havoc we've never seen before–more extended droughts, hotter summers, January's that feel like March's, a lack of chilling hours that trees need to go into a deep hibernation, the use of chemicals to put them into hibernation. The [inaudible] of the cherry trees, the cherry orchards of Kern County. This is what we're seeing now. 

And so in the book, we're go through and explore all these farmers and what they've done, what their families before them have done, what they're doing to try to transform the ground and respond to these changes. 

A question is rising up as well. And that question is: how much longer can we go on like this? 

I like to say there's an awareness that we need to change. And we've seen that in the state of California, we think of our state as a progressive place. But it was one of the last states to regulate groundwater.

And when they did through SGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, they put such a lead time in–25 years–that basically what it did is it just gave the farmers who wanted to grow more–the new farmers and when I say new farmers I'm talking about hedge funds–the Canadian Royal Mounties pension funds, retirement funds, the Mormon church–it gave them incentive now to dig more wells, go deeper into the ground before SGMA takes effect. 

So now we see a kind of nth degree of extraction that is destroying these aquifers.

And I saw what happened this summer in Madera. I wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly about a well fixer who wanted to warn all his community that the aquifer was collapsing. 

We're going into another summer of the same thing. We're gonna see what that brings. 

I like to think that the book, and I hope this talk, maybe ends on a positive note. And that is that kind of goes back to my grandfather and Rodale's organic farming and gardening. It's never been more important for us to embrace the ideals, the precepts of the kind of farming you [organic] folks do. 

You're our way out of this. Yes, I know organic farming has changed. It's not those folks, the early ones who came out of U.C. Santa Cruz, the hippies who went into their five and 10 acres and 20 acres and 30 acres. Yes, industrial agriculture has discovered organic farming. The Organic Farmer of the Year this year or last year had something like 25 or 30,000 acres. But let's put that aside. 

The soil–what you're doing to the soil. I've gone and visited with my friend Tom Willey. And some of the innovators of California organic farming–Phil Foster being one of them. I see what's going on. I think there's something to the capture of carbon. Those men who are trying to do it will admit to you that it may be hype. They don't know the reality but there's something there. But all the things you are doing are the things we need to go back to.

Maybe not the combination of sulfur and cow manure that my grandfather was using back there, but the sophistication of what you're doing, the science of what you're doing is a way for us to reduce the footprint of agriculture. 

In the San Joaquin Valley alone–and the farmers will concede this and the irrigation district managers will concede this–we are farming 6 million acres basically. We're going to have to go down to 4.5 million acres to achieve something that's sustainable, where the groundwater is being recharged as much as it's being extracted to do that.

Because, listen, the last thing you want to see is the San Joaquin Valley or the Central Valley turned into another San Fernando Valley that is filled with endless summers. 

This ground, these rivers, the sun–this was meant for agriculture, but we've got to find our way back to a better agriculture. 

And that's where you all come in–leading the way and in a sense, in a perverse way. 

I think climate change has opened up an opportunity. We don't have the wiggle room we used to. We're up against the line, and some force is coming from the other side. 

And I think it will allow us to make arguments that have a kind of force that they didn't have before. 

Let me give you a quick example. And then I'll end this. I'm moving now beyond the farm to suburbia because that sprawl model of farming, became the sprawl model of our suburban growth. 

About four months after the Paradise fire, the deadliest fire in California history, I drove up there. I'd never been to Paradise and as I was taking the road from Chico, that beautiful farmland outside Chico, which by the way has been preserved by green line that did not allow that city to grow into those orchards–one of the first urban growth boundaries to protect agriculture, if not the first in California. 

So as I'm driving from Chico, up this Skyway and it's literally a road that is taking you into the sky. And you're driving up to Paradise. And you see on one side of you, a river canyon and on the other side of you a river canyon, and it occurs to you that you are driving up the ledge of a geological chimney. 

And then you arrive there and you see all the destruction, and it occurs to you that a county planted 40,000 people in the direct path of wildfire, that the state allowed this to happen, and that today 10 million of the 40 million Californians live in the path of wildfire in the wildland urban interface. And how even as we're having these record wildfires, and the smoke is pouring down and literally, it sits in my valley for three months. I've got HEPA filters blowing all the time here, hardly make it outside in those months. As all that's happening, we are continuing to build more houses in suburbia, spending more money expanding freeways, widening them, making new ones into the woodlands of California. This is all wrong. And we can't quite embrace the other way yet. But we're getting there. Will we get there fast enough?

So I don't know if that's a hopeful note, but that's how I'd like to end it–that in the midst of all of this, I think it allows us to get creative and to do things that maybe folks didn't have the guts to do before, that they didn't have the spine to do before. Politicians wouldn't dare utter these things. But now we might. 

So anyway, I'm looking forward to going out and visiting some of you on some of the great organic farms of California, seeing what you're doing, and writing about it…I cherish this opportunity to have talked to you. Thank you very much.

Monday, March 14, 2022

Glyphosate Decreases Quality and Quantity of Sperm Production, New Chinese Study Shows

A January 2022 study from Chinese scientists published in Environment International on glyphosate shows how glyphosate decreases sperm quality and quantity. The study was designed to "investigate the influence of glyphosate on the BTB (blood testis barrier) in vivo and in vitro experiments."

Titled "Glyphosate damages blood-testis barrier via NOX1-triggered oxidative stress in rats: Long-term exposure as a potential risk for male reproductive health," the research team found that, 

"male rats exposed to glyphosate for 4 months exhibited a decrease in sperm quality and quantity, accompanied by BTB integrity disruption and testicular oxidative stress."

The scientists wrote in their paper that glyphosate, "is easily transported to surrounding ecosystems, leading to soil, water, and crop contamination. Furthermore, GLY enters into the bodies of animals and human through food chain, imposing a health risk on the public health."


In the study, in which rats were fed glyphosate in feed,  the authors wrote, "glyphosate residues were detected in serum (0.035 ± 0.010 and 0.146 ± 0.023 μg/mL, respectively) and testis (0.002 ± 0.001 and 0.016 ± 0.006 μg/g, separately) in both exposure groups (Fig. S1C), indicating that glyphosate is indeed present in the testis and affects testicular function."

Sunday, March 13, 2022

A Winery Raises Its Voice: How Can "Sustainable" Include Herbicides Like Roundup?

When people tell me organic is not profitable, I always refer them to Emiliana, an organic only winery in Chile that exports 1 million cases of organically grown wine around the globe to 50 countries.

They are profitable, practice healthy agriculture, etc., etc.  (In fact the estate, which produces two thirds of the grapes it uses, is also certified biodynamic.) And Emiliana is still growing rapidly, buying new land for vineyards further south in Chile.

Now they are the only winery in the world (that I have seen) to raise the issue of glyphosate based herbicides publicly–and in a finance magazine, no less.

See Sebastian Tramon's eloquent voice here, asking authorities and the Chilean food and wine industry to do better, when it comes to using herbicides like Roundup. As he points out in his opinion piece in Financial Diary (in Chile), "The Correct Sustainability" would prioritize organic agriculture as only this type of farming is healthier. Instead of kicking the can down the road for future generations to detoxify the soil and water, organic producers don't use toxins that attack biodiverse ecosystems. 

And as hundreds of successful organic producers around the world know, consumers support organic.

You can more easily read this by downloading this here.

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Aeris: The Taste of Sicily's Etna Region Comes to Healdsburg

An Italian immigrant of a different flavor is the latest Italian arrival in Sonoma soils.

While the northern Italians swarmed into Dry Creek and settled it, growing Zinfandel, who can name a Sicilian who grew grapes way back when in Sonoma? Or even today?

Up in Mendocino one brave soul, John Chiarito, whose family hails from southern Italy, was the first to plant climate appropriate varieties popular in Sicily–Nero d'Avola and Negroamaro. (Those vines have been taken over by Martha Stoumen these days.) I was fortunate to have them in Siracusa at one of the city's finest restaurantsDon Camillo (oops, it looks like I forgot to blog about that meal or post photo of moi and Don but here it is!)

Enjoying the tasting menu at Don Camillo's
restaurant in Siracusa where John Chiarito's
 Nero d'Avola was (and still is) on the wine list

                                

So it's stretching the spectrum to see Aeris take flight. Far from the lowland heat of the Nero (black) grapes grown in southern Sicily, Aeris is all about altitude. The word literally means a fresh breeze. The Aeris vineyard site on Centennial Mountain is about 2,500 feet, roughly the same elevation as its reference point in Sicily–Mount Etna, the volcano in Sicily that's become a mecca for wine lovers and somms. 

The Aeris vineyard on Centennial Mountain
is at 2,500 feet of elevation (with coastal influences)

Centennial Mountain is not volcanic, but it is playing Mama to baby vines planted with material from Etna –specifically the true white Carricante, an indigenous grape that is dying out in its homeland, with only 25 acres still planted, according to preservationist, vigneron and winemaker Salvo Foti who Rhys, the parent company of Aeris, has partnered with. Rhys sources from both its Sicilian site, purchased with Foti's help, and its Sonoma site.

Salvo Foti, Carricante's savior

The new Aeris tasting room in downtown Healdsburg just opened this winter–what a treat–and showcases Aeris' Carricante, the star attraction. (It's also a great opportunity to sample Rhys Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and sparkling wine which come from the Santa Cruz Mountains and Northern California climes). (The Aeris wines are not organically certified, but they are organically farmed).

I stopped by the other day after lunch with some friends and was fortunate enough to be hosted by Chilean born Javier Tapia, Rhys CFO and Vineyard Manager (a unique set of job titles if ever there was one). 

Aeries and Rhys viticulturist and CFO Javier Tapia flies
from vineyard to vineyard in a Cessna 182

Surprise - Javier has a super impressive background in biodynamics, working with the pioneering biodynamic wunderkind Alan York (no longer with us) in 1996 and then worked as viticulturist, winemaker and CFO for Jim Fetzer at the Demeter certified biodynamic Ceago wine on Clear Lake until Fetzer retired. He then went to Rhys where the predominant varieties are Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. It all adds up to another truly international story–part of the magic of wine in America. (I like to think of us as the United Nations of wine.)

Born into a family in Santiago, both of Tapia's grandfathers were in the wine business. He went to viticulture school in Santiago–where he also attended business school and received his degree in business in addition to viticulture. He worked in Chile for 6 years before coming to the US.

Carricante's name means "gigantic" or "yields a lot," but Tapia says the grape is managed for low yields to enhance wine quality.

Says Tapia, "You can get from 3,000 to 30,000 per acre with this grape, so it took a lot of work to get the balance right. You don't want to overcrop it so you can really have the expression of the wine."

Tapia and owner Kevin Harvey (who made his money in Silicon Valley at venture capital firm Benchmark) haven't stopped with Italian whites, though, planting Nerello Mascalese (another southern Italian variety) and the challenging Nebbiolo, which has defeated many attempts to grow it well in California. (Traditionally planted on steep slopes, high up in Piedmonte, it loves morning fog.) It's better known as the grape in Barolo and Barbaresco. 

Harvey is a meticulous student of climate and vineyards and is giving it his team's best shot. A Burgundy freak, Harvey is also fond of great Nebbiolos, which, at their best, have the same ethereal, transparent, finesse.

Visitors can try both the Sonoma grown Carricante and the 2017 Sicilian Carricante (Etna Bianco Superiore). These are wines that our finer wine writers (Eric Asimov and Esther Mobley) are raving about. I am, too, even though my tasting notes seem to have blown away with the wind. Which makes no difference. The Etna Bianco Superiore is a great wine and it makes a lasting, wordless impression. Sometimes that is the best kind.

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Fertility Crisis: As Intensive Pesticide Use Increases, Sperm Counts Decline

The BBC has just released a video on the dramatic findings of Dr. Shanna Swan's landmark research on declining sperm counts.


She is an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and the author of the breakthrough book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.

"A man today has only about half the amount of sperm that his grandfather had," the video says. And women are less fertile at 21 than their grandmothers at 35.

"We're looking at the sperm concentrations, when we last looked at them–samples collected in 2011–the sperm concentration in Western countries was 47 million per milliliter down from 99 million per milliliter 39 years earlier," says Swan in the video.

Exposure to farmland intensively sprayed with herbicide appears to be one of the biggest hazards-for workers as well as for residents. 


"We looked at pesticides metabolized in their urine, and how they related to the sperm count, concentration and shape of those. We found that there was a big difference in sperm count and quality" she says. 

"Most dramatic was that men who were living in central Missouri, which is an agricultural area, where there's a lot of corn and soy grown and a lot of pesticides used, they had only half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis. This is huge. And they were not workers, they were just residents of the area."


Glyphosate application rates for soybean and corn are much higher than in wine country, as those crops are engineered to be Roundup Ready–i.e. sprayed intensively.

Gyphosate is allowed for use under "sustainability" vineyard certifications. It is prohibited in organically grown wines. 

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Catching up with IPCC

As climate becomes an ever increasingly important topic for life on earth, and in the wine world, it's time expand the conversation from eco-friendly wines to larger concerns for an eco-friendly world. 

The release of the IPCC's latest report issued Feb. 28, 2022 is yet another turning point in the continuing catastrophe. 

While one old white guy after another old white guy read their prepared statements before blue IPCC backdrops in the IPCC's videos on YouTube, even without the swirling TV graphics on regular TV channels, the message was clear. 

It drove many of us into even deeper despair, with three huge pools of collective grief: our post Covid grief, our Russian invasion grief and our renewed climate change grief.

If you did not see the video, take a look at the remarks of the UN Sec. Gen. who's encouraging finance that supports climate change investments. 

Before you watch (and I hope you will) the old white guys from the UN, have a look at this video from climate activist Bill McKibben, another old white guy from Vermont. The McKibben video is only 10 minutes, giving you the quick download, and includes a quick clip from the UN Sec. Gen.

All of these gray hairs have given significant portions of their life force to reducing the impacts of climate change and it's worth hearing what they have to say. The language they use is strong stuff. You may even do a double take. Now, roll video:


If you want to go whole hog on the IPCC download, go for it here: