The Ecofarm Chronicles | Day One

Once again, the farmers went to the sea. The organic clan is gathering for its annual migration to Monterey's Asilomar conference center for the 40th Ecofarm conference. A stellar lineup of speakers enthralled, depressed and rallied the tribe.

Great science presentations are a tradition. This year, pesticide researcher and government whistleblower Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, kicked off the conference with an opening speech on the need for growing the grassroots movement for regenerative agriculture.

Jonathan Lundgren presents the case for regenerative ag in a workshop Thursday at Ecofarm. Video of his keynote was livestreamed on Facebook and will be posted on the Ecofarm YouTube channel.

A former USDA scientist, Lundgren's research on the effects of neonicotinoids on monarch butterflies was too hot for the chemical industry to handle and it was suppressed.

In 2015, he filed an official whistleblower complaint (during the Obama administration) and was later dismissed from his government position.

Today he works with the grassroots movements in regenerative ag from his farm in South Dakota, (Blue Dasher Farm) and Ecdysis Foundation with students.

"What we need is a Manhattan Project for bees. That is what we need for food production," Lundgren told workshop attendees at a morning session on bees and pesticides. "Millions of dollars have been spent on keeping a broken system. It's time instead to change agriculture."

"Our current systems are fundamentally flawed and heading for a cliff. We need to burn them all down and rebuild them."

Lundgren said new methods are also more profitable.

"Regenerative agriculture is more successful. The systems are transferrable, scaleable and successful. More organic matter in the soil increases yields."

Stacy Malkan of U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit that focuses on transparency in the food system, talked about the pesticide-propaganda chemical industrial complex, pointing out the heavy disinformation systems that chemical companies utilize to sway public opinion, government policy and science itself. Aside from direct subsidies, the companies employ an army of PR professionals and consultants, she said, pointing to newly released documents.

In a Jan. 2020 article entitled The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth by Lee Fang, Malkan said that recently released documents included in the article show the full scope of chemical industry's influence which is more entrenched and well funded than has been known.

"As Gary Kasparov says," Malkan stated, "the point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is too exhaust your critical thinking to annihilate the truth."

In another session, on vine mealybugs, U.C. entomologist Kent Daane and vineyard manager
Erin Amaral reviewed strategies for combatting vine mealybugs.

In the past, the dangerous neurotoxin chlorpyrifos has been used in attempts to suppress the vineyard pest. Its use has tapered off, and beginning in two years, the chemical will no longer be available for use in California.

Daane and Amaral outlined major biocontrol efforts with different types of predators and parasitoids and a discussion of the pros and cons of each.

The audience was captivated by Daane's videos of mealybugs secreting poison to kill predator ants.

Growers face difficult challenges in keeping vine mealy bugs in check whether they use conventional  or approved organic methods, though the organic growers' challenges appear to be greater. Growers using conventional methods are spending about $80-120 an acre at a minimum, Amaral said.

Organic solutions were more costly.

An audience member asked Daane about his view of drone programs to drop predator eggs into vineyards. Daane said he thought drone delivery may not be as effective as spot placement of larvae on infested vines.

"First of all, I don't like using the eggs, because they are not as effective as releasing larvae. And when they are dropped by drone, they might fall on the ground rather than the and don't get to the leaves, where they're needed. More work needs to be done to determine its efficacy" he said.

Bob Quinn's concluding slide in his presentation the past, present and
future of organic farming. After, lunch, attendees heard from keynoter Bob Quinn (a presentation that will later be posted on YouTube) who outlined a vision for the future of organic farming.

Quinn called on the audience to visualize a new form of homeland security - one that encompassed food sovereignty as basic to security. Tying food to health was another key component of his vision for the future.

"Sixty years ago we used to spend 18 percent of our income on food and 5 percent on healthcare (or sick care). Today we spend 9 percent on food and 16 percent on healthcare. It's roughly the same amount of money. We made food cheap and abundant at the cost of our health," he said.

Thirdly, Quinn said, regenerative, organic agriculture is the right way to address climate change.

Quinn, a grain farmer in Montana, went organic in 1991. He launched the KAMUT brand of durum wheat.

He called upon organic farmers to switch the economic system from Commodity to Community and told the story of a community project to help the local Indian reservation residents switch their diets.

"We live near a large Indian reservation where a many people have diabetes," he said. "Working together we were able to help them start growing their own grain on 500 acres and now they are putting in a new flour mill. We helped them start growing lentils, which they can use for oil, too."

The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Surendra Dara and Pam Marrone at Ecofarm

U.C. scientist Surendra Dara presented an afternoon session on beneficials, an emerging area of research in agriculture. Dara has worked food crops but said he will soon be devoting some of his time to wine grapes.

Biopesticide entrepreneur Pam Marrone attended Dara's workshop and the two indirectly discussed possible new fungi based products they might collaborate on in the future.

SF Wine Competition: Best of Class - The Organic Winners

Three organically grown wines got Best of Class awards at the SF Chronicle Wine Competition this week.

1. McFadden Vineyards' Brut 

A local's $35 bottle once again bested brands like Domaine Carneros and other well heeled labels. McFadden's Brut has been a winner in the Brut category more often than not for almost a decade.

(Its sparkling rosé is also a top choice, but in limited production).

2. King Estate's Domaine Pinot Gris

A knockout wine (at $29) this limited production wine from the southern end of Oregon's Willamette Valley is made from biodynamic grapes.

It also got a 93 point score from Wine & Spirits magazine.

3. Carol Shelton's Wild Thing Zinfandel

Sourced almost entirely from organically grown grapes, this affordable ($19) Zinfandel is partially fermented on native yeasts, a feat few can match at this case production level (8-10,000 cases). The grapes come from Mendocino.

The annual public tasting of these wines takes place in SF on Sat. Feb. 15.

The Decade in Review: What You Were Reading 2010-2019 | Most Popular Topic (#1 in a Series)

Dear Readers: congrats, you're an inquiring bunch.  You've been willing to follow me over hill and dale into a wide variety of wine topics. I salute you for that.

I've just taken a look at the most viewed blog posts of the decade (well, only back to 2011, which is when I started this blog), knowing not much but wanting to learn a lot. Look where our collective curiosity has taken us, from zero to 450,000+ page views.



I've never been one to try to get page views (if I was, I would have been much more active on instagram et al), but it was helpful that Google Blogger counted them for me and could show me all the posts that got more than 1,000 page views. There were more than 25, so I've grouped them into major topics. Here's today's topic, which got the most page views as a group.

1. Wine Industry Green Marketing aka Greenwashing

Is the wine industry great a green marketing or what?

From rebranding government enforcement guidelines (Napa) to declaring 100% victory (Sonoma), the industry sometimes really outdoes itself.

Examples:

• The original Napa Green vineyard certification was a rebranding of the Fish Friendly Farming guidelines (which combined federal, state and local fish protection regulations), laws that were already in effect on growers. (Napa Green was modified over the years, but not a lot).

But wineries got to put a green logo on their websites and claim they were creating green farming programs.

Now sustainability is a great movement and a good goal, but the vintners proved to be extremely adept at overstating their accomplishments and understating what really changed in quantifiable terms, despite their annual sustainability reports. They also obscured the fact that sustainability doesn't have much, if anything, to do with pesticide reduction, which was not their program's primary goal.

And they were so successful that they were able to pay higher grape prices for sustainable grapes (versus organic grapes), leading to a reduction in organic grape production in Mendocino and leading Bonterra to court walnut farmers in Lake County (offering 20 year contracts for organic grapes) in an attempt to grow its organic grape supply chain.

• Sonoma's been the most visible offender in overstating what is not obvious to consumers. Their sustainability programs are so diverse even for one county that no wine professional (good luck to you WSET types) or consumers can even discern what they mean.

Sonoma lowered the bar as far as it could possibly go, letting growers and wineries choose four different standards (some with teeth, mostly not) for their vineyard certification and three other standards for their winery.

What Sustainable Means: Lots of Consumers Think It's Organic (But It's Not)

The two standards with teeth (that Sonoma recognizes among four total) were originally regional programs--Lodi Rules and SIP (Sustainable in Practice, from the Central Coast]--developed at the local level and not meant to get everyone into the tent, but to set a high--or medium high-- bar. They really were a challenge to do better.

Then Big Wine got into the game, and they've got a lot of power and money. Companies like Walmart decided to adopt sustainability requirements and required all their suppliers to meet them. Big Wine had to have a dress to go to the ball in.

So the Certified Sustainable Winegrowing program was created. The experts on using less in the vineyard were, of course, the organic folks, like Andy Hoxsey and Paul Dolan, who took leadership roles in trying to get their brethren to stop using so much water and so many chemical fertilizers.

But the CSWA program eroded the medium high bar, replacing it with a notion of continuous process improvement and until recently permitting anyone to use the worst neurotoxins on the planet (paraquat, chlorpyrifos, etc.) and be CSWA certified if they promised to do better next year.

But the CSWA has a lot of money to do marketing and suddenly there was a glossy book on sustainability for consumers and self promotional videos on what a great job sustainable farmers were doing (without ever mentioning pesticide use). And they continue to "educate" the wine industry in free seminars at the SF Wine School and elsewhere, which the organic and biodynamic folks never get to do.

Just like Trump voters, "persuadable" consumers were easily convinced to the point where the industry's own marketing studies find that 43% of consumers think sustainable means organic, an impression the sustainability industry does nothing to correct. In the case of the Sonoma growers, it is an impression they, in fact, actively cultivated (with Marimar Torres).

As the devoted Napa land use lion and organic grower Volker Eisele (who was influential in my education) put it:

"The wine industry is focused on "sustainability" - and not pesticide reduction - because the wine industry is the most adept at marketing and they know the market. The market wants something green. And so this is why you have all these euphemisms. You call it "sustainable" farming practice. You do all these things. 

"I say, "sustainable" farming practices is counting the bugs before you spray them. It is undefined. Nobody knows what sustainable practices are because the obvious thing would be that ultimately if you are sustainable, you get rid of poison. And you would have to have other standards - erosion prevention, and habitat restoration, and all of those things - they should come automatically. But it's all very nebulous."

Sonoma Certified Sustainable press conference amid vines that have nothing but BARE SOIL (a sustainability no no) between the vine rows. Green cover is recommended. These rows have either been extensively sprayed with herbicide or tilled until the soil is dead. Let's hope 99% of growers don't do this or we're not going to see any carbon drawdown.)

Here are the top posts on this topic:

6,687 page views
• Dark Side of Sonoma's Sustainability Movement: No to Organics, Deep Deception and When is a Standard a Standard? (Part 1)
(I removed this from the blog for 18+ months and only restored it as an archive post this week).

3,237 page views
• Part 2

1,855 page views
• Sonoma Gets Its (Toxics) Closeup: What's On Those Vines? A Look at Carcinogens, Neurotoxins, and More

1,057 page views
• The Emperor's New (Green Marketing) Clothes: "Sustainability" Program Ramps Up in Sonoma - Headed by Marketing Professor

Extra:
557 page views
• Sonoma's Certified Sustainable Glyphosate: Average of 81,319 Pounds Each Year for Four Years in a Row

Other stories include:

1,304 page views
Your Tax Dollars At Work: UC Davis Professor Dr. Carl Winters of UCCE Shares Song "I Sprayed It On a Grapevine" with Sonoma Growers at DPR Accredited Educational Event--"No Problems with Glyphosate"

The most wild ass video of the decade had to be the Sonoma viticultural "education" event that featured Carl Winters trying to get a group of growers to accompany him in singing his last song (while on the government's pay roll, but he still gets a pension), "I Sprayed it on a Grapevine" sung to the tune of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine."

Despite the latest medical reports on glyphosate's connection with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, thousands of lawsuits (three of them successful at the time) and UC medical research on the connection with liver disease, Winters told growers there were no problems with glyphosate and dismissed the UN scientists' assessement of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. (The IARC scientists, who tend to be conservative, are generally regarded in medical circles as the gold standard).

1,286 page views
In the New York Times, Another Greenwashing Story About Wine: Why?
Painful to witness was a New York Times piece written, not by a wine professional, but by a reporter apparently offered a junket by Kendall Jackson. (I am assuming actually that the paper would have paid for all of his expenses). Having been mentored by a former top NYTimes editorial board member and editor (James P. Brown, now deceased), I was particularly appalled.

Did David Gelles, a business reporter, really have no idea how he was being played?

My dream is that good folks at Columbia Journalism Review and journalism schools everywhere would use this post as fodder for how not to cover an industry. Gelles seems to have taken everything at face value and includes no corroborating sources. The part where the Jacksons take him on a helicopter ride should have been a clue as to how sustainable they really were. (And why are they meeting with the National Wildlife & Fisheries guy? Did they do something wrong?) If only Greta had been there.

I'll continue to on to the other major topics in The Decade in Review in the days to come.

Ding Dong the Wicked Witch—Chlorpyrifos (Used on 5% of Wine Grapes)—is Dead (But Only Sort Of): California Bans Sales (But Not Yet Use) Effective February 6

Five percent of California's wine grape
growers use Lorsban, a restricted material
linked for years to neurological diseases in
children and adults.

For decades, scientists—and especially pediatricians—have been calling for a ban on chlorpyrifos, an old school insecticide that is used by conventional and, sadly, yes, sustainable growers.

Starting Feb. 6, sales of the neurotoxin in California will be banned.

Glasses up! Break out the bubbly!

But maybe fill up the glasses only half or a quarter full, since this is not actually a full glass victory.

Over the years, I have written a number of articles about chlorpyrifos in the wine industry.

Sold as Lorsban, the insecticide has a dark history—invented by war chemists in Germany before World War II)—and has been in the cross hairs of public health authorities since the 1980's.

For the last year data is available—2017—California wine grape growers used 49,417 pounds on 26,430 acres.

Why should we care about this dastardly chemical? And will banning its sale in the state end its use?

• In a pesticide hair testing study conducted by the Greens in Europe, it was found in 10% of the 150+ participants.

• It's linked by numerous scientific studies to neurological conditions—including damaging child brain development—and neurological diseases like Alzehimer's and Parkinson's.

• It contaminates water supplies in California where it's used (now mostly in the Central Valley, but it's been used in Sonoma, Napa, Monterey and elsewhere over decades. It's becoming increasingly popular on wine grapes in the Tulare region). A story published by Environmental Health News about the study conducted by Beate Ritz (an expert who also testified in the Roundup trials, but that's another story) published in Environmental Health Perspectives summarized the study's findings:

People drinking well water within 500 meters of a dozen or more of the pesticides had a 66 percent greater rate of Parkinson’s, the study says. Airborne exposure only slightly increased the risk. [Boldings mine.]

• It also pollutes the air. 

• It is highly toxic to bees.

Heard enough?

• In 2015, the EPA said it wanted to ban the pesticide, but the wheels of government moved slowly. Cal EPA issued a press release in 2015 expressing its concerns over chlorpyrifos and worker safety. Its report stated,

"We are concerned about some workers who mix, load and apply chlorpyrifos to agricultural and other non-residential sites...We are also concerned about workers who work around areas that are treated with chlorpyrifos as part of their jobs." 

When Trump assumed power he killed the proposed nationwide ban.

Surprisingly

• Sustainable wine growers in the Wine Institute's Certified Sustainable Winegrowing program may use it but only during the first year of certification. (Why would this be allowed?) It is used to wipe out nematodes in replanting vineyards, controlling vine mealybugs and other uses. Basically, it's an exterminator.

• The California Association of Winegrape Growers, showing no compassion towards workers, residents or health officials (or the reputation of their industry) opposed the ban on selling it. According to an article published on Wine Business.com, the growers "and other agricultural organizations argued chlorpyrifos as another 'tool' in the farmers’ 'toolbox.'"

Sadly

• No one can legally buy chlorpyrifos in the state of California, but it is available outside of California. While California is now on the road to banning its use, that milestone, if approved, is two years away, according to state authorities. They are moving to cancel its use after a period of transition in which $5.7 million has been allocated to help growers using it try other products.

For now, its use was not made illegal—only its sale—so it remains a restricted material.

That means county ag commissioners must issue permits for its use. While ag commissioners are able to grant or deny permits, they cannot actually deny a permit for a legal chemical and it is still legal to use chlorpyrifos.

Just ask the Sonoma County ag commissioner's office: they had to give Sonoma Cutrer a permit to spray it on 100 acres in 2017. "We can't prohibit it because it is legal to use it, even though it's restricted," a spokesperson for the office said. Locals were alarmed. And rightly so. There is no requirement to warn when spraying is approved or about to take place.

UCLA researchers have documented the problem of ag commissioners' reluctance or inability to stop the use of restricted materials, writing a report on ag commissioners' track records. Read their full report here or local news coverage here. Certain counties will be more or less likely to continue granting permits.

A FEW CASE STUDIES FROM NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WINE COUNTRY

• SONOMA

Gallo used 147 gallons of chlorpyrifos on 400 acres at its Two Rock vineyard.

Gallo sprayed 147 gallons of it over Gina Gallo's favorite Chardonnay vineyard, Two Rock, in Petaluma in 2015.

Sonoma Cutrer sprayed it on 100 acres in Sonoma in 2017. (Source: Sonoma County Ag Commissioner's public data—pesticide use report records—available from the county ag commissioner's office upon request).

Parents with children in nearby schools and homes are not required to be notified when the spray is used.

• NAPA

Laird Family in Napa (and Sonoma) has consistently used chlorpyrifos for years.

It is the largest land owner in Napa with 5% of the county's vines.

So why are Laird Family's wines sold even at Whole Foods in Berkeley? (You'll have to ask Whole Foods' wine experts or post on Whole Foods social media.)

Take a look at the second post on chlorpyrifos here to see maps of where wineries used it from 2000 to 2017 (latest year data is available). 

Wine Geeks: How to Relax Over the Long Holiday Weekend—Watch Fungi and Wonder About Their Influence on Wine

The weather's cold. It's time for a fire and a feast. And the warmth of the boobtube?

Many of us will have a little leisure time this coming week (after Thursday) and look for some kickback time - possibly spent on a screen.

I can recommend a few fun options.

BIG SCREEN

The movie Fantastic Fungi is now in (obscure, art) movie theaters in the Bay Area and maybe where you live. I saw it this weekend at the delightfully quirky New Parkway Theater in Oakland where it's playing until Nov. 28. It's also going to the Roxie in SF. 

“Louie Schwartzberg’s lightly informative, delightfully kooky documentary, “Fantastic Fungi,” offers nothing less than a model for planetary survival.” NY Times Review

“Schwartzberg’s film quickly proves to be one of the year’s most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs.” - Roger Ebert

Yes, you can take the whole family, including visiting relatives. The time lapse action will entertain them all. And you.

After the film, which is mind blowing and FUN, you may find your appetite has simply been whet. Not satisfied? Move on to...

YOUR OWN SCREEN

Genius researcher and explainer Paul Stamets has a lot of great YouTube talks (including TED talks) but to my mind, the best one by far is the one he gave at EcoFarm in 2017, just two short years ago. You will see just how much radically inspiring, super cool scientific discoveries he's been making about mushrooms.

One example is saving the bees with fungi. Yes, saving the bees.

Yes, there's fun stuff about magic mushrooms, but the magic of mushrooms goes so much further than even what Timothy Leary and the Terence and Dennis McKenna experienced.

Find out what I'm talking about in Stamets' talk. One example: antiviral properties in mushrooms that inspired the Dept. of Homeland Security in a post 9-11 world to give grant money to study Stamets' mushroom collection where it was discovered that out of 200,000 antivirals, one mushroom compound proved the most effective way of combatting potential bioterrorism. Or the largest network of fungi—in Oregon—that covers four square miles.

Stamets' latest research probes ways to save the bees, and succeeds in using mushroom extracts to kill off the varroa mites infecting and killing bee colonies. There's hope!

After watching these videos, the next morning it became clear to me what is happening in biodynamics is that the cow poop aged in cowhorns decomposes with the help of fungi. The powdery substance that emerges after six months is teeming with fungi.

Who knows: it may turn out that the sole reason that the tea known as 500 (a solution of the thoroughly decomposed poop) works is that it is an effective way of spreading an awesome antiviral (fungi) on the vines.

Who needs chemical fungicides when nature's are at work?

It also means we should be re-examining the impacts of using chemical fungicides: are they killing off the useful fungi deep in the soil that's pulling those minerals out of the rock layer and into the vines? Now I want to know more about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which a friend told me about today, and its role in grapevine soil.

Do we know which precise fungi are in 500? It would be likely that it varies from farm to farm, and yet...do we know? Where's the research?

Was the specificity of the instructions for making 500 an attempt to control the process so certain fungi would appear?

Stamets goes on to talk about how the red bellied polypore mushroom degrade pesticides, including DDT.

Today, I walked out into my yard where there are four giant eucalyptus trees and for the first time, one of them had a mushroom at the base of it. (Rain had not started yet at that point).     

Are mushrooms ready to tell their story?

Organic Champagne?! Mais Oui! French Group Proudly Flaunts Their Eco-Cred, Dispelling the "Organic Wine Stigma"

Morgane Fleury of Champagne Fleury, the oldest biodynamic grower in Champagne,
at the San Francisco tasting organized by the Association des Champagnes Biologiques.
She also runs a wine shop in Paris, Ma Cave Fleury, carrying her family's wines.

France's vintners have embraced organic wine growing and certification in far more vast numbers than U.S. producers, but there's big divide between those who make fine wines and those who make lower priced, table wines in how the groups talk about organics.

Overall, the table wine producers from Languedoc-Roussillon and other regions are happy to put the Ecocert (organic certifier in France) logo on their bottles and exhibit at Millesieme Bio, but fine wine producers with certified organic vines in Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhone and elsewhere haven't been so enthusiastic about waving their organic flags. (The situation is the same here in the U.S. Substitute Mendocino for Languedoc-Roussillon for the table wines and Napa/Sonoma for the fine wines).

Now comes a vanguard--what a breath of fresh air--an organized, proud and effervescent gang of organic Champagne producers.

Vincent Couche was the first Champagne grower and one of the first vintners in Champagne to become biodynamic

Grower champagne, or terroir champagne (probably a more accurate term) flourishes in the margins of the Champagne region but not all producers are working organically and fewer still certify or bottle label their organic certification. (The same is true of producers in the U.S. In Napa, out of 50 wineries with certified organic vines making at least one wine solely from certified grapes, only 10 label their organic certification on the back label).

No other organic fine wine producers have risen to the organic communications challenge, proudly declaring the benefits of organic and exhibiting as a group.

The Champenois do so amidst a region that uses the most pesticides on wine grapes in all of France. (The black regions in the map below show the highest use of pesticides. The black region in the upper right is Champagne.)

In their first American tour, the group of 15 producers from the Association des Champagnes Biologiques took over San Francisco's Cerf Club Tuesday for an intimate, informal trade tasting. Only two percent of the region's producers have certified organic vines (up from 0.5% in 2009), but they're ready to make noise about it. (There are a total of 63 producers in the region with certified organic vines. Roughly 1,400+ acres [out of a total of 83,000+] in Champagne are certified organic. Fewer still are certified biodynamic).

Though I only found out about the tasting at the last minute from a friend on Facebook who was in attendance, it was enough to make me drop everything and drive over the bridge for the last precious hour of the tasting.

No more having to go booth by booth and having to ask, "Are you organic?" as is standard protocol at most tasting events. (Though I often ask tasting organizers in advance which producers I might target who are organic, it is usually impossible to get a list of them.) No more smirks and stares, like why would being organic be important? And why would certification matter?

Here, to my profound amazement, I not only met many of the 15 organic producers but also more than a few Demeter certified biodynamic producers. Some of these producers have been organic since 1971 and biodynamic since 1989.

The natural wine magazine Glou Glou features an interview in its Champagne issue with Jean-Pierre Fleury, the first to go down the biodynamic path.

From Glou Glou, Champagne issue, No. 1 (Sorry I wasn't able to find a link
online to purchase the issue, or I would have posted it here).

The association was selling copies of Glou Glou (now transformed into Super Glou, a New York based importer) which covered the region's organic producers. They wrote about AND defended certification, a rare phenomenon. In the U.S., most natural wine people do not like to talk about certification. It's almost a dirty word: like, "what, you don't believe us?! Trust us." (I wouldn't; ask to see the spray reports. And be sure to do it on a wine by wine basis with U.S. natural wine producers since most are buying grapes from uncertified sources.)

ORGANIC PRIDE

Bottle Labeling

Each producer had the little green leaf, the Ecocert label, on the back of the bottle.

Why Organic Matters

Glou Glou's coverage talked about growers' practices and why they are so important. It had a frank explanation about copper. (Headline: "Copper is a problem invented by industrial agriculture to undermine organic farming.") It had a timeline of the organic movement in Champagne. It had explanations about soil, and terroir, and root depth. Without the bullshit.

Why Excuses for Not Being Certified Are Just Excuses

There was a section called "The Gaslighting of Organics," detailing the typical excuses given by other wineries for not being organic.

They were all too familiar: "It's too expensive." (In the U.S. it ranges from $11-40 an acre, a little known fact. If you can't afford that, should you really be in the wine business?) Their answer: Ecocert certification fees are 800-1,500 euros a year. Which translates into costs of one to two cents per bottle. 

How much time does certification take? Their answer: 3 hours a year maybe? But it's worth it because, "it gives our customers greater transparency."

For those who don't certify, they had these words: "In Champagne, there are lots of people who say they're organic, but not certified. Why? Because they're not organic," says Vincent Laval in Glou Glou.

Pascal Doquet echoes that observation, "Winemakers who say they farm organically but aren't certified are almost always liars, That is to say, they use chemicals in difficult years and they're organic 80-90 percent of the time." (I would say this applies to more than a few producers in the U.S., too). He continues, "I don't know a single winemaker in Champagne who actually farms organically in Champagne who is not certified. Anyone who is not certified continues to justify the existence of the chemical industry. For me, they're against organic farming."

And most damningly, in keeping with my own horror show responses to wine shops (including natural wine shops), Doquet describes his visit to New York wine sellers with Laval: "Everything there was labeled 'organic' or 'organic practicing' or 'organic non-certified.' Yet it was nothing but chemical farming."

Reports on farming practices provided by wine sales reps should be taken at face value.

"Anyone who's not certified can spray pesticides whenever they damn well please."

THE WINES SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Although I only made it through about 5 to 6 producers' wares, the wines were uniformly fantastic and showed the nuances of terroir and subsoils. It's a pleasure to taste the terroir.

Retail prices were in line with other Champagne producers, with entry level bottles in the $35-50 tier and special bottles around $75 and up. Many also made a zero dosage or no sulfite Champagne as well.

Georges Laval, certified organic since 1974

Georges Laval's boxes show where the wine is from, a lovely touch for those
marketing wines of terroir

Lucie Cheurlin of Champagne L & S Cheurlin

Dominique LeLarge-Pugeot and her husband 
Dominique are the seventh generation at the family 
estate; they are also Demeter certified biodynamic.

Cheurlin

LEARN MORE

To learn more about the producers, visit the association's excellent website or visit the 15 producers this weekend at Raw Wine in LA, where I imagine they will be quite a hit. 

You can also read Terroir Champagne, by the very capable Caroline Henry (featured in a previous blog post here) who lives in Champagne and writes regularly about the organic and biodynamic producers in the region. Her book is the indispensable guide.

What Effect Do Fire Retardants Have on Vineyard Soil?

Can anyone point me to any research on this?

Here's the only article I've found so far:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/blanketing-california-in-fire-retardant-is-potentially-1821181258

Timely | Stephen Pyne's TED Talk: How Fire Shapes Everything

Stephen J. Pyne: The Pyrocene

I am posting Stephen Pyne's magnificent summary of the history of fire on the planet. I just discovered his work today, and it seems so timely.

His initiation into the world of fire started at 18 when he began working on a fire crew, work he continued for 15 years, first during the summers when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. Later he became a professor, authored 35 books and was awarded a MacArthur fellow. He retired from Arizona State University in 2018.

Winter Isn't Coming - Prepare for the Pyrocene

Millions of acres are burning in the Arctic, thousands of fires blaze in the Amazon, and with seemingly endless flareups in between, from California to Gran Canaria – fire seems everywhere, and everywhere dangerous and destabilizing. With a worsening climate, the fires dappling Earth from the tropics to the tundra appear as the pilot flames of an advancing apocalypse.  To some commentators, so dire, so unprecedented are the forecast changes that they argue we have no language or narrative to express them.

Actually, the fire scene is worse than the headlines and breathless commentaries suggest because it is not just about bad burns that crash into towns and trash countrysides.  It’s equally about the good fires that have vanished because they are suppressed or no longer lit.  More of the world suffers from a famine of good fires than from a surfeit of bad ones; the bad ones are filling a void; they are not so much wild as feral.

Underwriting both is that immense inflection in which humans turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones in the form of fossil fuels.  That is the Big Burn of today, acting as a performance enhancer on all aspects of fire’s global presence.  So vast is the magnitude of these changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene.  Call it the Pyrocene.

So there does exist a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, and one that has defined our distinctive ecological agency. It’s the story of fire.  Earth is a uniquely fire planet – it has been since life clambered onto the continents.  Equally, humans are a uniquely fire creature, not only the keystone species for fire but a species monopolist over its manipulation.  The fires in the Arctic testify to the planetary antiquity of fire.  Nearly all are kindled by lightning and burn biotas nicely adapted to fire; many could be suppressed, but extinguishing them will only put off, not put out, the flames. By contrast, the fires in the Amazon bear witness to a Faustian pact that hominins made with fire so long ago it is coded into our genome.  They are set by people in circumstances that people made, well outside ecological barriers and historical buffers.

This is a narrative so ancient it is prelapsarian. Our alliance with fire has become a veritable symbiosis.  We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food.  We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes.  Now we have become a geological force because we have begun to cook the planet.  We have taken fire to places and times it could never have reached on its own, and it has taken us everywhere, even off world. We have leveraged fire; fire has leveraged us.

How this happened is a largely hidden history – hidden in plain sight.  Fire disappeared as an integral subject about the time we hid fire into Franklin stoves and steam engines.  (The only fire department at a university is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm sounds.)  It lost standing as a topic in its own right.  As with the fires of today, its use in history has been to illustrate other themes, not to track a narrative of its own.

Yet how the present scene came to be is clear enough in its general contours.  How, outfitted with firesticks early humans could take over select biotas.  How, with axes and plows and livestock as fire fulcrums, societies could recode the patches and pulses of vast swathes of land for agriculture.  How, hungering for ever more firepower, we turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones – once-living biomass converted over eons into oil, gas, lignite, and coal.  Our firepower became unbounded.


That is literally true.  The old quest for sources has morphed into one for sinks.  The search for more stuff to burn has become a problem of where to put all the effluent.  Industrial combustion can burn without any of the old ecological checks-and-balances: it can burn day and night, winter and summer, through drought and deluge.  We are taking stuff out of the geologic past and unleashing it into the geologic future.

It’s not only about changing climate, or acidifying oceans. It’s about how we live on the land. Land use is the other half of the modern dialectic of fire on Earth, and when a people shift to fossil-fuels, they alter the way they inhabit landscapes.  They rely on industrial pyrotechnologies to organize agriculture, transportation, urban patterns, even nature reserves, all of which tend to aggravate the hazards from bad fire and complicate the reintroduction of good fire. The many conflagrations sparked by powerlines nicely capture the pyric collision between living and lithic landscapes. Still, even if fossil-fuel combustion were tamed, we would yet have to work through our deranged relationship to fires on living landscapes.

Because fire is a reaction, not a substance, the scale of our fire-induced transformations can be difficult to see.  But we are fashioning the fire-informed equivalents of ice sheets, mountain glaciers, pluvial lakes, outwash plains, and of course changing sea levels, not to mention sparking wholesale extinctions.  Too much bad fire, too little good, too much combustion overall - it’s an ice age for fire.  The Pyrocene is moving from metaphor to descriptor.

It’s all there: narrative, analogue, explication.  A couple of centuries ago we began hiding our fires in machines and off site, which can make it difficult for modern urbanites to appreciate how profoundly anthropogenic fire practices inform Earth today.  We use the rampaging flames to animate other agendas, not to understand what fire is telling us.  But fire, the great shape-shifter, is fast morphing beyond our grasp.

What does a full-blown fire age look like?  We’re about to find out.

If you want more, go for the bigger enchilada:

Update: Status of Organic Vineyards in Kincade Fire Area

NOTE: 15,000 of Sonoma's 60,000 acres of vines are located in Alexander Valley.

• Alexander Valley Vineyards | Facebook Update, Monday, Oct 28, 10 am:

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. These are just a few (pictured above) of the many that left their communities & families to protect ours. We didn’t get to see them all or even learn their names, but we are forever grateful to each & every one of them. Prayers for their continued safety.

UPDATE at NOON

Press Democrat reports:

Hank Wetzel, owner of Alexander Valley Vineyards, said several outbuildings suffered minor damage on his property. He has about 500 tons of grapes still in the vineyard, which could likely go to rot as the property does not have electricity.

“We just don’t know if we are going to get them picked at this point,” Wetzel said.

With nearly 15,000 acres of vineyards, Alexander Valley is home to 31 wineries and 82 growers. About 80 percent of the valley’s grape crop had been picked before the Kincade fire started last week, said Michael Haney, executive director of the Sonoma County Vintners trade group. The valley, known for its premium cabernet sauvignon, is typically the last wine region where harvest wraps up for the season.

• Eco Terreno (Cloverdale) | Mark Lyon | Facebook Update, Monday, Oct. 28

Updates; The Vineyard, Employees and Animals are out of harms way of the Kincade Fire. Fortunately; Eco Terreno Vineyards and House are up in the Northern Part of Alexander Valley. Winds are currently pushing the fire from Southern Alexander Valley to Chalk Hill Rd. No evacuations in Cloverdale. We have delayed our harvest today; to hopefully resume tomorrow; but that’s still not certain until evacuation orders are lifted.

We are very worried about client/wineries that are on Chalk Hill Rd, along with employee/friends in the Healdsburg/Windsor communities. We hope that our brave and exhausted fire fighters can thwart the flames. These are very sad times for those who have lost homes and wineries. Our Sonoma County community is strong and will rally to help.

For now; we are hunkered down in the town of Sonoma at our house. We do have power and not under any evacuation orders. Luckily; no new fires have ignited in Sonoma County; despite fierce winds last Saturday night thru Sunday PM. We heard a transmission line blow up Saturday night. This is a nightmare and need these winds to die down.

• Medlock Ames | Facebook Update Sunday, Oct. 27, 10 am

Update: another scary night. Our tasting room on Alexander Valley and our winery on Chalk Hill are still standing but remain threatened by #kincadefire. Our hearts ache for our neighbors who weren’t as lucky. Our entire team has been evacuated but all are safe. We remain eternally grateful for the first responders and crews who work tirelessly to fight back the flames. We will remain closed until further notice.

UPDATE: 8:45 PM
Last night the #kincadefire swept quickly through our vineyards at Bell Mountain Ranch and touched almost 75% of our property. With the amazing efforts of the first responders, none of the buildings including our winery, barns and offices burned. 

A few vines out of our 55 acres were singed. 

Our wines were safe in our winery and the remaining 30 tons which we harvested quickly were brought to our friends @saintsburywinery in Carneros as soon as the evacuation order was given. 

We couldn’t be more thankful for the help of the first responders and will let them continue in their tireless efforts to protect our community. Our team remains safe albeit in different spots due to the evacuation. Thank you all for your love and support and we will share more details soon.


Here are the terraces of our Jefferson merlot block today. Still standing and #sonomastrong

• Skipstone | Facebook Update Monday, Oct. 28, 9 am

Late Wednesday night, the Kincade fire broke out in the hillsides above Skipstone, and rapidly spread throughout our region near Geyserville in Alexander Valley, including Skipstone.

The fire continues to burn to the south of our property and has grown with limited containment, but we are hopeful that the immediate threat to Skipstone and our neighborhood has passed. We're now keeping a close eye on the number of smoldering spot-burns spread across our property as the wind conditions remain concerning at this time.

Most importantly - all of the Skipstone team and our families are safe and secure. Our horses and sheep are also accounted for, and have been removed from the property to a safer zone.

The fire swept broadly through our estate grounds, and we lost several of the structures, but are fortunate that our main residence is still standing. Portions of our vineyard and olive groves also suffered some damage, but we will repair and replant as necessary in the affected areas to fully recover. 

Our wine and olive oil program will continue uninterrupted. 

The 2019 wine lots are safely fermenting and the recent vintages are aging in barrels in our remote winery, so there is no impact to any of our Skipstone wine in the very near term.

Other Sonoma wineries in Dry Creek, West County and Sonoma Coast as well as many in Napa: closed until power outages are over.

A Little Green Marketing Humor for You

New Zealander's Novel Idea for Wine Labeling: Add "Chemgro" to the Bottle Label for Conventional and Sustainable Wines

I wanted to share this novel idea that appeared in the wine industry news last week on a proposal to label chemically grown wines.

Read the article here.

Charlie Barra | A Worthy Tribute

A big shout out to Heidi and to the Ukiah Daily Journal for this worthy memorial tribute article to Charlie Barra. This should stand as the definitive account of a great man. And a fun guy, too!

Organic Winners on Wine & Spirits Top 100 List: 16%

Sixteen percent of the U.S. wineries with certified organic vineyards placed among the 36 wineries from the U.S. in Wine & Spirits Top 100 Wineries of 2019.

Since organic vines represent about 2 percent of California vines (except in Napa where they are 9 percent of the total), they are overrepresented by 800 percent compared to other wines.

That's something to raise a glass to.

Mendocino County
• Roederer Estate (BD at Domaine Anderson)

Napa County
• Storybook Mountain Vineyards

Paso Robles County
• Tablas Creek (BD)

San Benito County
• Calera

Sonoma County
• Radio-Coteau (BD)
• Ridge Vineyards

Willamette Valley
• Brooks [Eola-Amity Hills] (BD)

Half are Biodynamic (About 10% of the U.S. Winners)

In addition, it should be noted that four of the 36 wineries are also Demeter certified biodynamic, which also represents an over-representation. Demeter certified vineyards cover about 3,450 acres.

Sonoma's Certified Sustainable Glyphosate: Average of 81,319 Pounds Each Year for Four Years in a Row

The Sonoma Sustainable team has been out in full force today, tooting their horns and telling the uncritical media how green it is. See the Esther Mobley piece in the Chronicle and the North Bay Business Journal article.

In case you think that the program is resulting in meaningful reductions of glyphosate use in the county, here are the Sonoma stats from 2014 to 2017 (a period of drought). Five years ago the county set a (marketing) goal of 100% certified sustainable by 2019.

Pounds Used on Wine Grapes in Sonoma County

2014: 79,000
2015: 92,562
2016: 79,000
2017: 74,715

Total: 325,277

Average: 81,319

And that was during the drought years. 

As my friend Monty Waldin, the English organic wine expert says, "Sustainable means you used to smoke a pack a day and now you only smoke 10 a day. But you still smoke."

In this case, there's not really a real reduction. 

Here's a comment I wrote on the North Bay Business Journal site in response to Kruse's statements.

COMMENT

Karissa fails to mention that in 2017, Sonoma's sustainable wine grape growers used more than 74,000 pounds of glyphosate on their vines. In the meantime, cities in Sonoma and Napa have been banning glyphosate left and right. The entire county of Sonoma banned it from any county owned property as did Petaluma and Santa Rosa. In Napa, American Canyon, Yountville and the city of Napa have all banned its use on city owned property.

In addition, Sonoma's Certified Sustainable program enforcement under the Fish Friendly Farming standard (one of the four Sonoma approved third party standards) appears to be quite lax, with Kruse's boyfriend Steve Dutton using Mancozeb on a Fish Friendly Farming property for many years. (He stopped last year after I wrote about his use. And he publicly-in writing published on a wine industry news web site-accused me of libel for writing what the pesticide use report data said). (This claim was incorrect, as the editor of that site informed him). Mancozeb is prohibited under the Fish Friendly Farming certification program. It is highly toxic to fish.

In addition, Dutton went on to label all of his wines from those Mancozeb vines with little green Sonoma Sustainable labels. And so did all the other wineries who bought grapes from him, who wanted to use the green label. So where's the enforcement?

Kruse says in this article that the organic people aren't getting certified sustainable and that's why it's not 100 percent. Not so. There are others, like Laird Family, which owns vineyards in Sonoma, who are not taking the self assessment test. (And since when did self assessment count as certification?)

Laird is the biggest land owner in Napa with 2,200+ acres (or about 5% of the vineyards) and has never been certified sustainable in Sonoma. (Check the Sonoma Certified Sustainable honor roll in 2019 and you won't find them under their Bayview Vineyards farming company name or under Laird Family.)

It's time that journalists did their homework instead of uncritically just printing wine industry press releases.

74,000 pounds of glyphosate contains heavy metals, arsenic and other toxic ingredients, according to toxicology reports, which have analyzed the ingredients using mass spectrometry. (http://www.seralini.fr/wp-c...

It's time for Sonoma Sustainable to start counting more than media impressions and give us meaningful data.

And now Karissa want to talk climate change. Yes, let's! The latest Bonterra study (https://www.bonterra.com/so... shows that organic farming in wine grapes sequesters 9 to 13 percent more soil organic carbon than a conventional control vineyard. Why can't Sonoma both farm organically AND sequester carbon? Or is that too much to ask?

Roundup in Wine? Please, No, Says Mimi Casteel

Oregon wine's deepest ecological thinker is having a moment. Mimi Casteel, whose family started Bethel Heights, is one of the most thoughtful and well educated people in wine when it comes to the topic of true sustainability.

Her appearance on Levi Dalton's I'll Drink To That podcast has catapulted awareness of her insights into a more prominent dialog among wine writers, wine lovers and wine makers.

You can catch the two hour talk here.

For the short attention span version, there's an article about her in Punch, as well. (But you'd be missing a lot if you didn't listen to the podcast to get the Real Download).

I spoke at length on the phone with Mimi this spring, as I was writing an as yet to published website that includes her current winery, Hopewell.

VIDEO

But many don't know about her kickass video, based on science--she has a master's in forest science--for vintners on Roundup and why you don't want it in your vineyard. It's worth tuning into:

Bayer's Bad News: Asset Selloff and German Ban

The German news publication DW.com has two stories on Bayer's strategies for surviving the disastrous, financial meltdown it faces as Roundup lawsuits increase.

It has begun selling assets: See story here.

Meanwhile Germany announced plans to ban Roundup by 2023. See story here. (Austria has also banned it.)

What is the takeaway? Roundup isn't getting any good publicity. What will wineries do about?

The future is unclear.

Update on Bayer and Roundup Trials: $8-10 Billion Settlement in the Works

See the latest from Bloomberg.

Beyond "Grower Champagne": Caroline Henry's U.S. Book Tour for Her Book, Terroir Champagne

Matt Cirne (Verjus and Quince), Caroline Henry (author) and
two fans at her book signing event at Verjus in San Francisco

Caroline Henry was in San Francisco this weekend on the tail end of her U.S. book tour, promoting her book Terroir Champagne, which has become the definitive guide to a category that people sometimes call "grower champagne." But is grower the right word?

"I was always intrigued by the idea of terroir in champagne," Henry said, over a light lunch of omelets stuffed with Boursin cheese at Verjus, where we dined before her afternoon tasting there. A book signing and tasting, hosted by Verjus somm Matt Cirne, featured wines from nine producers.

Champagne's major houses have traditionally blended their wines, growing estate grapes and purchasing significant amounts of fruit from local growers. 

Terroir champagne turns the game on its head. The subtleties of grapes and varying blends from tiny plots, grown by vignerons, has reinvigorated the industry and given the little guy independents - usually families - a voice for their soil and winemaking styles.

Eco-luxe is another part of the indie picture. Many of these tiny producers are practicing organic or biodynamic farming and/or have certified organic and biodynamic vines (all of which are listed in Terroir Champagne).

Henry regaled me with her insider stories about Champagne, from its major houses to its tiniest producers. She lives in a small village there (population 750). Her exploration of the vineyards in Champagne began when she took her dog on daily walks.

There, she could see the blue bits of plastic in the ground from the compost routinely exported from the cities to the countryside until 1998. And she could see the spraying and the tell tale yellow strips left by Roundup applications in the spring.

"It wasn't just in Champagne," she said, "that the French garbage compost was applied. It was in all the wine regions." Governments later decided to burn the compost.

While some producers strive to reduce pesticide use, which is part of French government mandates, the region is still among the heaviest users of herbicides and fungicides in France. (See map - the red spots show the heaviest pesticide regions.)

In the Champagne region, there were two valleys that suffered from water so polluted that residents didn't have drinkable water, Henry said.

Overall, Champagne's markets have shifted from France to export markets.

I asked her about the recent Seralini studies on the taste of pesticides in wine and whether or not they had had any impact on the industry.

"The 30 glorious years, from 1970-2000, in Champagne were the time of chemical farming," she said. "And at the same time, that was when the wine expert degrees like the MW and WSET program, grew more popular. Those flavors (of pesticides) became the benchmarks, so people are used to tasting the wines grown with chemicals."

Henry herself teaches English at the business school in Reims. "That allows me to stay neutral," she said, as opposed to being beholden to the wine industry and its marketing muscle which often makes it hard for writers to share the stories they want to write about.

Many of the wineries in Terroir Champagne are certified organic or biodynamic.

Some of the big guns - like Roederer - have decided to pursue biodynamic practices and certification. The reason?  "They want to make better wine, and places like DRC have convinced them that is the only way," Henry said.

Roederer's Crystal is now sourced entirely from organic or biodynamic grapes, she said.

During her SF visit, Henry also appeared at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco, where she said many consumers attended the tasting (but didn't buy the book). "The trade did buy the book," she said.

Before the tour, she'd sold roughly 2,000 copies. During the tour, she sold 1,500 more books, proving there is interest in this topic in the U.S.

WINES

Here are two of the wines from organic or biodynamic vines.

The Reasonance champagne from Champagne Marie-Courtin, made by Dominque Moreau (page 52 in the book), was crisp and precise, with a generous amount of frothy mousse. 

The fresh Thomas Persaval Tradition (page 143 in the book) offers up bright citrus notes and packs in some pucker power to boot.

I've left out a lot of the information about herbicide and fungicides in Henry's book as that's covered in Gwendolyn Alley's blog post about Henry here.

To order the book (available in hardcover or as an ebook), click here.

Mendocino Wine Competition: Double Gold + Organic Winners

An esteemed panel of judges awarded medals this weekend in the 2019 Mendocino County Fair Wine Competition held in Boonville. Judges included Dan Berger, Laura Ness, Mark Bowery, John Sverko, Mike Dunne, Chris Sawyer, Greg Richtarek, Debra Del Fiorentino, Melanie Mann and Donny Sudthisa.

Photo credit: Chris Sawyer

One wine has been a standout year after year, consistently beating out bigger competitors (like Roederer Estate). The McFadden Cuvee Rosé, which has been unavailable for several years, is back and took Best of Show in Sparkling.

From a field of 264 entries, the judges selected 33 Double Gold winners. Ten were from certified organic vines.

Most of these wines (with the exception of the sparkling wine) are on the market for $25 or less.

Cabernet Sauvignon - Double Gold

• Girasole 2017 - Best of Class

• Yorkville - 2016

Chardonnay - Double Gold

• Barra 2018

• Blue Quail 2018

Gewruztraminer - Double Gold

• Handley Cellars - Estate 2018 - Best of Class

Italian Reds - Double Gold

• Chance Creek - Sangiovese 2014 

Other Whites - Double Gold

• Girasole - Pinot Blanc 2018

Rosé - Double Gold
• Boonville Road 2018 

Sparkling Wine - Double Gold

• McFadden Vineyards - Best of Class and Best of Show in Sparkling

Zinfandel- Double Gold
• Bonterra 2017- Best of Class

Dashe Cellars Makes Its Move: Big City Vistas from Alameda

Dashe Cellars, one of the best urban wineries in the Bay Area, packed up and moved from its long time home in Oakland (not far from Jack London Square) to the wilds of the Alameda shoreline.

The views from the new site are stunning -- incredible to see the SF skyline from their "edge land" setting on the Alameda coast. But that's not all - there's also a bird sanctuary right there so you can watch the nesting big birds there in their day to day lives.

Winemakers Michael and Anne Dashe source several wines from organic vines in Mendocino. Their McFadden Riesling is always a standout.

The winery had to move when its landlord decided to rent their old space to a cannabis operation, willing to pay way more in rent -- a common cause of warehouse space "cannabizisation" in Oakland.

Visit soon!