Biodynamic wines demystified

Holy Cow!

From Domaines Leroy, Leflaive and De la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy to Cullen and Henschke in Australia, biodynamic farming clearly works for some of the world's best producers. Joanne Gibson asks Johan Reyneke, South Africa's foremost proponent of the approach, to demystify its more esoteric aspects.

 

Maybe I read too many Bambi books as a child," says Johan Reyneke, his hand plunged wrist-deep into the soil of a biodynamic vineyard on his Stellenbosch farm, his eyes shining with good humour and even better intentions. But the soil speaks for itself - loose clods interspersed with fine roots, such a contrast to the packed, cracked, cement-like earth in most vineyards. There's an earthworm beating a wriggly retreat on being exposed to the autumn sun, and - oh dear - is that a mealybug I see clinging to the root of that dandelion in Johan's hand?

The carrier of the dreaded leafroll virus? It would have conventional farmers reaching for the pesticides, but Johan is delighted. "By using poisons to get rid of weeds, everything is destroyed except the vines - no wonder the pests go to them! But within three years of farming biodynamically, we didn't have any more mealybugs on our vines - it turned out that they preferred dandelions!"

I'm interviewing Johan, SA's only certified biodynamic winegrower, because my understanding of the approach advocated by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s is limited. "An extreme form of organics" is one over-simplified definition. "Starry eyes and good intentions mixed with quasi-religious hocus-pocus" is how critics describe it, sceptical about ‘voodoolike' aspects like burying cow horns filled with manure and farming according to the phases of the moon (see The World of Fine Wine, issue 12).

Either way, it seems to be working for Johan. Since he started going biodynamic a decade ago, his wine sales have gone from 2 000 to 20 000 cases a year. What's more, his fruit is sought after by the likes of Boekenhoutskloof, Tokara and De Toren, with further endorsement having come in the form of operational investment from and distribution by Vinimark, SA's largest independent specialist wine wholesaler.

And his vineyards speak for themselves - the converted blocks resplendent in their autumn colours alongside some adjacent blocks still in conversion, their vines having prematurely shed all their leaves.

"They're like junkies that have gone cold turkey," chirps Johan But he wasn't this cheerful the first time he experienced vines detoxing. "When we converted our first vineyard - a quarterhectare of Pinotage - I initially thought it was an utter disaster. I had every weed, pest, plague you can imagine in that block. I was at a complete loss. In my heart I knew that I had taken the right path, but it was so bad I almost thought I'd better revert to conventional farming. I'd always been wary of people who try to squeeze reality into their own ideological framework, and maybe I was guilty of doing it myself."

Johan had, after all, studied philosophy rather than viticulture and oenology at university, where he "got into environmental ethics" after reading a book by Arne Næss, the founder of Deep Ecology, the tenet of which is that every being, whether human, animal or vegetable, has an equal right to live and thrive. "It seemed fundamentally wrong to me that, come spring, the conventional thinking was to spray everything until it looked like a wasteland. It was spring, yet there were no flowers or bees or butterflies..."

The catalyst came when Johan drank a 15-year-old Chenin Blanc from Savennières in France's Loire valley. "It seemed to get better and better over the course of the evening, and by 3am it stood head and shoulders above the other wines. It was La Coulée de Serrant, and when I found out that Nicolas Joly practised this environmentally friendly way of farming called biodynamics, I knew I had discovered a way of respecting nature and achieving quality at the same time."

Johan duly read Joly's book, Wine from Sky to Earth. "But it confused me more than it helped me, and some of Steiner's agricultural texts made even less sense. They were interesting from a philosophical point of view but didn't offer much practical help."

In despair over his infested Pinotage block, he eventually got biodynamic farmer Jeanne Malherbe of Bloublommetjieskloof in Wellington to come and have a look: "She said my problem was that instead of swapping agri-business for agriculture, I'd let it become a wilderness. She showed me that it wasn't enough just to stop using fertilisers and poisons; I had to put a whole new methodology in place. She said: ‘Your farm is a book and the weeds are letters in that book and you just have to learn to read them.'

"Jeanne taught me that every weed has a specific function, and I went from disliking all weeds intensely to realising that they were there to help me. They were nature's way of telling me what problems I'd been causing through my farming activities to that point. Some were there to fix the nitrogen in the soil; some were there because there was a problem with the pH, or because the soil was overly compact. Thanks to the weeds, I could now remedy the underlying problems instead of merely addressing the symptoms."

Today Johan is happy to offer advice and demystify biodynamics to anyone who asks, from students experimenting at Nietvoorbij research farm to Stellenbosch wine estate Spier, where they are converting 9ha of vineyards. "The first way to explain biodynamic farming is by comparing it to conventional farming, where the driving-force is essentially profit, and to organic farming, where the farmer recognises the importance of sustainability. In biodynamic farming, the shift is from sustainability to self-sufficiency.

"To tend their vines, conventional farmers drive off to the co-op to buy pesticides and fertilisers while organic farmers buy organically certified Bounce Back or pelleted chicken manure. Biodynamic farmers take things to the next level by having their own chickens, ducks, cows. We also recycle all our waste, instead of having to pay someone to remove it. Apart from anything else, our carbon footprint is lower, and it works out cheaper too - our own cow manure stays the same price regardless of petrol increases or Forex!"

The second way of explaining biodynamic farming is in terms of value. "Modern society is all about material value, so in farming a cow has a number - say 371B - and her worth is determined by the weight of her meat per kilogram, or how regularly she calves, or how much milk she produces. It's all about proftability. In biodynamic farming, there is a cognisance of the inherent value of what you're farming as well as its commercial value. So that cow is not just a weight and number; she has a name, Daisy, and she has a certain personality that makes her unique, and she brings joy to the farmer."

Johan's cow example is not random. "The expression ‘holy cow' comes from a time, not so long ago, when farmers had a very different, much more spiritual relationship with the land. They felt truly blessed to have a farm, a harvest every year - and a cow. Wherever the cow grazed, she contained the weeds and fertilised the soil. She provided milk every day, a calf every year, and at the end of her life you could even wear her! What's more, she didn't just have one stomach like other mammals; she had four, so her manure was finer. And she had horns! To these farmers who built churches with steeples, the horns also seemed to reach to the heavens, to represent a connection with divinity."

In this context, the so-called biodynamic preparation 500 - taking the best manure from the best animal and burying it in that animal's horns "when Mother Nature breathes in" (in autumn) then digging it up to spread over the land "when Mother Nature breathes out" (in spring) - seems merely a throwback to traditional, pre-industrialisation farming methods, rather than being esoteric or unscientific. "But it can all be explained scientifically too," insists Johan. "Cow manure is richer in micronutrients than other manures, the soil is more conducive towards microbial activity between autumn and spring, and composting is an aerobic process, which makes a cow horn ideal whereas in glass or plastic or metal the manure basically goes off."

There are eight other ‘preps', namely 501 (silica mixed with rain water), 502 (flower heads of yarrow fermented in a stag's bladder), 503 (flower heads of camomile fermented in the soil), 504 (stinging nettle tea), 505 (oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal), 506 (flower heads of dandelion fermented in cow mesentery), 507 (juice from valerian flowers) and 508 (tea prepared from equisetum). Says Johan: "The herbs are used to heal the soils and plants - and, in turn, animals and people. It's the ‘you are what you eat' principle. You can't nuke plants and animals and expect them to be healthy food for people."

Before being applied in compost heaps or as teas/sprays on the plants, the preps are diluted and then stirred in a specific way known as dynamisation. "We take our cue from nature, which manifests itself is in a vortex or spiral - think of a budding vine, a rosebud, a shell, a wave breaking... It is only man who makes water run straight from a tap or in a pipe. In nature, water meanders, so we stir it in the same vortex-like way."

Johan says he spoke to a microbiologist about some of the "weird shit" like cow horns and stag bladders. "She gave me all the scientific reasons why these things worked and suggested some modern alternatives - for which I would have needed to spend R50 000 on equipment! Frankly, I'm happy to carry on with my cow horns..."

As for the other controversial aspect of biodynamic farming - the lunar calendar - Johan says the moon's influence on the ocean is undisputed. "So given that most organisms comprise 90% water, surely it isn't difficult to accept that plants will sometimes have more moisture in their leaves than at other times? Similarly, if you rack your wine at full moon, you're guaranteed to have more particles in suspension, so you will have to filter your wine, stripping it of flavours and other beneficial substances."

Ultimately the wine is what it's all about. "I absolutely believe that biodynamic farming has improved my wines a lot. In my conventional farming days, I would pick grapes and immediately add sulphur, then yeast - Vin 11 or 12 or 13 depending on whatever style was fashionable - and then I'd add tartaric acid to improve the pH, enzymes for adequate extraction, and so on. Now my wines have two ingredients: grapes and time. Wild yeast does the job perfectly - I haven't had a stuck fermentation in 12 years - and there's no need to add tartaric acid because the pH in my soil has completely normalised, improving the pH in my grapes. And because the vines are in competition with some weeds, my berries are smaller with a higher skin-to-flesh ratio, so there's no need to add enzymes.

"By achieving balance in the vineyard, not artificially in the cellar, my wines are better integrated, not 20 things chucked together then propped up with sulphur to prevent them from falling apart. And above all, they are wines from this property's soils, not from superphosphate fertiliser; fermented by yeasts that occur naturally here, instead of yeasts chosen to recreate Sancerre or Cloudy Bay."

Self-sufficiency aside, Johan accepts that some critics believe he'd achieve the same results with organic farming. "But for me personally, it feels good to employ biodynamics to bring some balance to the materialistic, spiritually impoverished world we live in - and whereas I only occasionally came across a kindred spirit in the past, there's been a huge shift over the past five years. People realise that bananas are big but flavourless, that wines all taste the same, that everyone is getting sick. For food (and wine) that is wholesome in a nutritional and spiritual sense, you have to go right back to the beginning. In essence that's why I do it."

Reyneke Wines, off the Polkadraai Rd (M12), Stellenbosch. Tel 021 881 3451, www.reynekewines.co.za

THE WINES
Recently joined in his cellar by Vinimark-employed Rudiger Gretschel (ex Boekenhoutskloof), Johan says: "In comparison with conventional wines, which look good on opening but start falling apart after an hour and are cooking wines by the next day, biodynamic wines are shy at first, open up after about an hour, and are even better over the next day or two - simply because they are alive!"

This certainly proved the case for his reds, the Pinotage 2008 redolent of ripe plums with hints of coconut (no coffee!); the Cornerstone 2008 blend of 35% Shiraz, 35% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Merlot and 10% Cabernet Franc coming into its own on day two with a medium-rare sirloin and roasted veggies; the Red Reserve 2007 in its lovely engraved bottle living up to Johan's promise that it was the best red he could make every year (in this case a wine of both structure and elegance from Shiraz with 30% Cabernet Sauvignon).

As for the whites, the Sauvignon Blanc 2009 was finished with friends before it could stand the test of time - more floral than grassy on the nose with lemony acidity - while the ‘honey-cake' Chenin Blanc 2008 was superb with a mild chicken curry. As for the White Reserve 2008? Sold out. "We don't even have any left for our own library!"

FURTHER AFIELD
Other South African producers quietly using biodynamic methods for at least part of their production include Mullineux Family Vineyards, The Sadie Family Wines, Rozendal, Spier, Topaz, Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards and Waterkloof.

By far the largest certification body for all kinds of biodynamic agriculture is Demeter, which was formed in 1928 (see www.demeter.net), while Biodyvin only certifies biodynamic winegrowers (see www.biodyvin.com). Locally, producers can also approach the Bio-Dynamic & Organic Certification Authority (www.bdoca.co.za).