This episode is the last of the Quebec series, and it’s such a great one to end with… because it makes me miss Quebec and want to go back for a visit again as soon as possible. This one is special for several reasons: first, I got to interview a family… or part of the family who farms and makes wine as Vignoble Pigeon Hill. Kevin, Matthew and Trisha Shufelt treated Maxime and me to a beautiful tour, tasting, and conversation. And we finally got to see some sheep in action in the vineyard! And we...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 6Ep. 202
My guest for this episode is Simon Naud of Vignoble La Bauge. La Bauge is the first Canadian vineyard to be Regenerative Organic Certified by the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Knowing what I now know about Quebec it doesn’t surprise me that the first certified Regenerative Organic vineyard is here. Simon is also a past recipient of the best winemaker or vigneron for Quebec. When you see the trellising style of these cold climate, high fungal pressure areas, the integration of grazing animals se...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 6Ep. 201
On June 21, 2025 I gave a talk at the Carnival Brettanomyces in Utrecht, Holland, virtually. It was 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees farenheit in Holland at that time. The original title of this talk was called Making Wine for My Community, and you need to know the original title – because I structured this talk as a three part breakdown of the assumptions implicit for most people when they hear it. So I reference that original title throughout. But I named this episode Vinifera Culture Is Dead...
Jul 04, 2025•52 min•Season 6Ep. 200
My guest for this episode is Michael Marler who, with his partner Véronique Hupin, owns and farms and makes wine as Vignoble Les Pervenches in Quebec and has been doing this for 25 years. Mike has twice been selected as the best winegrower or Vigneron in Quebec, and he’s the only person to have received this honor twice. 75% of his vines are vinifera, with 25% Seyval Blanc, and he specializes in Chardonnay partly because he bought a farm that had old Chardonnay vines already growing on it. Those...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Season 6Ep. 199
I’m excited to introduce another incredible and relatively new Quebec winery, Domaine Oak Hill… and I love that it was named for a tree, and I met that tree and it is incredible… and worthy of having a winery named after it. I’ll even have a photo of Maxime and my guest and the owner of Oak Hill, Louise Macdonald, standing under and dwarfed by the oak. Louise, with her partner Sylvain Lalonde, farm Oak Hill biodynamically and make zero-zero wines from all hybrid grapes. Louise makes two versions...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 198
I’m so excited to bring you this special series on Quebec wine over the next few weeks, and I think you’ll soon realize why. Quebec might be 25 years ahead of most of the wine world. The innovation, adaptative strategies, and ecological approach to expressing something unique about their land, sets an example of the path forward for dominant wine culture. But the one thing you can’t hear on a podcast is the quality of the wine. So let me tell you: It’s fantastic. I had multiple best-I’ve-ever-ha...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 40 min•Season 6Ep. 197
My guest is Laura Barrett, and she’s been the winemaker at Clif Family winery in Napa for over 10 years. I met Laura when she was on a panel I moderated for Napa Green earlier this year. She’s got some really great things to say about working for a B corp and the farming they do at Clif Family… which has been organic from the beginning and is now introducing regenerative practices. None of that is out of the ordinary for me, but then… the majority of the interview is a technical, step-by-step di...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Season 6Ep. 196
Christian Cain does contract grazing for vineyards and orchards in Northern California with sheep and goats with his company Perennial Grazing. “We are members of natural communities: what we do to them, we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them can we nurture ourselves. Palates link cultures with landscapes and moderating the impacts of palates on human and environmental health will require changes in the kinds of foods [and wines!] we produce and consume…” That’s Fred Provenza and others from...
May 26, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Season 6Ep. 195
This is part 2 of my interview the Dan Rinke of Art + Science. We get into even more specifics of how he makes his holistic farm of vines and trees and animals work with very little inputs, his lessons and insights from multiple years of running both egg and meat chickens through his vineyard, his experience as an organic transition advisor, and much more. At one point Dan mentions how his orchard planting was influenced by Michael Phillips, and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow during the con...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 6Ep. 194
This episode is part 1 of a two part episode with Dan Rinke of Art + Science Cidery and Winery in Oregon. The conversation was interrupted by technical difficulties after about 45 minutes, which was plenty of time to get to hear about Dan’s ecological journey with wine, and how his love of winemaking turned him into a crazy beyond organic wine and cider grower and maker. Dan has had a pretty serious career in organic and biodynamic vineyards and cellars in California and Oregon, and he and Kim H...
May 05, 2025•59 min•Season 6Ep. 193
My guest for this episode is Fritz Westover. Fritz, like me, is originally a fellow Pennsylvanian, and he’s going on 3 decades of learning about, working with, and teaching about viticulture. He runs a viticulture consulting business, focused primarily in Texas, Georgia and the US South, and he reaches an international audience through his Virtual Viticulture Academy. And he’s also a fellow podcaster with The Vineyard Underground – a fantastic resource for technical viticulture knowledge present...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 45 min•Season 6Ep. 192
My guest for this episode is Rob Schultz. Rob is the vineyard manager for Lemelson Vineyards in Oregon, and farms 130 acres of organic vineyards in the Willamette Valley. Lemelson Vineyards has been certified organic for over 25 years, and has been one of my favorites since I started in wine over 2 decades ago. Rob also happens to be one of the main people responsible for the Organic Winegrowers Network there in Oregon, which led to the historic Organic Winegrowers Conference this spring of 2025...
Apr 15, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 6Ep. 191
My guest for this episode is Elaine Chukan Brown. Elaine is a writer, speaker, wine educator, and now author of the book The Wines of California. Elaine has been a contributor, columnist, editor, and/or wine reviewer for nearly every wine publication out there, and they co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum, and have advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries. In 2019, the Wine Industry Network named Elaine one of the Most Inspiring People in Wine. In 2020, they were awarded...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 190
In this episode I interview Wendy McNabb, the current owner with her husband, of Carolina Heritage Vineyards, one of only four certified organic wineries on the entire East Coast of the United States. They use paper bottles, so we talk about the pros and cons of this alternative packaging. And we talk about some of the really interesting wines they make at Carolina Heritage, including dry Muscadines. Now, Muscadines have come up on Beyond Organic Wine before, including last week’s episode, but W...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 6Ep. 189
I’ve known about Botanist & Barrel and DeFi Wines for a couple years, and even visited them in Asheville, North Carolina. They introduced me to both Muscadine grapes and Paw-paws through their wines. And they have a wine named Grapes Have Feelings, made with apples and muscadine grapes, that is both a delicious wine and one of my favorite names for a wine. I talk to Lyndon Smith, one of the founders and winemakers for Botanist & Barrel and DeFi Wines. We discuss true regionality in wine,...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 6Ep. 188
Tommy Fenster is a scientist who studies agroecological systems, but specifically for the last few years he’s been focused on gathering data from dozens of vineyards around California and studying the practices and impacts of regenerative viticulture. Tommy gathers data across something like 49 vineyards. In a sense, the largest regenerative viticulture trial is the one being conducted across all vineyards in the world right now as more and more farmers embrace more and more regenerative practic...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 6Ep. 187
Gideon Beinstock started Clos Saron with Saron Rice in 1999 as an attempt to purely and distinctively express the terroir of their home in the Sierra Foothill outside of Oregon House, California. Over the years they've developed and refined both their winegrowing and winemaking with an eye always toward a more pure expression, less about them and any input, and more about finding what the land has to say through grapes. This objective has led them to some fascinating techniques and approaches to...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 57 min•Season 6Ep. 186
This fun episode is a conversation with Domenico Musumeci, co-owner of Ca’Musu and Wine Pirati, with his wife Elise. They live and farm wine in Michigan, and Mimmo talks us through their unique approach to viticulture… which involves working with a draft horse named Buster. I’m a lover of horses, myself, and worked as a horseback trail guide in Colorado at one time in my life, and had the great fortune of getting to know and have a relationship with a horse named Vinegar. Vinegar was named for h...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Season 6Ep. 185
My guest for this episode is Caine Thompson, head of sustainability for O’Neill Vintners. Caine has initiated and oversees the largest side-by-side trial of regenerative organic viticulture in the world at Robert Hall Winery, one of O’Neill Vintners flagship brands in Paso Robles. Going into it’s 5th year in 2025, this regenerative organic viticulture trial is already providing data that show that regenerative organic viticulture, in Paso Robles, provides, at minimum, economic & wine quality...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 184
My guest for this episode makes wine from flowers. Her name is Aaliyah Nitoto and her winery is called Free Range Flower Winery. She’s based out of Oakland, California, so she could use grapes. But her first attempts at infiltrating the grape wine hegemony we’re overly welcoming. As she assessed and regrouped, her studies led her to a different calling. Her story is inspiring and her fermentations are both refreshingly novel and at the same time steeped in historical tradition. At every step she...
Feb 18, 2025•58 min•Season 6Ep. 183
This episode digs into several varieties of hybrid grapes being grown in New Hampshire by the team that makes up NOK Vino. I speak with Nico Kimberly, the founder of NOK Vino, about the challenging viticulture of New Hampshire, what its like to be making wine in a new, young wine region, the importance of community to these efforts, and the diversity of grapes that are making it possible to do what he’s doing. Nico has a refreshingly non-dogmatic perspective, that approaches each site and each v...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Season 6Ep. 182
Maybe you took a break from alcohol this January and you don't want to go back to drinking wines made within the dominant paradigm. Maybe you'd like to try something truly extraordinary, rare, unique, ecological, and excellent. If so... this episode offers some suggestions. For this episode I assembled a gathering of Los Angeles wine professionals to taste through a handful of wines that represent winemakers who are among some of the most groundbreaking... and the most unacknowledged for the ama...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 6Ep. 181
Becky Sykes is the Program Director of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, and she’s gives us a great introduction to many of the resources and opportunities available to wine producers through their work. Becky tells us about the RVF’s upcoming 1 block challenge, as well as their regenerative Toolkit that you can participate in as a winegrower, and we discuss many of the other resources and ideas that the RVF brings attention to. In short, you’ll hear many reasons why and how you can get i...
Jan 27, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 6Ep. 180
Bruce Reisch joined the faculty of Cornell University in New York in 1980 and spent the last 40 years specializing in developing new grape cultivars as well as new grape breeding techniques. During this time his program released 14 new grape cultivars, 10 of which are wine grapes. In fact I have one of his most popular grapes, Traminette, growing with a persimmon tree in my front winegarden here in LA. Bruce was also Chair for over 10 years of the Grape Crop Germplasm Committee, a national commi...
Jan 15, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Season 6Ep. 179
Behind the ecological devastation caused by conventional, industrial viticulture and agriculture in general are ideas of disconnection and individualism, which lead to extraction and parasitism. These won't be solved by focusing on soil health. We need to rebuild our belonging to the community of life. Gratitude is a great place to start to reconnect with our dependence on our community. The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address Beyond Organic Wine Reading Recs You Can Support this podcast by subsc...
Jan 06, 2025•16 min•Season 6Ep. 178
My guest for this episode is Daniel Callan, the cellar man behind Slamdance Koöperatieve. Daniel pointed out to me recently that I've been too focused on winegrowing. I had to agree, and Daniel’s suggestion was that we talk about how the past of winemaking may actually be its future. Because, essentially, all wines made throughout history until sometime around the start of the 20th century, were natural wines, and were made without additives nor fossil fuel powered, high-tech wineries and wine f...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Season 5Ep. 177
This episode features a conversation with Adam Tolmach of Ojai Vineyards, and it’s located not too far from Los Angeles in distance. Adam Tolmach lost his estate vineyard a couple decades ago to a vine disease that is endemic to Southern California. This disease has become a serious problem for anywhere in North America that has mild enough winters… and that area is steadily creeping north. This vine disease is known as Pierce's Disease, it is spread by insects… specifically sharpshooters, and a...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 176
My guest for this episode grows and makes wine on one of the most popular island vacation spots in the Mediterranean Sea: Mallorca. His name is Tomeu Llabrés, and his winery is C’an Verdura. You might be surprised to find out how much of an impact Mallorca has had on the world. You might be less surprised to find that the local, indigenous varieties of grapes that Tomeu works with out-perform on several measures the Cabernet and other “trendy” grapes that were brought to Mallorca just a few deca...
Nov 25, 2024•51 min•Season 5Ep. 175
After spending the year learning some of the limits of regenerative wine, and reporting those in the Death in the Vineyard mini-series, I wanted to spend some time exploring what regenerative wine could be. This is a stand-alone episode, but it also functions as an epilogue to the Death In The Vineyard series. The most important lesson I learned this year is that it is impossible to grow or make wine “regeneratively,” or even to grow organically or biodynamically in a meaningful way, or to make ...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 5Ep. 174
This episode is a conversation I got to have with Ariana Ross and James Sligh. Ariana you may remember from an earlier episode in which I talked to her about her treatise, Wine’s Way To Art, and James is the creator of and educator at The Children’s Atlas of Wine. This conversation is about what we talk about when we talk about wine, and it includes philosophy, history, politics, social justice, art criticism, and of course agriculture. You may learn some juicy historical tidbits that upend your...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr 36 min•Season 5Ep. 173
