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64=C;4<0= 50A<4A Paul Dolan, out standing in his field.
;d]Pa 3aX]ZX]V Yes, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another biodynamic wine story, but this one is moo better By Alastair Bland
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n a field by a vineyard near Ukiah, a 600pound black Dexter heifer named Rita grazes in the Mendocino sun. Unknowingly, she absorbs cosmic energy through her horns and terrestrial energy through her hooves. She is placid and calm, enjoying a life that seems as sustainable as the hills. Alas, she is doomed. For in the laws of biodynamic farming, first laid down in ink almost some 90 years ago, it is written that manure composted within the hollow horn of a female cow must be spread across the fieldsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and Rita is the one. She will be sacrificed to the vineyard within several years. Others have gone before her. Paul Dolan, the man who runs this 200-acre winemaking operation several miles southeast of Ukiah, buys cow horns each year from a local organic beef farmer. As ordained by the doctrines of biodynamic farming, he fills them with estate manure each November and buries them under a fir tree by the farmsteadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vegetable garden, on a bluff overlooking the Russian River Valley. In
the summer, he unearths them and in the fall disperses their contents on the appropriate day of the biodynamic calendar. For almost a decade now, Dolan, who co-owns the Mendocino Wine Company in Ukiah, has followed the often mystifying, sometimes witchy and generally peaceable principles of biodynamic farming. Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian thinker and naturalist who founded the Waldorf system of education, brained up the farming philosophy and its many unusual aspects in 1924 as a response to widespread farmersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; reports of diminishing yields and productivity. The buried cow horn is the most well-known of biodynamic farmingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mandates. Less well known is the practice of filling a stagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bladder with yarrow flour and composting the sealed sack on the property, or the belief that faraway lunar and planetary cycles affect how wine will taste on a given day. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was extremely skeptical in the beginning,â&#x20AC;? says Dolan, a man of quiet, measured words who first took to the notion of biodynamic farming in the 1990s. â&#x20AC;&#x153;But I stayed with it, stayed connected.â&#x20AC;?
Eventually it made sense. It took faith, he says, and, indeed, the practice is a sort of dogma. Science cannot quite prove or disprove much of what biodynamic farming is based upon, but a well-tuned individual can supposedly feel it. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I can walk through the vineyard and feel the energy centers, the areas where the chakras heat up with vibrations,â&#x20AC;? Dolan explains as we drive past an invisible nucleus of energy, halfway to the highest ridge of his property. He is hosting four journalists for three days, running us through a crash course in biodynamic farming, biodynamic wine and what it all means for the future. Naturally, we have questions for him: Does this matter to consumers, who generally donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand biodynamics? Or is it about the environment? If so, why is organic farming not enough? And why, of all things under the sun, is a cow horn required to contain the manure as it matures underground? To this latter question, Dolan says that the cow horn, in fact, may not be essential to the manure preparation process. The rules of biodynamic farming are still developing; &+ THE BOHEMIAN
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