WINE CELLAR
GREEN IS GOOD
Organics and biodynamics are having a profound and positive effect on both the winemaking business and our planet. WORDS TONY HARPER
IN THE MIDST of our failing planet, the organic producers, the biodynamic practitioners, the ‘natural’ farmers and winemakers are looking less like a cult of hippies and more like visionaries. Meanwhile Australia’s coal mines alone are allegedly producing more carbon emission than a small European country. Ouch. But here’s a contrast: in the Margaret River, a few hours south of Perth, Vanya Cullen – the poster-girl for biodynamics – has a vineyard and winery that sequesters more carbon than it produces. It is doing its best to clean up the mess the rest of us are making. For the sake of brevity and ease, I’ll call Organics and Biodynamics, and the muddle that can happen between the two, ‘sensitive farming’. Because that is what it is. It is farming that uses nature to grow life within the soil and achieve balance both within the soil and externally, amongst the leaves and shoots of the vines, between the rows and beyond … into the broader land. Composts, beneficial insects, plants that encourage those insects and help build soil structure, and a general eschewing of chemicals are common between the two practices. Biodynamics takes things further than organics, paying heed to the influence of the moon and
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planets on earthly life (and before your eyes glaze over, consider tidal pull, and how the phases of the moon effects the behaviour of fish: every fisherman worth his salt follows the dance of the moon), and employs some almost ritualistic stuff that can’t easily be explained, but that achieve remarkable results. In that way it’s kind of like religion, or yoga, or a microwave: we don’t know how it works … but it does. Prue Henschke (Henschke Wines), the viticultural side of the incredible partnership between herself and husband Stephen, puts it in a nutshell. “Biodynamics is about soil health; building the microbial life of the soil with a range of applications based on the most balanced of all the animal manures – cow manure,” she explains. “It sounds like the aims of regenerative agriculture. It is about adding and building the soil and the plant’s resilience, whereas organics is more about excluding the 'heavy hitting’ chemicals that can throw the natural balance of plant and animal growth out of whack. “Certainly, organic management is much easier where pest and disease threats are low, e.g., in a drier climate, and biodynamics may be more difficult. “That’s where the cosmic influence comes into play – some points in the month are wetter than
others during Spring and it tends to align with the biodynamic Moon opposite Saturn.” It is sympathetic farming that assists nature and, in turn, is assisted. Conventional farming for at least the last century has done more than ignored nature; it has run against it. Herbicides to remove weeds and grasses so the vines have no competition; pesticides to kill the pesky insects (and at the same time killing ladybirds that eat mildews, worms that enrich the soil, micro-life we can’t even see, but that are a vital part of the food chain), then adding fertilisers because the soils are dead (thanks to the herbicides and insecticides); in fact they are not soils any more, they are dirt. And so the cycle continues. It’s more than a decade since I committed myself to drinking from sensitive producers – not solely, but predominately – because their wines simply taste better, and they communicate, far better, the results of the season and the intricacies of the land from which they were sprung. In short … they taste better, more fully, of their place and their grapes. “We now have healthier land hence healthier vines and hence grapes ... better quality wines,” says Vanya Cullen.
