Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers

Chapter Three: The Banality of Cow Horns and Broomsticks

42 chapter three The Banality of Cow Horns and Broomsticks Q: Is it actually right for us as anthroposophists to resuscitate the production of grapes for wine? A: The question of how things ought to be is a difficult one nowadays … That’s why I said we should certainly take cow horns and use them, but that to become bull-headed in our opposition to various things could be very harmful to the cause of anthroposophy. —Rudolf Steiner In August 2002, Barbara and Bill Steele purchased an overgrown former dairy pasture and homestead in Jacksonville, Oregon. If this were a typical vineyard story, it would proceed like this: “After clearing the land and installing drip irrigation, they planted new rootstock and vines in the spring of 2003.” But this isn’t your typical vineyard story. This is a biodynamic vineyard story. And it still doesn’t unfold the way you might imagine. In 2003, the Steeles began gathering temperature data after installing weather stations throughout their 117-acre property. Studying tables of climate conditions in various French wine regions, they found that the arrondissement of Valence—the Northern Rhône Valley region that includes the Hermitage appellation—provided a good benchmark for their farm’s microclimate. In the meantime, they had been assembling a team of soil scientists, architects, and contractors. In 2004, they broke ground on infrastructure projects, moving large rocks, building roads, and bringing in power and water lines. Only in 2005—three years after purchasing the site—did the Steeles begin to plant. On the strength of four decades of weather observations made at Hermitage, they established eleven and a half acres of syrah, grenache, viognier, marsanne, and roussanne vines in channels of an ancient riverbed percolating with egg-shaped rocks, similar to the famous galets of the Northern Rhône. But they didn’t stop there. Using as a guide a property map that’s color-coded by soil type, by thickness of soil structure, and by waterholding capacity, they also determined which fruit and vegetable The Banality of Cow Horns and Broomsticks 43 crops they should sow in the estate’s three and a half most fertile acres. Eventually, their farm will encompass fifty acres of vines and fifteen more of produce, each plant carefully chosen to thrive in the small patch of soil it inhabits. There are two explanations for why the Steeles have been so painstaking in their approach to farming. The first is that they were determined from the beginning to farm their estate biodynamically. Which means that—with no access to crutches such as pesticides and fertilizers—there is no room for error. The second is that Alan York is their advisor. Intherarefiedworldofbiodynamicconsultants,Yorkisasuperstar. He had, at last count, seven clients on four continents. He travels to South Africa and South America with frequency. He advises Sting and Trudie Styler at their nearly one-thousand-acre Tuscan estate, Il Palagio. His wife looks like Goldie Hawn. York has a snow-white ponytail—the wine writer Alice Feiring refers to him as “the Silver Fox”—twinkling brown eyes, and the smile lines of someone who laughs frequently. He speaks in a pleasingly relaxed Southern drawl and curses with brio. He frequently concludes a conversation with, “That makes all the sense in the world!” York’s high-powered client list includes wine-world heavy hitters like Benziger Family Winery in California, Casa Lapostolle in Chile, andtheninety-six-thousand-acreBodegaColoméestateinArgentina. With their paltry-by-comparison 117 acres, the Steeles don’t quite fit York’s typical customer profile. But they presented him with the opportunity to start from scratch, with a couple of eager students and an unplanted pasture that hadn’t been stripped by chemicals. (Not that York shies away from converting conventionally farmed properties: “The whole thing is elastic to the nth degree,” he says. “Lookattheabusethehumanbodycantakeandstillbeachampion.”) It was a chance for the consultant-to-the-big-time-winegrowers to show that he could make his methodical style of biodynamics work on a small scale and with a limited budget. York chose his mom-and-pop operation wisely. The sole biodynamic wine estate in southern Oregon, Cowhorn Vineyard & Garden sits just across the road from the Applegate River in a valley surrounded by foothills of the Siskiyou Crest range in the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion, a biodiversity hot spot and the largest voodoo vintners 44 concentration of intact watersheds and roadless...