Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers

Chapter Five: The Neo-Naturalists

75 chapter five The Neo-Naturalists “I’ve found my most enthusiastic clients to be those chefs and sommeliers who find in biodynamic wines a ready partner for what they are doing in their restaurants. The wines can be a bit eccentric, often atypical, but always distinct and true to themselves.” —Aaron Danforth, owner, Bon Vivant Merchants, Portland, OR; importer and wholesaler of natural and biodynamic wines Approximately sixty million* people log onto Facebook each day for a specific purpose. They’re not there to see pictures of their friends. They’re not there to catch up with old roommates. They’re there to farm. FarmVille is a video game that appeals to non-gamers. The twodimensional graphics could have been designed by Fisher-Price. But the look is not the point. The point is to virtually grow crops, then sell them. Then buy more land and more animals. And plant more crops. The distance between urban and agrarian society is wider today than ever before. And yet, the fascination with farming is more passionate than it ever has been. Even as genetically modified produce has become an everyday sight at the supermarket, so have organic fruits and vegetables, with the implementation of the National Organic Program in 2002. The origins and moral implications of our food have become a twenty-first-century cultural meme. The last decade brought us films like Fast Food Nation, Food, Inc., King Corn, and Super Size Me and national awareness of the raging obesity epidemic. Entertainers like Moby, Alicia Silverstone, and Natalie Portman have become vegan activists, while the leading lights of the culinary world have embraced traditional butchery and whole-animal cooking. Bookstores have stocked up on Michael Pollan’s paeans to simpler eating and Wendell Berry’s classic depictions of traditional American * As of January 2011. voodoo vintners 76 farms. “In no other time would a highly regarded young novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer view a book about the anti-animal-eating movement as a necessary extension of his oeuvre, the way a novelist in the ’60s might have felt obliged to write a book about the antiwar movement,” observes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. Whether we’re responding to the Slow Food movement’s quest to connect our eating habits with the natural rhythms of our ecoregions or the environmental movement’s goal of establishing a more sustainable farming system, we’ve gone loco for locavorism. We’re frequenting farmers markets and scanning restaurant menus for the names of our favorite farmsteads. Our CSA (community-supported agriculture) boxes brim with dirt-smudged produce; vegetables and herbs sprout up in our back yards and back-deck planters. The hottest gardening trends of the new millennium have been heirloom seeds, indigenous species, and nature-mimicking permaculture. Masanobu Fukuoka’s minimalist classic, The One-Straw Revolution, which reads strikingly like a biodynamic farming treatise, was reprinted in English in 2009,* for a new generation of ultra-farming fanatics to discover. In sipping circles, this meme has expressed itself in the “natural wine” movement, whose spokespeople—a loose group of critics, merchants, and producers who jokingly call themselves terroiristes** —espouse chemical-free farming and technology-free winemaking, despite the protests of critics such as the French wine writer Michel Bettane, who claims that “le vin bio n’existe pas!” Filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter brought this issue to the attention of the literati with his documentary, Mondovino, a crowd favorite at the 2004 Cannes film festival. In Michael Moore style, Nossiter portrays über-critic Robert Parker and über-consultant Michel Rolland as villains whose evil plan is to inhabit the globe with overpriced, overmanipulated, overflavored wines. In France, 2009 marked the first edition of the nowannual Carnet de Vigne Omnivore: Les 200 Vins Nature, a guide to the * Fukuoka’s apprentice Larry Korn, who originally assisted in translating the text from Japanese to English and toured to promote the book’s republication , is a permaculture expert based—where else?—in Oregon. ** Terroiristes can be found lurking in establishments such as the two Terroir Wine Bars, New York (www.wineisterroir.com); and Terroir Natural Wine Merchant & Bar, San Francisco (www.terroirsf.com). The Neo-Naturalists 77 two hundred top natural wine producers in the nation. To be eligible, the wines must be 100% raisin, or contain nothing but grapes. “The natural-wine movement has been sweeping France for a few years now, with stylishly dressed millennials...