I have to admit, all the biodynamic farmers and gardeners I've known have been a bit crazy. But they also all grow good food. And Waldorf kids turn out pretty darn amazingly, so I guess Steiner was onto something.

I don't get this thing of people not wanting wine to taste like fruit. It's made out of fruit. But maybe I'm biased, since I make fruit wines (what they call non-grape wine).

Eat what you grow, grow what you eat

As near as I can tell the biodynamic vineyard will be the one that looks rather weedy from the road. Considering the rate at which California hills have been paved with vineyards I'm not sure I approve.

Could some of the rest of you learn to grow your own wine grapes at home? Please?

Put the Carbon Back

Check out this for a review of the scientific nonsense underlying biodynamics and it's rather sordid scientific history.  (Short version: the science supporting biodynamics is about as robust as the science debunking anthropogenic global warming and evolution.  If you support scientific approaches to the latter, be very skeptical of the former.)

As against that, my brother has a wine distribution business and his palate (far superior to mine) seems to think these BD wines have something to them.  The best conclusion the two of us have been able to reach over the course of conversations steeped in both science and wine (sometimes more of the latter) is that there is no controlled experiment - the BD crowd is often also the organic crowd and if nothing else, doing all that crazy BD stuff necessarily means that they're walking around the vineyards on a regular basis, picking weeds, plucking mites, pruning vines and doing all those other things that are good independent of ramshorn powder and the full moon.  Or to put it more prosaically, if you sprinkle rams horn into a pile of compost and lay the compost around your vines, I'll bet you have happy grapes... regardless of the moon phase and ram chakras that may have happened to coincide with all that good humus.

Nice research on this, Lou. I have no doubt that  biod wine has a lot going on.

I co-managed a biodynamic farm for a season after having apprenticed on an organic market farm the year before, and found the health and vigor of the plants at the biodynamic farm to be far superior. And my health was incredible, too, eating that food - the routine cuts and bruises you get on a farm job all healed so fast that I swore I could watch it happen.

Part of it was that the soil was absolutely phenomenal, a direct result of the careful composting of very mundane ingredients plus that kooky cow's horn additive.

I've never tasted sweeter fruits (we had some tested for sugar content in a lab, and the readings were very very high) or seen tomatoes or tender seedlings stand up to a hard frost as well. Think what you want of biodynamics, but this skeptic found that the system works beautifully - little miracles abounded.

Erik

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French actor and vineyard owner offered his take on this subject in an article from Decanter.

http://www.decanter.com/news/273087.html

As Tom Cruise teaches, looking to actors for science can be dangerous, but, I would note that as a vineyard owner, Depardieu says "Treatment costs a lot of money. I only use biodynamics in Anjou because I'm poor."

This to me underlines the more important topic contained herein, the fact that there is great value to be found in wines made from organic and biodynamic grapes.  Our stereotypes about organics equalling expensive are not always justified.