By Kris Sanchez, NBC KNTV
I like wine... from the good stuff to the stuff that comes in a box my roommates and I loved in college, I'm not too picky. I'd like to think I have a decent palate, but I have rarely sent a glass back. That being said, tasting biodynamic wine was a whole new experience for me.
First of all, I thought biodynamic wine sounded like something out of the future, engineered and tweaked in a lab. In a visit to the Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, I found out quite the opposite is true.
As I am expecting my second child, I took my husband Chris along for the tasting along with my 20-month old daughter Isabel. Turns out, founder Randall Grahm's own young daughter was part of the impetus for the sale of his more commercial labels which sold 400,000 cases a year to concentrate on making just 35,000 cases of biodynamic wine he says are better for the body and the environment.
Biodynamic growing is about getting back to old world ways of winemaking, letting the vines extract everything they need from the soil they're planted in and the air around them. Okay, up to this point, I think this sounds like the organic movement. Here's where it gets a little out there.
At Bonny Doon, biodynamics also means stuffing a cow's horn with manure, then burying and unearthing it according to the planetary and seasonal cycles. It also means putting the wine into barrels lined with rose quartz crystals. Um, my husband grew up in Woodstock, New York and even he was looking at Director of Sales Alex Krause like he was just a touch - just a touch - off his rocker.
Reporter Kris Sanches with Alex Krause, Director of Sales
Don't get me wrong, we try to be green. We recycle, we take our own bags to the grocery store, our kid gets organic food and we read her bedtime stories by the lovely light of compact fluorescent bulbs. We just aren't as groovy as the winemaker who named one of his wines after the French law banning the landing of UFOs.
Alex Krause, who's held all kinds of positions within Bonny Doon and learned to love wine in France, explains that every aspect of winemaking has been tweaked so much that many of the grapes end up being mere vessels for the water and chemicals forced through the vine. His description made me think of the people who look like they got a little too much plastic surgery. First the nose, then lips to fit the new nose, which then demands a change to the cheeks that no longer match the eyes and in the end a face that's hardly the one with which they were born. Seems like the same thing's happened in winemaking.
At Bonny Doon, winemaker Randall Grahm is now focused on making wines that taste like the place they come from. And, he succeeded, without coaxing the vines with artificial fertilizers and without the protection of pesticides. That's pretty unbelievable for a winemaker who lost a whole vineyard to an insect-borne disease. Sips - tiny doctor-approved sips - of the white, red and rose still in barrels taste of fruit but also of minerals. Not quite what you get when you pop the cork on most bottles. But then, these bottles don't have corks either, they're sealed with screw tops which the winemaker feels provide a more consistent seal.
I went into Bonny Doon looking forward to a new wine to buy and came out with a new appreciation for biodynamic growing and the kind of winemaker willing to give up commercial success for a wine that's closer to what it was in the old world and a vineyard he can walk freely through with his daughter without the fear of chemicals.
Kris Sanchez
NBC KNTV
http://nbc11.com/goinggreen/
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