Uncorked (9 page)

Biodynamic was starting to sound like organic plus—everything you love about organic and then some. My customers seem to agree. “Even Walmart has organic,” one regular pointed out. “Biodynamic,” she continued, “is more natural, better.” Sure, Tissot’s products cost a little more than other dessert wines (a half bottle retails for $47.99), but wasn’t it worth it for the greenest wine on the planet? So far so good, I thought.

Tissot’s wine was also impressive. His pride, Spirale, is a sweet dessert liqueur. The production is similar to that used to make the traditional
vin passerillé
(literally, “straw wine”): hand-harvested grapes are dried on straw mats for several months, fermented for an entire year, then put in barrels to age for several more. It’s hard to argue with the results. Deep, caramelly, and unctuous; you don’t have to be a wine snob to want to finish the bottle.

When we polished off the Spirale, I asked Stephane to expound further on the intricacies of the biodynamic way. I think he could see me smirk when he said that he preferred to pick under the full moon (naked, I suspected), but he quickly diffused my suspicion when he explained that the full moon exerts strong gravity on the plants, pulling the water up in the fruit, resulting in plumper “berries” (individual grapes).

Yet it was hard to keep an open mind when he started detailing the making of chamomile sausages out of cows’ intestines and their burial at the fall equinox until they have amassed the proper “etheric and astral forces,” at which point the goop is disinterred. Likewise, I had to turn away when he described lovingly packing ripe cow dung into a female cow’s horns to make a potion that would fertilize a whole field. Yarrow plant stuffed into deer’s bladder, dandelions stuffed into bovine peritoneum, and oak bark stuffed more ominously into the skull of a “domesticated animal” rounded out this menu of entrails farci. Could this be, I wondered, just his unpolished English, like bad subtitles in an art house foreign film? Was this a joke?

His practices stem from the theories of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and the founder of biodynamic farming. Steiner is just the kind of Renaissance man I’m inclined to give
the benefit of the doubt to: he was a wide-ranging intellectual who founded the well-known Waldorf schools (now an international network of more than a thousand schools), designed seventeen buildings, and wrote more than forty volumes of novels, plays, and poetry. He promoted ethics and civil equality.

Steiner’s principles of biodynamism grew out of a series of lectures he gave in 1924 in response to recent crop failures. Biodynamics is based on his belief that there is an objective spiritual world (“anthroposophy”) behind farming; it’s a philosophy that combines astronomy, biology, and a dollop of mysticism. To farm well, according to Steiner, you not only have to reject industrialized agriculture, you have to acknowledge the Spirits that influence crops. Among them are Gnomes, who live beneath the ground and push plants upward; Undines, who foster budding; Sylphs, who wither mature plants; and Salamanders, fire spirits who imbue seeds with the heat they need to germinate.

More than recycling wastewater, encouraging biodiversity, and avoiding pesticides, the real faith behind biodynamics lies in a series of these preparations designed to spark the “memory of the soil,” thereby, Steiner believed, igniting those supernatural “terrestrial and cosmic forces.” The preparations are numbered from 500 to 508 (go figure). In addition to the recipes Tissot had mentioned, there are cow horn with cow dung (number 500), cow horn with quartz (number 501), deer bladder with yarrow (number 502), intestines with chamomile (number 503), skull with bark (number 505), and peritoneum with dandelions (number 506). There are also stinging nettle tea (number 504), a sweetly scented herb called valerian (number 507), and horse tail (number 508).

All these concoctions are either applied to the field in minute quantities (grams per acre) or added to compost piles at the appropriate dates on the astrological calendar. Just half a pound of the manure is considered enough to treat two and a half acres of land.

The science behind the catalyzing preparations remains dubious. A Washington State University study points to increased disease resistance as a result of the oak bark, but only in zucchini! Most other blind studies point to increased soil health, but not more than is found in traditional organic farms.

And it gets weirder. Are field mice a problem? Just spread ashes made from burning their skins over the vineyards, but only when Venus is in Scorpio. If weeds are an issue, collect some seeds from the target undesirable plants and incinerate them above a wooden flame that is kindled by the same weeds and then add the residue to the “clear” urine of a sterile cow. Mind you, don’t forget to first expose the urine to the full moon for six hours. The aim, according to the Demeter handbook, is to “render the weed infertile by blocking lunar influence.”

There seems to be tacit agreement among many biodynamic proponents not to let you know more until you’re deemed prepared. Mike Benzinger, founding winemaker of his family’s California vineyard, explains this reticence in an article in
San Francisco Weekly
: “One of the things you have to be careful about is over-projecting information to people before they’re ready,” he says. “Look into history. There have always been initiates, and no one is willing to tell novice secrets about the way the world works. They’d be blown away. You see the face of God, you die, right?”

Extraterrestrials, occult forces, talking mountains, nutty theories withheld until you’re “ready”: Tissot’s winemaking was starting
to sound less like science and more like Scientology. Is biodynamics, I was starting to wonder, the winemaking equivalent to Dianetics?

Oh, and that bit about the gravity of the full moon? It turns out, according to University of California–Berkeley professor Alex Filippenko, that if a two-pound bunny were to scurry beneath the vine, it would be exerting 750 to 1,000 times the pull of our small satellite.

The only thing a rep likes better than dragging a winemaker to stores is getting one to perform at a winemaker dinner. For the most part, these events are designed to pump customers with enough wine to start them buying case after case. One slick but endearing salesman was the first to propose that we host one in our enoteca. “I sold $10,000 [for the shop owner] at the last one,” he boasted. The real carrot, however, was the winemaker, the charismatic Alessandro Mori.

In the heart of Montalcino, Mori’s family owns Il Marroneto, a heralded Brunello vineyard. Dashing and talented, Alessandro is exactly the kind of person with whom anyone would want to have dinner. (Imagine George Clooney in the wine business.) Somebody (I hope it was not me) suggested: “Why don’t we make a few bistecche alla fiorentina to go with the wine and toss in some salad and a few spears of asparagus gratinée to start?” “Great,” we all thought.

The day before the dinner, Janet got the best meat we could from the Greenwich Village butcher Pino’s Prime Meats: aged, well-marbled slabs ($500). I drove to Fairway Market in Harlem and bought a wholesale quantity of baby rucola ($85) and four hundred spears of asparagus ($350). Once we got everything
back to the store, it was clear that the vintage stove in our apartment was not going to be adequate to make steak for thirty-five, much less all that asparagus. Someone (I truly forget who) suggested that we rent a grill ($160, including delivery) and put it outside in the garden. Janet would man the grill in the back while I boiled and broiled the asparagus upstairs. Several hours later, the grill arrived in pieces and without charcoal. Just as we got it fired up, guests started to arrive.

Alessandro made a series of toasts, starting with his simplest rosso. The good stuff, the verticals (selections of successive vintages) of their flagship wine, would wait until we served the steaks. Despite the late start, all was going perfectly until the thunderstorm. While, five flights up, I was madly trying to broil four hundred asparagus spears a dozen at a time, Janet decided to hang a tarp over the top of the grill pit to keep the rain off the steaks. Smoke quickly billowed through the windows and just as quickly enveloped the room. The smoke alarm went off. The gratinée was charring. Somehow we finished cooking the steaks and saved the asparagus. The wine started flowing: 2001, 1997, 1985! By the end of the evening, amid shots of Alessandro’s grappa, guests were exchanging e-mail addresses and promising to see one another again. Arm in arm and in twos and threes, the rest of the group slowly exited amid laughter. One couple lagged, making out in the soggy garden. Alessandro gave me a hug. The experience was an incredible success except that nobody—not one person—bought wine. That memorable dinner, I would discover later, had been totally illegal.

Sometimes winemakers show up without their reps. One afternoon I returned from a portfolio tasting, a seasonal event at which you are jostled about like a kid at a kegger as dozens of
your competitors gulp down a distributor’s umpteen offerings. I was exhausted and happy to be back but surprised to find a half dozen Frenchmen stiffly sitting in the enoteca sipping a bottle of pricey Côte de Beaune. It turns out that they were all Burgundy producers in for another trade event. In the corner, looking particularly serious, was Armand Rousseau, the maker of the Pinot Noir that had so wowed us on the second floor. Janet was giddy and smiling, oblivious to her purple-stained teeth.

The next morning I was even more stunned to find the same group hanging out in the same spot looking as if they had just taken an all-night train from Bangladesh. Thin-lipped Rousseau was smoking. In my best high school French, I managed to find out that Janet had taken it upon herself to entertain the guys that night. And where does a tattooed twentysomething with purple-stained teeth and lensless Sally Jessy Raphael glasses decide she’s going to take a group of France’s most esteemed winemakers?

“Zee Ustler [Hustler] Club,” murmured one of the monsieurs, a burly Philippe Starck look-alike.

Evidently, Janet had secured a VIP pass (God knows how or why or when) for the establishment where they had spent most of the evening enjoying wine, women, and song. Janet, I later discovered from Armando, had attended personally to Mr. Rousseau.

Yet the all-nighter only amped her enthusiasm. For the next several weeks, Janet attacked selling with vigor. On more than one occasion, I remember having to calm her down after she whooped over the sale of a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Becky and I were simultaneously horrified and in awe.

By the summer of 2005, we certainly were selling a lot of wine at the shop. I tried to overlook the fact that Janet rarely made
it to work in time to open at ten o’clock. She was still going to portfolio tastings only to return several hours later with those purple teeth.

One day, things came to a head when Janet took it upon herself to change the store hours. Sundays, she decided, we would close early. It did not matter what the gilded lettering on the door said or what we had listed on our website or what we had filed with the State Liquor Authority. Janet thought 5 p.m. was just fine.

Feeling like the parents of a rebellious teenager, Becky and I reminded her of our obligations as a retailer. A store, we told her, must be reliable. Instead of closing early, we suggested, let’s get you some help.

Janet replied that she needed no one else. An Italian (boy) friend with a basement wineshop in the East Village told her that he did everything himself. Why couldn’t she?

A few weeks later, Janet changed her mind. She told us that she had discovered just the right person to join the staff: Mariko, an Italian wine connoisseur who worked the floor of a famous wineshop just to be in close proximity to her passion. After meeting Mariko, Becky had her doubts. I told her not to worry. Almost immediately, we realized we (I) had screwed up once again. Respectful to the point of dour, Mariko meted out every taste of Chianti as if it were part of a tea ceremony but could not relate to customers who didn’t recognize the transcendence that is an Aldo Conterno Barolo. We were in a bind. We had just negotiated a contract with a mature adult and were loath to just turn around and let her go. But Janet was as adamant about her dismissal as she had been about her hiring: “I can’t work with
that … prig!” “Fire her!” she kept demanding. And, eventually, we did.

During the summer lull, when loyal wine buyers seem to abandon the city, we retreated to Cannizzaro for what we hoped would be a welcome dose of carefree Italian life. All we wanted to do was eat and nap. Then I got a call from Cristina, a college classmate and old friend, who asked if we would take the time to visit her childhood friend who had recently bought a vineyard over the ridge from us. We could not say no.

It didn’t look promising. As we drove in the hills above Lucca to visit the Tenuta di Valgiano, ten miles north of this Tuscan city, a heat haze looking a lot like smog hung over the walled city. Worse, the baking sun, perfect for growing the olives for which the area is famous, can overripen grapes, resulting in flabby, characterless wines. But since Laura Collobiano, Cristina’s pal and a biodynamic maker, had invited us to tour her renovated vineyard, I felt obligated at least to check it out. In addition to my memories of Tissot, the loopy Frenchman, I had good reason to be wary. Lucca is well known for many things (the Roman forum, the medieval main street, the Renaissance ramparts, the olive oil), but not for wine.

Growing up, I was familiar with the local, rather forgettable Montecarlo white (named after the picturesque hill town approximately ten miles west of the city). It was the kind of slightly grape juice-y quencher, light and easy, that’s perfect with lunch on a hot summer day. But take away the homemade gnocchi, the pergola, and the rolling vistas and it’s hardly worth exporting. (VitaminWater flavors are more memorable.)

Sixteen hairpin turns later, as we zigzagged up the mountainside
and emerged from the low-lying haze into the courtyard of a stately sixteenth-century villa, I started to reconsider. Lucca’s best villas encircle the valley of the walled city at the same altitude, about 250 meters above sea level. Most are also nestled near ravines cut by mountain streams. The result is a Goldilocks microclimate, neither too hot nor too cold, too sunny or too shady. Perhaps Laura was on to something.