Laura Sabourin is not your average grape grower. She studies lunar patterns. She senses the vibes of her vines. She wants her vineyard to "strike a balance between gravity and levity."
When she bought a Niagara region farm 11 years ago to start a biodynamic vineyard, neighbouring growers began sizing up her farm equipment, anticipating an imminent bankruptcy auction.
"I was the biggest joke around the place where the local farmer boys go out for breakfast," said Ms. Sabourin from her farmhouse near St. Catharines, Ont.
Recently, however, her vineyard, Feast of Fields, has become the envy of the region.
"Last year, I had so many grapes to take out of here, the transport truck couldn't get out of my driveway," she said. "I can honestly say they're not laughing any more."
Ms. Sabourin is part of a small but growing segment of grape growers and winemakers who have converted to a mysterious set of farming practices called biodynamics. Long dismissed as a sort of agricultural voodoo for its use of animal bladders, bones and lunar cycles, biodynamics - a philosophy first laid out more than 80 years ago by Austrian Rudolf Steiner - is slowly winning disciples the world over.
With some of Europe's most acclaimed wineries recently adopting biodynamic practices, winemakers and wine drinkers on this side of the Atlantic are looking beyond the mysticism and embracing a style of grape-growing they say best captures the unique flavour of the farm in each individual grape. Twenty-two U.S. growers have already converted to biodynamics. In Canada, Ms. Sabourin remains the sole certified grape grower and sells most of her grapes south of the border, but two highly anticipated new wines are set to change everything.
"When I hear the word biodynamic, my ears perk up," said Stephen Beckta, sommelier and owner of Beckta, a restaurant and wine bar in Ottawa. "I think, 'Wow, these guys must be serious about their winemaking.' When a bottle says organic, it's not necessarily a better wine. But when it says biodynamic, fundamentally it will be a better wine. For me, the cow's bladder and all that stuff is not something that will make much of a difference, but the lunar cycles are huge. They can influence when the vine is pulling up minerals and when it is pulling up water."
Winemakers could be excused for balking at Mr. Steiner's musings about agriculture for so long. The father of biodynamics was a philosopher, not a vintner - and one who theorized seriously about out-of-body experiences at that.
In 1924, a year before his death, Mr. Steiner gave a series of lectures about the spiritual shortcomings of modern chemical farming. He advocated thinking of the farm as a single self-sufficient organism in which animals and plants nourish each other and so have no need for imported fertilizers and pesticides.
Mr. Steiner created a number of very specific concoctions he said were vital to maintaining farm health. These included placing manure in cow horns, yarrow blossoms in deer bladders, chamomile blossoms in cow intestines and oak bark in animal skulls.
And all planting and harvesting was to be done according to lunar cycles.
"It's all very philosophical," said Bill Redelmeier, owner of Southbrook Winery based in Richmond Hill, Ont. "I don't know how it works, but it does."
Last year, Mr. Redelmeier hired Ann Sperling, a biodynamic devotee, as Southbrook's head winemaker. The winery's first biodynamic wines will go on sale in two years.
Mr. Redelmeier adopted costly and labour-intensive biodynamic practices 18 months ago, after a visit to Benziger Family Winery in California. Benziger's biodynamic vintages have garnered awards in recent U.S. tasting competitions. Mr. Redelmeier saw how Mike Benziger cultivated just 42 acres of an 85-acre estate, leaving the remainder as lush habitat for insects, plants and wildlife deemed beneficial to the vines.
"They seemed more connected to the earth there," Mr. Redelmeier said. "They deal with problems as they arise rather than spraying the heck out of a problem. I instantly became an absolutely willing convert."
A full conversion is still a few years off. Vineyards must comply with all biodynamic standards for three to four years before Demeter, the international authority on all things biodynamic, will even consider certifying them.
Mr. Redelmeier wants to follow the success of several celebrated French biodynamic wineries: Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, whose bottles can run about $70, and Maison M. Chapoutier, five of whose wines have earned perfect 100-point scores from the influential wine critic Robert Parker.
So seductive are those price points and accolades that Vincor, Canada's biggest wine producer, has started dabbling in biodynamic techniques. Four years ago, Vincor partnered with the Burgundy house Boisset in Le Clos Jordanne, a Niagara winery that uses many biodynamic practices under the guidance of Thomas Bachelder.
While Mr. Bachelder doesn't buy into the use of cow horns and animal skulls on his roughly 125 acres, he does uphold many biodynamic practices. "If the moon can affect all the tides in the world and all the animals and possibly women's menstrual cycles, why not vines?" he said. "We're cautiously inching towards adopting more biodynamic techniques all the time."
For Mr. Bachelder, biodynamic methods are key to bringing out each vineyard's unique combination of soil type, sun exposure and microclimate in its grapes. It's all the more risky for Mr. Bachelder because he's harvesting pinot noir, a legendarily finicky grape.
But it's paying off. After four years of buzz, Le Clos Jordanne released its first wine in March. By 9:30 a.m. on opening day, it was sold out across Ontario.
Even with all the accolades and new high-stakes entries into the biodynamic market, skeptics remain.
"I think it becomes an ethical and almost religious quest beyond practical agriculture," said Andy Walker, viticulture chairman at the University of California Davis. "A bunch of mystical herbs and minerals and chanting correctly for the right phase of the moon - it's all a bit farfetched. It's goofy."
Mr. Walker allowed that biodynamic wines tend to taste better than conventional wines, a trait he attributed to the fervent devotion biodynamic growers seem to have for their crops rather than to herbal cocktails or cow horns.
Ms. Sabourin doesn't waste much time trying to convert the doubters. "If someone asks me about biodynamics," she said, "and I can tell they're a cynic, I just give them a big smile and say 'It's witchcraft.' That's what they're going to believe anyway."
*****
Steiner's theories
When he first posited his theories of spiritual agriculture in 1924, Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner admitted, "I know well enough that these may appear rather crazy notions, but you must remember that many things which have at first seemed to be crazy have been accepted a few years later." More than 80 years later, acceptance of the following ideas remains somewhat, ahem, elusive:
The world is inside out
"Above the surface of the Earth is really what may be regarded as the bowels ... On the farm we are walking about inside the belly of the farm, and the plants grow upwards within this belly. Thus we are dealing with an individuality which is standing on its head."
There is beauty in dung
"One must learn - and this may not always be pleasant - to enter into a personal relationship with everything that comes within the sphere of Agriculture, and particularly with the work connected with manure and manuring."
Wildlife is cosmic
"In the bladder of the deer, however tenuous its substantiality may be, there are forces which are connected ... with cosmic forces; the deer's bladder is almost a reflected image of the cosmos."
No one needs a mousetrap
"Catch a fairly young field mouse and skin it. The skin must be secured at the time when Venus stands in the sign of Scorpio, then burned and the ash and any residue carefully collected (several skins must be burnt to procure a sufficient quantity of ash). Now, because the skins have been burnt when Venus stood in Scorpio, that which is contained in these ashes is the negative power to the power of reproduction in the field mouse."
Compiled from a 1938 translation
of a Steiner lecture available
at www.garudabd.org/Agriccourse/contents.html
*****
Patrick White