Show Notes
For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy Harvest, Merry Samhain, and a Celebratory Equinox to you all wherever you are. This episode is about Magic, the cunning arts that have been practiced for millennia in most cultures.
Even if you have clear and strongly held thoughts about Magic, I think it’s important to consider for a moment the space between those thoughts. You don’t have to let go of healthy doubts to admit that any thoughts contained within words, like the ideas of this sentence, are quite limited… threads of logic spun across vast oceans of truth. Our net of language may catch fish, but can it catch the sea? Enlightenment, I’ve heard it said, is the space between thoughts. The practices of Magic are as old as agriculture. And I think we can find something to hold onto in that word “agriculture” or “viticulture,” even as we follow my guest for this episode into realms that are unfamiliar to some of us, myself included. The root of “culture” in viticulture or agriculture is the same root of the word “cult.” It implies both turning or tending the soil, and worshiping, honoring, and caring for it. The same proto-Indo-European root gives us the words “inhabitant” and “servant.” And so we have embedded deep in the roots of our language a reminder that what we do as farmers, as winegrowers - the material work of caring for the soil-plant communities to which we belong – is simultaneously a spiritual rite of worship, of love, for this land, and that this land is our home and our role in relation to it is not to manage it but to serve it. This understanding asks us to re-imagine, in a way that is both literally and figuratively radical, the kinds of perspectives and relationships that have come out of the reductive, materialistic approach to science. My guest for this episode, Todd Elliott, wrote a book to help us with this re-imagining. I see the approach he offers - the cunning approach, the use of Magic - as a way to help us re-imagine our relationship to the community of life as one guided by the ecological intimacy, the devoted dependence, and the deeply rooted love that is our true and ancient relationship with a world teeming with sentience. Whether you believe in Magic or not, I think Todd and his book, The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magical Practices, Mythology, and Folklore, can help us approach our interaction with our local ecology, our land, our community, with more curiosity, more care, and deeper connection. And those are all urgently needed things. And re-engaging with our land, re-immersing ourselves in the wild and mysterious communities of life that surround us, may bring a bit of magic back into our wines and our lives. And that may be what actually saves us. Enjoy! Another great book: Wine Liberated
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Here’s a quick mention of a few upcoming things that I’ll say more about in the future: First, the book release party for my book Wine Liberated will be held in Ithaca, NY at Autumn Leaves Bookstore on November 14th. Wine will be served. It’s an anarchist book store. I’ll be there, trying to inspire a new odyssey for the next century of wine exploration. Second, the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference is happening February 21-22 at UC Davis and in Berkeley at the Donkey & Goat winery. Tickets will go on sale in a month-ish, and we are looking for sponsors and hybrid wine producers who want to showcase their herbicide free wine to a thirsty west coast. Third, I’m going to MC Undercurrent 2027, which is THE organic and biodynamic wine conference in New Zealand, maybe the entire southern hemisphere. It’s June 1-3 in Queenstown, and the amazing Alica Anderson of Amvive will be the keynote speaker. Finally, please subscribe at beyondorganicwine.substack.com to support this podcast and all the work of Beyond Organic Wine. Thank you! At this point in history, Halloween 2026, talking about the very scary crisis in agriculture, especially in the US, may be like being on the Titanic and brining attention to the fact that the boilers are flooded. It’s true, and it’s a seriously serious issue… but it’s merely a symptom of much bigger issues. So I start this episode with a quote from my guest as a reminder of where our focus needs to be. I started a boycott of glyphosate and all herbicides in wine because it is an important statement that we don’t need to tolerate discussion about this anymore. The known knowns of glyphosate are utterly damning, and even though there are certainly many unknowns, they give zero reason to excuse its use. And yet this boycott doesn’t solve the larger issues. And Dr. Michelle Perro reminds us of the power and responsibility we have as agents of change, as instigators and initiators. But we need to speak up, stand up, and own our capacity to re-engage with our communities in not letting our lives be dictated by corporations who seek short-term material gain and the power to protect and increase their profit-making ability despite its devastating effects on humans and all of the lives with whom we share this world. Wine invites us to think about the future. We make decisions today in wine that we know we won’t taste, in some cases, for years. Wine asks us to think long-term. To think perennially. To think about systems that exceed our own brief lifetimes. I find it ironic that we think we can’t live and make wine without these novel chemicals that were only invented a few decades ago, that are harmful for us in multiple, intergenerational ways, when our wine cultures were developed over thousands of years without fossil fuels, let alone chemistry, I know it isn’t easy to farm ecologically, but easy is only a short term solution, and short term thinking seems to have created some long term problems. We find ourselves deeply invested in an approach to winegrowing that is only possible with chemicals. But that doesn’t make those chemicals good or wise, and examples to the contrary, the hundreds of folks I’ve interviewed for this podcast, prove that these chemicals are not the only way to grow grapes commercially. I know that there can be pretty extreme consequences to weaning off some of these things when there aren’t other easy alternatives, and it would suck to be the people who bear the burden of those consequences in our lifetime. But I think those consequences can be felt voluntarily by us now or they can be felt by our children involuntarily, because agricultural approaches that are only possible with chemicals are not sustainable in the long term. If you haven’t read my post, How To Grow Wine Without Herbicides, please do. My guest is Dr. Michelle Perro. Dr. Perro is a veteran pediatrician with over four decades of experience in acute and integrative medicine, co-founder and CEO of GMOScience, a 501(c)(3) no
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