Show Notes
“To care for what we know requires care for what we don’t, the world’s lives dark in the soil, dark in the dark…” “…Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know. We live by lives we don’t intend, lives that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast our designs, staying by passing through, surviving again and again the risky passages from ice to warmth, dark to light.” - “A Small Porch” by Wendell Berry Forbearance is the restraint or patience we exercise even when we feel the urge to act. I love the idea that this is how we care for the things we don’t understand. In the face of our own ignorance, we show we care by restraining ourselves from acting. To acknowledge that we need to patiently observe, study, and learn more is how we show love to the things that are complex, invisible, and rooted in histories that we haven’t shared. We could apply this to anything, really, to our relationships with each other, to the way we use the ocean, and in this episode we apply it to soil… or what I call the soil-plant community. This Substack is entirely reader/listener-supported. To receive new posts and support Beyond Organic Wine, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
My guest for this episode is Jordan Lonborg. Jordan has been working in vineyards in the California central coast, and all over California, for decades. He spent 9 years at Tablas Creek where he helped transition it to becoming the first Regenerative Organic certified winery in the world. He’s now a regenerative consultant managing biodynamic, organic, and regenerative viticulture and transitions at Coastal Vineyard Care, one of California’s largest vineyard management companies. I got to see Jordan present on the importance of soil testing at the recent Mindset symposium produced by Anna Brittain. Soil testing is one of the important ways that we show forebearance and care for what we don’t know, and we talk about many aspects of the new best practices in soil testing to better understand the biology of the soil, rather than just the chemistry. Jordan explains why, to better understand nutrient cycling we can’t just get a standard soil test. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in this in-depth conversation. We talk about rhizophagy, and why this might be the most important discovery in Jordan’s lifetime. We talk about some of the less well known but amazingly important roles of mycorhizal fungi. We talk about the underground brain, plants as farmers, and the incredible feedback loop and trade between plants and soil microbiology. And we talk about how all of this is impacted by fertilizers and fungicides, and why hybrid grapes need to be part of every regenerative viticulture discussion. And Jordan talks at length and with passion about the belief that most people have that you transitioning to regenerative organic viticulture will necessarily cause you to lose yield for a while. Jordan has found that he can actually flip this and enable transitioning to result in immediate yield increases. And he discusses foliar feeding and how important he is finding foliar nutrition sprays are to vine health and, surprisingly, soil health. This is the cutting edge of soil science in relation to viticulture, and Jordan’s enthusiasm is infectious. Get ready to take some notes and have a blast learning about the amazing community of life we depend on for our wine and know so little about. Enjoy! Resources mentioned in this episode: Jordan’s presentation from the Mindset Symposium has a lot of great information, as well as a way to contact Jordan: Baselining and Understanding Soil Health Caine Thompson and the regenerative organic vs conventional side by side trial at Robert Hall winery in Paso Robles gets mentioned, and I recorded a really fantastic episode with Caine last year: Also, we talk about Pierce’s Disease, and this is a really urgent issue in California right now… not because Pierce’s Disease is new to California, but because the big moneyed inte
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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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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.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com