Show Notes
Last Monday Elodie Oliver and I hosted a sell-out crowd (we had to add extra seats!) of winegrowers, winemakers, wine sellers, grape breeders, wine industry leaders, wine press, academics, and wine aficionados at the UC Davis Conference Center for a conference dedicated exclusively to the benefits of hybrid grapes for the California wine industry. The conference felt like a symbol of the seismic shifts that wine is undergoing, and it felt like we took a big, important step forward. One of my biggest take-aways, based on the enthusiasm at the conference and feedback we have received since, is that California was thirsty for excellent wines made with hybrids. We had three types of wine tastings throughout the day. First, each attendee sat classroom-style in the conference room with three glasses in front of them. Three times throughout the day, keynote presenters Matt Niess (North American Press), Deirdre Heekin (La Garagista), and Adam Tolmach (The Ojai Vineyard) told the story of their wines as attendees sipped and savored. Secondly, we had a blind tasting of six wines in the lobby. Three of the wines were made with hybrid grapes and three were made with common vinifera varieties. I selected the wines based on quality and having been grown and made in the same region. I wanted as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible, rather than the “California Vinifera vs North East Hybrid” kind of comparison that often leads to hybrids being disadvantaged from the beginning by coming from a much more challenging climate. All but one of the wines came from the Finger Lakes region of New York. Tasters scanned a QR code and answered whether they thought each wine was a hybrid or vinifera, and selected their favorite. Before I presented the results, I already had several people tell me how much they appreciated the blind tasting. Even though they were able to make distinctions between the wines, they enjoyed experiencing the quality across all the wines, and they often second-guessed their decisions. When I revealed the results, it was clear how hard it was to distinguish vinifera from hybrid. Most wines split somewhere near 50-50. Often the majority guessed right, but the majority wasn’t huge… usually less than 60-40 split. And every one of the wines were some significant percentage’s favorite. I did something sneaky with the two red wines in the blind tasting. One was a really plush and tasty Marechal Foch with a touch of RS from Living Roots Winery in the Finger Lakes… and the other red wine was Apothic Red that we grabbed the night before the conference from a Safeway in Sacramento. The sneaky part about this is that while Apothic is likely made with vinifera grapes, it is also likely made with Mega Purple. And one of the points I made about Mega Purple in my welcome speech is that it is made with the Rubired grape… which is a hybrid. California, therefore, has been using hybrids to enhance vinifera wines and make them more appealing to a wider drinking demographic for years. The most popular wines in the world – think Yellowtail, Apothic, 19 Crimes, etc. – have hybrid grapes in them giving them some of the qualities that make them so popular. So I cheated a little in the blind tasting. Over 65% of people thought the Apothic was a hybrid… and they actually weren’t entirely wrong. Finally, we had an end-of-day open tasting of over 20 wines, sponsored by Joyce Jones & Dennis Johnson. Most wines were donated by the incredible wineries who made them. If the guided tastings and the blind tasting were the 1-2 combo, the open tasting at the end was the knock-out. Attendees were treated to an array of incredible hybrids from the East Coast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, West Coast, Canada, France, and Germany. The quality was mind-blowing. A 2012 Norton from Stone Hill Winery in Missouri was the best Norton I’ve ever had, and showed the true potential of this home-grown American legend that was once a global favorite. A L’Acadie Blanc from
More from Beyond Organic Wine
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