Show Notes
My guest for this episode is Terah Bajjalieh. Terah is a California winemaker, sommelier, and founder of Terah Wine Co., crafting intentional wines that champion underrepresented Mediterranean varietals and organic farming practices. With 14 harvests across five countries and a Master’s degree in Enology from France, she brings a global perspective to California winemaking. Her wines—described by the New York Times as “superb” and recognized in Wine Enthusiast’s Future 40 Tastemakers 2024—are vibrant, textured, and built for connection. As a female, LGBTQ+, Arab American winemaker, Terah is committed to elevating lesser-known voices and varietals in the wine industry. That’s Terah’s official bio, and there are so many important nuggets of connectedness in it… But I want to add that I’ve had the pleasure of working with Terah and some of her best qualities aren’t things that usually go into a wine bio. Terah supports and shows kindness to everyone she knows. She looks for ways to help and helps generously when she can. I’ve never heard her speak a disparaging word about anyone. She bought a ticket and attended the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference even though she doesn’t work with hybrid grapes and doesn’t intend to, but simply because she knew I wanted her to be there. She’s the kind of person who, like her fellow Bay Area natives Alyssa Liu, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and many others makes me proud to be a Californian, and makes me hopeful just knowing she’s out there doing her thing. Her thing, in this case, just happens to be beautiful wine. And she’s one of the best arguments that I can think of for supporting small producers.
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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