Show Notes
“I want to thank you for what you said. I’ve felt excluded from wine, and I didn’t understand why. And what you said helped me to see why I felt that way, and now I feel like I can do something about it.” A young woman said this to me after my presentation on the panel titled “Beyond Vinifera,” at the Oregon Wine Symposium last week. Before I spoke, two scientists from Cornell University spoke about grape breeding and the sensory evaluation of new grapes, so I saw my role as bringing a big picture philosophical perspective. Why were we talking about hybrid grapes in the first place, and why was it important to wine, especially in Oregon? I don’t live or work in Oregon, though an Oregon Pinot Noir I drank in college was the first wine that ever sparked curiosity in me to find out more about what it was and where it came from. I’ve traveled to Oregon for wine and other reasons many times now, and I spent the week before the Symposium visiting with and talking to several producers to ask questions, listen, and try to understand their perspectives. First, it is undeniable, in my opinion, that some producers in Oregon make some of the most delicious expressions of Pinot Noir in the world. Oregon also has the highest percentage of organic, biodynamic, and regenerative vineyards in the US, as well as the most vineyards with other sustainability certifications like Salmon Safe or Deep Roots Coalition membership. Many winegrowers in Oregon care deeply about producing wine in a way that doesn’t degrade the health of the earth. They should be proud of this and of the wines they produce… and I think they are proud, in the best way. In trying to understand how to talk to Oregonians about hybrids, then, I had to understand that this wine culture they have built over the last 40+ years is like an intergenerational family. Sometime, decades ago, some strangers met and had kids and built a home on a piece of land. Since then their kids have had kids, and an entire community has grown up around their home. The younger generations don’t see the two strangers who made the unprecedented decision to put down roots together… they see their grandparents. They see their family, their tribe. The novel decisions their grandparents made and the resulting ways of making a living in this land are now traditions – cultural anchor points for their own identities. It’s extremely difficult to see outside of your own identity, and most of us seldom feel incentivized to get this outside perspective unless we experience crises that have significantly extreme impacts on us. Without crises, it’s the rare person who would question their basic assumptions and challenge their fundamental understandings about what makes them who they are. These are things we all, mostly, take for granted. And so in this analogy, hybrid grapes are like an outsider that questions things that aren’t up for questioning. In some ways I’m offering the solution to crises that, for Oregon, don’t yet exist with enough acuteness for winegrowers to question their membership in the Pinot Noir family. Family membership isn’t a belief. It’s not something you chose after careful reasoning. It just is. And that makes it all the harder to hear someone who tells you that you could be part of an entirely different family. This state of being transcends wine, of course. It’s why big change of any kind is so hard. I say all this to be as fair as I can to everyone in wine, because these conditions exist across the global wine community. The understanding that I took into my presentation at the Oregon Wine Symposium was that Oregon winegrowers make wine with the greatest amount of care that is possible for any wine on earth. They carry on a beautiful tradition, and they uphold that tradition with the highest level of skill and generations of accumulated knowledge. That doesn’t mean they have no blind spots, however. Oregon is one of the most monolithic wine monocultures on earth. Three varieties of a single
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