Show Notes
My guest for this episode is Joseph Wiens. With his wife, Jasmine, Joseph founded and makes wine for Lost Ranch Winery in Temecula Valley California. If you aren’t from Southern California, you might not have heard of Temecula. There are many reasons for this, some we discuss, some historical, some justifiable, and some not. Whatever the reasons, Joseph and Jasmine are giving everyone a reason to take notice, to reconsider this historic wine region, and to discover the next generation of Temecula wine and the new wave of California wine. As a second-generation winemaker, Joseph was steeped in vineyard and cellar approaches that were considered to be best practices. But he didn’t see his values represented in the status quo conventional approach and began planning Lost Ranch. He and Jasmine think ecologically and guide their farming and winemaking by regenerative, organic values, while practicing very low-intervention yet non-dogmatic winemaking. The results are wines of outstanding quality that reflect their region beautifully and uniquely. Some highlights from this include how they use prickly pears in their winemaking to make a stunning wine called Les Cactus. How they incorporate a diversity of genetics in their vineyard, including Italian, Greek, and American genetics, to deal with the climatic and insect-spread disease factors of their region. How they make wine by listening and letting the land and their community determine wine style, resulting in a very delicious and bee-friendly rosé. How they make a wine from 100-year-old grapes, some of which might be hybrids misnamed as Mataro. How they used their sheep’s wool to insulate their chicken mansion. And much more. Temecula Valley is a hot climate wine region that is one of California’s oldest, with records of vineyards from the early 1800’s. It is named for one of the original peoples who made it their home before the arrival of Europeans. Their name meant “Where the sun breaks through the white mist.” Some of these original people still live there, and there are ancient grapevines growing on the nearby Pechanga reservation. Temecula Valley is 22 miles from the Pacific Ocean, around 1500 feet in elevation and at the base of mountains that rise up to 11,000 feet. As the afternoon sun hits those mountains and heats them, the valley gets cooled as ocean breeze gets pulled through the Rainbow Gap in the coastal hills. By night the air on the high mountain peaks spills down to cool the valley further. For these reasons, Temecula has a climate similar to regions several hundreds of miles further north in California, like Calistoga and Lake County. Unlike those regions it brings in over a billion dollars in wine tourism revenue each year…. So yeah, maybe it’s time we give it some much deserved attention. Lost Ranch is giving us some incredibly delicious reasons to take this region seriously. This is the new California wine. Enjoy!
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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