As beautiful as they are, conventional vineyards can be viewed as monoculture grapescape, uprooting trees and scaping soils, destroying the savannas that used to be there. Let’s turn our attention instead to grapevines that anchor a broader, balanced, regenerative landscape. We recently learned about rotational sheep grazing at
Tablas Creek Vineyards, one of a growing coterie of vineyards who play a critical role in promoting and expanding the sustainable food movement. We are fortunate to work with a formidable group of winemakers and vineyard managers at
Hewitt,Francis Ford Coppola, and
Ridge Winery, who, in addition to an investment in primum non nocere, are themselves stewards of their chosen cultivated ecosystems, which provide services (in this case a very important public service: wine) and livelihoods back to them. As they continuously seek out better methods of land — and therefore crop — stewardship, their vital role in maintaining a healthy soil-climate (and weather-, and microbe-, and plant-) feedback loop becomes obvious.
But how do we measure the balance of an ecosystem in a way that is both meaningful to management and not restrictive of craft?Soil microbiome research is young and very
au courant,and — once we really learn to decipher its manifold nuances — can only enrich our ability to make informed, on-the-ground decisions. It’s not that we are just now discovering that soil holds the key to nourishing life (see
Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History; Farmers of Forty Centuries; An Agricultural Testament;), but over the last few decades, climate has won the narrative. Why is this? Digging deeper into the historical debate of climate vs. soil as it relates to wine involves delving into the nuanced goals of vineyard managers and viticulturists — as well as the preferences of today’s consumers. Historically, viticultural science has remained firmly rooted in climate studies, with its emphasis on growing degree days as a measure of readiness for harvest.
As Jon Bonné
points out, at some point in the middle of the Twentieth century arose a belief that winemaking could be done according to a formula. He highlights Richard Graff’s ideas on how the factor of climate produces differences in grapes which are measurable in the laboratory, whereas Bonné conversely sees differences in grapes that are the result of soil as distinctly not measurable in a laboratory. There are centuries of speculation on what, exactly, makes a wine. The French coined the place-based term terroir to describe the “somewhereness” (h/t Matt Kramer) embodied in each bottle, but what makes a place a place — landscape, soil, rocks, climate, microbes, people, animals, history, really anything that comes into contact with the grapes, or the vine, or the land and air around them — is a shifting target.