Excerpts from an essay by Nicolas Joly – Coulée de Serrant

"More and more winelovers around the world are fascinated by the scale of complexity, vitality and purity they find in biodynamic wines. This type of agriculture differs from biological agriculture insofar as it adds very small amounts of preparations per hectares, quantities varying from one to hundred grams that have usually been dynamised in water. How can such small quantities have any real effect on the quality of wine?

Biodynamic agriculture looks at the world as a world of energetic flows, existing independently of their physical presence. Living beings are a sum of frequencies and rhythms. It’s a kind of vibratory world. The rules of this world are no longer, so to speak, terrestrial laws, in the sense that they are not submitted to the force of gravity. Modern science has discovered a lot of such laws and we are using these laws on a daily basis: think of magnetic resonance, satellites, microwaves or simply your cell phone.

No one is surprised to hear the voice of someone thousands of miles away on their portable. With the help of this portable the call did not even use a thousandth of gram of waves, for waves are not measured by weight. In biodynamic agriculture a few grams of preparations act as relays or catalysers of precise processes indispensable to the life of plant. How many grams of quartz make your watch work for ever a year?

So why shouldn’t a biodynamic preparation based on quartz accelerate photosynthesis, which generates the sugars, the colours, the aromas? Why shouldn’t the preparations destined for the earth accelerate mycorhiza, that is so to say, the linking of roots with earth?

By using this world of energies, biodynamics increases the possibility for the vines to receive the characteristics of the environment, thus linking them to their appellation. Wines without the reflection of their surrounding can be imitated in countries where labour is cheaper.

Biodynamic strengthens the ability of plants to fight diseases for themselves and opens the possibility to clean up the harmful effects of herbicides in a few years.

Although attempts are made to ridicule biodynamic agriculture in order to preserve lucrative economic markets, a growing number of vintners is convinced of this way."

Statements of our members about Biodynamic winegrowing:

Johannes Hirsch: "The health and balance in my vineyards and my whole surrounding got even more important for me when I became father for the first time."

Karl Fritsch: "I am more pleased and delighted when I am in my vineyards as I was before. I have a feeling of doing something good for nature and vines. Everything seems to have a happy touch."

As Bernhard Ott puts it: "I don’t want to make a lot of fuss about it. The wines should speak for themselves and everything should be quite natural."

Let your own palate decide!