Benziger: The Winery That Came Back to Life

Benziger would embark on the jour­ney of a life­time to revive his property—and the results would bring the com­plex fla­vors of his liv­ing sys­tems into every bot­tle of wine his fam­ily win­ery would produce.

The Conventional Path

Benziger had cer­tainly not started off with the death of his land in mind. Shortly after col­lege, he had come to California from New York. It was not long before he fell in love with wine and wine­mak­ing, and in 1979 he founded his fam­ily winery.

“When we first started grow­ing, I had a lit­tle bit of expe­ri­ence mak­ing wine but didn’t know a lot about grape grow­ing,” Benziger said. “So we hired the best con­sul­tants that we could hire out of Napa Valley. Their phi­los­o­phy was that when you grow grapevines, you grow them in an envi­ron­ment where there is no com­pe­ti­tion what­so­ever. So we did what every­body else was doing at that time: we grew per­fect grapevines in an envi­ron­ment that was com­pletely ster­il­ized of the nat­ural envi­ron­ment around it. So through spray­ing and the use of chem­i­cals and other agents we sys­tem­at­i­cally pushed nature to the other side of the fence.

“Our vines looked beau­ti­ful; there wasn’t a weed you could see. But over a period of years we saw that, first of all, the soil started to die. Every time it rained, our park­ing lot would fill up with soil and silt. Also the wines that we were mak­ing, quite frankly, were kind of mediocre. Our fer­men­ta­tions were weak.”

The Transformation

Very for­tu­nately, Benziger real­ized what con­ven­tional meth­ods had done to his farm, and he knew he had to change. “We began to look at dif­fer­ent farm­ing meth­ods,” he said. “We looked at per­ma­cul­ture and organic farm­ing. But when we came across bio­dy­nam­ics, it imme­di­ately grabbed us because of this whole part of it that has to do with heal­ing the earth. That was what we really needed to do at the time. That’s when we started, in 1994, to change the prop­erty over, to farm bio­dy­nam­i­cally, and it was almost imme­di­ate that we saw the impact on wine quality.”

Biodynamics is a series of sus­tain­able farm­ing meth­ods devel­oped by sci­en­tist and philoso­pher Rudolph Steiner after the First World War. It involves every stage of growing—from the soil, to plant­ing times, to har­vest­ing and pro­cess­ing produce.

It took a while to get every­one on board. “When we first started con­vert­ing over to bio­dy­nam­ics, just within my fam­ily there was a huge amount of skep­ti­cism,” Benziger recalled. “With all farm­ing tran­si­tions, you get to a point where you’re in this ‘yuck zone’—you’re mov­ing away from arti­fi­cial chem­i­cals and mov­ing toward nat­ural sys­tems. There’s a point there where the nat­ural sys­tems aren’t mature enough, but you’re already wean­ing from the chem­i­cals. It’s kind of like jump­ing into a lake and swim­ming to the other side; you get to the mid­dle and you can’t see the shore that you left, but you can’t see the other side where you’re going.

“We were really at a stage where we were won­der­ing if we should quit or con­tinue on. What we did was we all got in an air­plane and went to Europe. For two weeks we saw prop­er­ties that had punched through to the other side, so to speak. We got a vision of what beauty and suc­cess looked like and then went back home and recom­mit­ted our­selves to it.”

Click any image to enlarge.

Natural Interaction Is Key

The dif­fer­ence today is quite remark­able. “Our ripen­ing is much more uni­form,” said Benziger. “The net result is fla­vors that are con­nected, or attrib­utes of the sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment that are reflected in fla­vors of the prod­ucts we make. The impacts on wine qual­ity that I see in gen­eral are, first, more authen­tic­ity of flavor—in other words, fla­vor and taste are asso­ci­ated with the envi­ron­ment around us—and sec­ond, wines that are more inter­est­ing in the glass and last longer in the bottle.”

Benziger has found that the inter­ac­tion of the grapevines with nature—which was pur­pose­fully absent before he con­verted his methods—is the main rea­son for the dif­fer­ence in fla­vor. “Biodynamics regen­er­ates the land,” Benziger explained. “It builds bio­log­i­cal cap­i­tal. It does that by being a closed sys­tem of agriculture—we build into the soil and into the plant our own biol­ogy, which only exists on our prop­erty. It’s that biology—the microor­gan­isms that live in the soil, the yeast that lives in the other flora and fauna liv­ing on top of the land—that really helps cre­ate a unique envi­ron­ment that is then reflected in the fla­vor of the grape and in the fla­vor of the wine.

“The final thing that is really impor­tant is to have an instru­ment that is highly tuned and highly sensitive—i.e., the grapevine. Through farm­ing and stay­ing within the rhythms of nature, you cre­ate a very high-level record­ing device. The vine itself is able to mem­o­rize what hap­pens in its envi­ron­ment for that par­tic­u­lar year, and lock that mem­ory in the lit­tle CPU or the lit­tle cen­tral pro­cess­ing unit that we call the grape.”

“Chemicals tend to cut off a vine’s inte­gra­tion from the nat­ural envi­ron­ment,” Benziger con­cluded. “It’s like dirt on the wind­shield of your car. So once you are able to move away from using arti­fi­cial inputs, the plant itself inte­grates with nature because nature is free to come in. If a plant is work­ing within the cycles of the nat­ural envi­ron­ment, it becomes sen­si­tive and those sen­si­tiv­i­ties are recorded in the grape juice itself. Of all plants, grapevines just hap­pen to be one of the most sen­si­tive of all. That’s why wine­mak­ing has such a long tradition.

“In bio­dy­nam­ics, we think of plants as the sense organs of the world; we look to ani­mals to bring move­ment and beauty to the envi­ron­ment, and as the char­ac­ter per­son­al­ity of the world; and we look at man as the orga­niz­ing force.”

Benziger has cer­tainly brought his farm back to vibrant life—which will be sus­tained for end­less years to come.

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.benziger.com.