Beyond Organic Wine

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comThis episode features the audio from the first panel at the Embracing Hybrid Grapes Conference that took place at UC Davis on January 26th, 2026.This episode is available for paid subscribers to the Beyond Organic Wine substack. You can subscribe and listen to the full audio on the Substack app or at beyondorganicwine.substack.com. And a huge thanks to …

Johannes Pinchbeck is a Canadian grape breeder who lives north of Edmonton, Alberta and develops grapes that can take sub-arctic cold and still be productive. The extremity of his climate introduces aspects of grape growing that seem unbelievable, and that remind me of how mind-blowingly amazing these plants are that have adapted to survive in these conditions. Enjoy this journey to explore a kind of viticulture you probably never imagined possible. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comElaine Chukan Brown is a gifted writer, speaker, and global wine educator, as well as an outspoken advocate of diversity in our wine cultures… and everywhere. Elaine has won many awards and honors including Wine Communicator of the Year. But more than that, Elaine is a badass, beautiful human being who I learn from every time we talk. Every presentation…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comThis episode features Will Bucklin of Bucklin Old Hill Ranch. Will is the caretaker of one of California’s oldest vineyards, and he discusses some of the many things we can learn from a vineyard that is over 150 years old. One of the remarkable things about a vineyard that old is that it pre-dates the Green Revolution and the industrialization of modern…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comHey, this is Beyond Organic Wine, and this episode features audio from the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference that took place on International Hybrid Grape Day, January 26, 2026, at UC Davis in California. This audio is only available for subscribers, and features Matt Niess of North American Press telling his story of how he became the first and only w…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comThis episode features Zach Geballe of the VinePair Podcast. Zach’s experience as a wine and drinks communicator for VinePair builds on years of experience as a sommelier and beverage director in restaurants. He and the VinePair team do a great job of staying informed and having informed perspectives, and sometimes strong opinions, about the wine and bev…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comOn January 26, 2026, I and Elodie Oliver produced a historic conference at UC Davis that was dedicated exclusively to the benefits of hybrid grapes for California wine. I will be releasing the audio from each of the keynotes, presentations, and panels for Beyond Organic Wine substack subscribers. This is the first of that audio. I hosted and gave this w…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comThis episode features Derrick Vogel, a grape grower in northern Michigan, and the co-owner of Folklor Wine & Cider with Izabela Babinska. Derrick introduces us this unique winegrowing region at the northern edge of where Vitis vinifera can grow thanks to the buffering influence of lake Michigan, and where hybrid grapes are just as common because of the …

I had such a great time on my first trip and was so impressed by the wines that I went back to Quebec for a second trip and discovered another fantastic producer who has been certified organic since 2021, growing a few select vinifera and several hybrids, and making some outstanding wines. They are Vignoble Sugar Hill and please do yourself a favor and try their wines. This is a second career for the owners, and their first career must have been successful, because the winemaking at Sugar Hill indulges in the one secret ingredient to making incredible wines that almost no one can afford: TIME. They have a sparking vidal blanc for sale right now that spent 12 YEARS, not months, 12 YEARS on lees before disgorging… it is the best expression of Vidal Blanc I’ve ever tasted and one of the best sparkling wines I’ve ever had. They have a St Pepin that is not only the best St. Pepin I’ve ever had, but was so good that I almost smuggled a case across the border so that I could share it at the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference… I didn’t but there’s still hope for those of you coming… the good folks at Sugar Hill maybe sending a representative with wine to the conference. Then there’s the Dolce Luna, their off dry wine that will convert you to off dry, made with a blend of hybrids…. We talk about all these and more, and we talk about them in English, Quebecois, and Spanish… because their vineyard manager and winemaker Jorge is Guatemalan, and one of members of the small team there, Ariane, acted as translator for us and gave her own input… so this is a fun and colorful conversation about cold climate viticulture and some of the most precision winemaking of some of the best examples of hybrid wines you’ll find anywhere. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

Reflections on some of the big questions of 2025, and recommendations of some of my favorite books from 2025. An end of year wish for you and your wine, and a big thank you to everyone who makes Beyond Organic Wine possible. I hope to see you at Embracing Hybrid Grapes on January 26, 2026.Embracing Hybrid Grapes in California. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

What if I told you that you could take a piece of degraded, marginal land with 3.5 pH soils and turn it into an agricultural production system with five times the productivity of neighboring conventional farms without using any fertilizer or pesticides or outside inputs besides sunlight, seeds, and plants? What if I told you that there are decades of data to support this and that it can be done anywhere, and that this system makes grapes more productive, healthier, and more delicious?Erik Schellenberg is the Commercial Horticulture and Natural Resources Educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension. He runs Black Creek Farm & Nursery in the Hudson Valley of New York, and he’s implementing a commercial scale married vine (or vite maritata) vitiforestry polyculture. If you don’t know what married vines are, it means growing vines on and with living trees as their trellising. But I prefer to think of it as the “Three Sisters” of perennial agriculture, in the sense that I don’t think the emphasis should be solely on the vine… I mean why isn’t it called a married tree? But that we should think of these living partnerships as polycultural guilds with symbiotic and stacking benefits.In this episode, Erik outlines a syntropic approach to agroforestry, and breaks down how this system works whether you’re growing cacao and coffee in Brazil, or grapes in Switzerland… and anywhere else. You likely have some appreciation for the importance of trees. But so much of our approach from a viti-forestry perspective is about how to integrate trees into our wine monocultures without hurting productivity, and sometimes we even may argue that we have to sacrifice productivity for ecological reasons. After listening to Erik present how syntropic agroforestry with vines works, you will begin to see that not only is using trees the most productive way of growing vines, but that without trees we will be handicapped in our efforts to farm with fewer inputs and to increase health and resilience. In this system, pruning functions almost exactly like rotational grazing, and really takes regenerative viticulture to the next level, where we think of perennials as cover crops… but even that doesn’t capture it exactly.This is a kind of viticulture that embodies succession, the ecological process that most of our vineyards fight against, and how humans become the regenerative partners we are meant to be in our communities. We dig into the details of vitiforestry and how to select the right tree to grow with vines. And we get into the myth of invasive species… and even some ecological solutions for the spotted lantern fly.There’s a moment in this episode in which Erik talks about how a tree responds when it gets pruned, and I got goosebumps thinking about what it would mean if we followed this example. And there’s another mind blowing moment where he discusses the ecological function of a vine and how vines may be the plant equivalent of a mastodon or elephant, and how that informs pruning and developing an early successional wineforest for their greatest productivity.I was excited about growing vines with trees before, but now I can’t imagine growing them any other way. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest for this episode is Nika Carlson of Greenpoint Cidery in Hudson, New York. There are some unique and wonderful aspects of what Nika does that make this conversation fun and enlightening in ways that I find thrilling and inspiring…. She planted her estate orchard entirely from wild seedling apple trees that she selected from her region. She ferments a landscape of flavors, including herbal and floral ingredients in her concoctions. She lives part-time, nearly off-grid at the orchard. And she offers a cider CSA by sailboat on the Hudson River. She also introduced me to a wonderful book titled “Folk Wines, Cordials, and Brandies” by anarchist and puppeteer, M. A. Jagendorf, a source of inspirations and recipes for a incorporating more diversity into our fermentation cultures, much like Nika is herself. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest for this episode is Joseph Brinkley. Joseph is the Senior Director of Regenerative Organic Farming at Bonterra. He oversees farming of Bonterra’s 800+ acres of estate vineyards in Mendocino County, all of which are farmed with organically. Bonterra is one of the largest organic B-corporation wineries in the US, and they are now the largest winery to achieve Regenerative Organic certification. Joseph discusses the importance of the social focus of the Regenerative Organic certification, which is unique in nearly all wine certification requirements. Since 2011 Joseph has helped Bonterra show the world that ecological best practices in viticulture, which includes the entire community, can be done at any scale, and they do this while producing delicious wines for under around $15 a bottle. We discuss all of this, biodynamics, hybrid grapes in California, and much more.Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comMy guests for this episode are Julia and Alex Alvarez-Perez of Usonia Wine in the Finger Lakes region of New York… and they will be sponsoring Embracing Hybrid Grapes in California with two of their wines… and I’m very much looking forward to sharing them with those of you who attend… you are in for a surprise and a treat…Very much like you are in for …

My guest for this episode is Franz Weninger of organic and biodynamic certified Weingut Weninger in Horitschon, Austria… and you, dear listener, are in for a treat. Franz is a second generation winegrower who thinks deeply about the soil, the plants, the systems and ideas that go into the ecology of wine. He offers practical and surprising insights into how to grow vinifera with less sprays, how to design vineyards for human psychological health as well as environmental health, how using highly-resistant hybrids shouldn’t be an excuse for neglecting our vines but an opportunity to care for them in different, less obligatory ways, how hybrids shouldn’t be an excuse for keeping high-density monoculture, and how a single tree can benefit a vineyard, and how if we don’t want to picnic in a vineyard… maybe we shouldn’t drink the wine from it.If this talk inspires you as much as it inspired me, you might want to check out weninger.com where Franz has published many posts that dig even deeper in to his thoughtful and revolutionary approach to winegrowing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest for this episode is George Gale. George has led a double life. On the surface, George presented a public façade as a philosopher of science, American historian, professor, and author. He was a PhD student at UC Davis, and wrote his dissertation at Oxford. He has a Wikipedia page, spent 43 years as a professor of science and philosophy at University of Missouri Kansas City, and published multiple papers and books on the philosophy of science, the big bang theory, the anthropic principle, the philosophy of modern cosmology, and the Many Worlds Theory, among many other topics. But George also had another life, a dark and mysterious life. Outside of the classrooms and lecture halls of academia, George grew hybrid grapes. Not only did he grow them… he fell in love with them, made wine with them, and even hybridized more of them. For decades George has had a secret affair with Leon Millot, Villard Blanc, and many other outcast grapes. After decades of secrecy, George tells all in this scandalous interview.Well, sort of. George wrote a book that turns out to be THE book about the phylloxera crisis. Without knowing this history, I think many of us in wine take a lot of how things are for granted. But George’s book, Dying on the Vine, gives an amazing historical perspective on how phylloxera shaped the world that we live in today in ways much larger than just how we grow wine. Phylloxera became the catalyst for Big Science in the sense of international collaborative science that is tied up in national and international politics and economics. It was a cultural trauma that caused mass global population migrations that affect our cultures still, and it was one of the main drivers of hybridization in grapes that led to some of the enduring varieties we still drink today and use for further grape breeding efforts. But there was a dark side to all of this. Anti-american prejudice festers in the subtext of this history, and informs the wine world we inhabit. George gives us an overview of this history and even more details of the fascinating elements that still influence our wine culture now. This broad and deep look into the history of hybrids gives us insights into human nature, globalization, and the future of wine. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest is Rueben Lange of Amiti in Oregon FromAmiti.com. Rueben first worked a harvest in 2016, but he has packed in something like 12 harvests since then by bouncing between Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and three continents, including some notable vintages at Idiot’s Grace in the Columbia River Gorge, Maison Maenad in the Jura, and Forlorn Hope in California. Rueben says of Amiti:“The goal of this project - beyond employing the basic tenets of good land stewardship (both in my farming and the vineyards I choose to purchase from), caring for all those who work for me, and crafting wines that are meant to celebrate those I hold dear - is to deeply explore a sustainable future for Oregon, and push the envelope of Hybrid grape varieties. I love vinifera and want to continue to celebrate it, given the remarkable wines that come from them in this state. However, we as an industry continue to push the narrative of this being Pinot country - a notion I believe to be utterly false given the challenges associated with farming it here - and fail to focus on varieties that are better suited to our climate and its ever shifting nature. For that reason, I choose to work with what are considered A-typical, or non-normative varieties for this region, specifically those that I believe are well adapted to the level of climate change I will experience in my lifetime.I choose to make hybrid wines because I believe that they are the only option for a sustainable future in this state, and present an exciting possibility to develop a true sense of place and varietal typicity, free from the constraints imposed upon us by the old world. If we truly want to develop an understanding of what American terroir looks and tastes like, it seems like a no-brainer to me to do it with a variety that has no mandates handed down from the ‘higher ups’.”On the last episode we considered how natural wine is not about minimizing intervention but about a total perspective shift to seeing life as process to celebrate. On this episode we again flip a common understanding of natural wine on its head as we discuss how natural wine is not about removing human influence but actually finding the distinctively personal touch of humans engaged in intentionally fermenting. In this spirit, Rueben makes a case for abandoning the zero-zero ethos, or at least any celebration of it or smugness related to it, referring to it as a kind of recipe winemaking for natural wine.This is a wildly pro-human discussion of wine, that will piss off the misanthropes and the worshipers of that pristine ideal known as “Nature” which is kept pure by lack of contact with the malodorous miscreants known as people. Rather, we envision wine as a flowing stream in which we, besotted beavers that we are, immerse ourselves and play and mate and build dams to overflow the banks and flood our communities with life.Rueben’s wines have been described as “disorientingly delicious” and I hope you’ll find this conversation to be the same. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

My guest for this episode is Michael Völker, one of the Zwei Natur Kinder in Germany. Michael and Melanie Drese spent many years working in other fields, traveling the world and. In 2013 they returned to begin taking over Michael’s father’s winery in Kitzingen in Franconia, Bavarian Germany. They began to make natural wines under the 2naturkinder label as a side project for the winery, and since then have decided to fully expand the project to take over all of the winery’s production. They make wine from grapes like Muller-Thurgau, Silvaner, Bacchus, Dornfelder, Regent, Domina, Souvignier gris, Muscaris, and several others. Some of those grapes are hybrids, and I list them all together this way to make a point… they’re just grape varieties. And if you don’t know which ones are hybrids in that list, does it matter that theyre a hybrid? Some juicy information and philosophical discussion here about lots of topics. I’m still thinking about several of the questions that come up.Enjoy!https://2naturkinder.de/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.comMy guest for this episode is Harold Langlais, who works as Marketing Director for and part owner with the Amoreau family at Chateau Le Puy. Chateau Le Puy’s land – the Hill of Wonders - has been chemical free since it began in the 1600’s. After WW1 they refused to begin using the novel chemistry that came out of the war and they have continued on that …

My guest for this episode is Alder Yarrow. Alder writes and does everything for the blog Vinography, and I’ve been receiving Alder’s weekly email for several years. He gives a list of links of articles he’s been reading, and I always enjoy scanning this list to see what’s going on in the wine zeitgeist.Alder’s Vinography.com blog has been published daily since 2004, and was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2013.Since 2011, Alder has also been a monthly columnist for Jancis Robinson where he also contributes wine reviews for American wines. Alder has been judging competitions for many years, and spent nearly a decade as a judge for the World of Fine Wine’s annual Global Restaurant Wine List awards, and for the James Beard Restaurant awards.His coffee-table book of essays and photographs, The Essence of Wine, was named one of the best wine books of 2014 by the New York Times and won the Chairman’s Prize at the 2015 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers Awards.In 2013 Alder was inducted into the Wine Media Guild of New York’s Wine Writers Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with only 24 other living wine writers. He is also a member of the Circle of Wine Writers.Alder was the architect of and serves as the day-to-day manager for the Old Vine Registry, the world’s first and most authoritative public database of old vine vineyards around the globe.I reached out to Alder for this conversation because of a comment he made about the recent Eric Asimov article about hybrid grapes. I gave Alder questions in advance, so he knew I wanted to challenge him on several ideas. To his credit he still agreed to the conversation, and you’re about to listen to the results. Though I think we share most of the same values and agree about a lot, we don’t agree about everything, and that’s why I wanted to talk with him. I hope that makes sense. You have to get out of your own echo chamber if you want to learn, and if you care about truth. And more and more you have to actively seek the company of those who disagree with you if you want to break free of the control of algorithms… if you want to cultivate diversity. So I’m grateful to Alder for being game and taking the time to have this conversation/debate.And if you listen until the end, I’m also including as an epilogue the verbatim exchange that we had via email after the conversation. As I re-listened to a specific part of the recorded conversation while editing, I realized I wanted to make a comment about something that I had let slide, but I wanted him to be able to respond to that comment. So stay tuned at the end if you’re interested in hearing more.Please join Beyond Organic Wine on Substack.Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com/subscribe