Viticulture

While viticulture describes the cultivation of grapevines, biodynamic viticulture narrows in on cultivating grapevines for the production of wine under the authority of the cosmos, to the life giving forces of the universe. It barters with the land to yield a high quality wine, revealing not only the character of the soil in which it grew, but also a total embodiment of the energies that filtered through from roots to must. Those energies are archetypes for “anything under the sun”. Forces of gravity, of magnets, of light, and of heat; follies of weather–droughts, humidity, floods; and faculty of objects or ideas of higher sophistication such as the use of the cow horn as an for growing bacteria–the quintessential elementals that influence and motivate every living organism. Biodynamic viticulture does not like weak or passive adherence, and those certified by the Demeter Association rarely cite market incentives as reasons for adherence. Rather, the strict practice and belief of Biodynamics files under one general motive: Return earth to the Earth.

By its own right, Biodynamics claims that certain forces of the universe have been numbed so that the cavity of a growing population could be filled quickly as well as to reconcile the pain of hunger and war that might ravage such a future if those desperate people maintain such a path. While wine could not sustain a hungry civilization, it heeds to the same soil as wheat or corn and shares a common language with the science of the intangible elements of the human experience. Aromas, tastes, and harmonies are among several nouns --be them reminiscent of places or things-- cited in a glass of wine. Laws of light, gravity, and time lollygag in the relatively basic theories and conversations that people have with the universe. True, the fact that we can bottle wine to a certain level of stability and preservation as well as maintain light by a bulb and switch indicates a fairly clear example of an understanding worldly and intentional in temperament. To say a bottle of wine is your finished product however, is as silly as saying that the infant is the finished product of a man and woman: Both wine and an infant are living organisms, interacting and engaging with their self and the environment, forever developing until death do them part. Wine indeed sours into vinegar and children wrinkle into raisins. While the processes between wine and vinegar and child and elder are no enigma, the capacities that give rise to life at all are rather mystical.