“Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm done with ye!”
It might not be *quite* as strange as Huckleberry Finn’s cure for warts, but biodynamic agriculture is weird.
Biodynamic agriculture is like organic farming on steroids. (Yes, I fully appreciate the irony of that statement.) It treats a whole farm as a single organism, rejecting the use of outside chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, etc., which is pretty cool. Call me crazy, but I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and… my wine made in vineyards that don’t use glyphosate.
Jean-François Ganevat doesn’t use glyphosate. In fact, the guy is so old school that he doesn’t even use a computer. He does all of his business by phone—or by fax. And there’s a lot of business to take care of when you produce more than 40 different wines, from vineyards that total just 21 acres in area.
All of this means that the grapes for the wine we’re going to talk about today are grown in an area that’s about the size of a large suburban backyard.
That’s a little weird—especially for those used to drinking wines from California or Australia, or wherever that are made at industrial scale, and bottles in the tens of thousands of cases. Where it gets truly bizarre is when you dive into the details of biodynamics, and find out that it’s not just about growing grapes organically. True biodynamics involves timing your planting to both the phases of the moon, and the astrological constellations the moon passes through at different times of the year.
And instead of sprinkling Miracle-Gro, farmers treat their fields by burying cow horns filled with manure or powdered quartz, and using the results months later above the surface. Biodynamic vignerons bury chamomile blossoms stuffed into cow intestines in the vineyards, and dig them up six months later. They bury Yarrow blossoms stuffed into the bladders of Red Deer—and dig them up. They also bury bureaucrats from the French wine bureaucracy in shallow graves in the forest when nobody is looking. (Ok. I was joking about that last part. Probably.)
How does all of this work? Who knows? But it does. Some of the world’s best wines are produced biodynamically. Some of the world’s top wines are made biodynamically, from Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, to Domaine Huet in Vouvray, and Beaucastel in the Rhone.
Maybe it’s all un-scientific mumbo jumbo. Maybe eschewing chemicals requires the winemaker to spend more time in the vineyards than is necessary with conventional agriculture. Maybe… there are forces at work we just don’t understand.
All I know is that Jean-François Ganevat is a wizard.
This particular wine is sparkling—technically a Cremant du Jura. Made from 100% chardonnay, in the traditional Champagne method, this wine will give you a glimpse into what the best sparkling wines in the world are capable of.
When you first taste it, this wine is all about minerality. It’s chalk and granite all the way down. Then the yeast kicks in, and you get an incredible taste of buttered brioche. Once it’s been open for a while, the honeydew and cantaloupe flavors come to the fore. For slightly less than the price of a pretty-good, big production champagne (like the one mentioned in yesterday’s blog post) you can get an experience that’s equal parts intellectual and sybaritic.
What’s more, this is the perfect gateway drug. It gives you a taste into what some of the world’s best sparklers taste like. While it doesn’t have the bright flavor explosion of wines from David Léclapart, or the depth and brute strength of the wines being made by Anselme Selosse, it’s less than half the price of the former, and a quarter of the latter.
This wine is so aromatic, if you put it in a traditional flute, you won't get the full experience. Use a white wine glass.
If you can find it, buy it. And drink it.
The wine: Jean-François Ganevat
The vintage: 2010
The score: 9.3/10
The price: $48
The source: Discovery Wines in New York City
How weird is it? On the palate, it’s a 4/10. With the story, it’s a 7/10.