I’m not a believer in the pseudo-mystical bullshit of biodynamic wine and I’m very strongly of the opinion that it’s 100% New Age marketing bafflegab to excuse jacking up the price of a mediocre-or-worse bottle of wine and to deflect criticism of faulty or inexpert winemaking. “Organic” wines are too often just adequate wines at a higher price point than their quality would otherwise justify. Michael Pinkus reports that he had to put up with a full-on biodynamic bullshit storm on a recent tasting in Italy:
While on a journalist junket […] I found myself at a beautiful modern winery where Daddy had obviously made a lot of euros and he wanted his offspring to have the best in their new endeavor … the winery was painfully modern and so were the levels of wines (earth, sky, air, etc) everything pointed to a winery that devotedly cared about the environment wherein it existed and did so with biodynamic winemaking techniques and practices – even the tour dripped of kale-eating and moccasin-wearing.
[…]
When it came time to taste the wines, we all sat at a long elaborate table, everything was set to impress. We started with a bottle of barely choke-downable sparkling wine … it was off-putting and oxidized, and that’s putting it mildly. I looked around the table but everybody seemed to be okay with what was in their glass. Next we tried both the whites and red from the various lines previously mentioned, with each wine seemingly worse than the next.
I turned to an older colleague and said, “Do you like any of these wines?” To which he went into an explanation about how the wines are not “typical” but laudable: “In competition these wines would not show well because they have something different about them – but once they are explained, to either the judges or eventually the consumer, these wines would show much better.”
My mind screamed “NO” while I nodded so as not to start a huge argument in front of the winemaker who had returned with yet another bottle … How in the world could this logic be true? In what world is this even right? Wine is good or it is bad and that decision is in the palate of the beholder (so to speak), but to make an argument that a wine needs a full dissertation before one can enjoy it is absurd to me and blatantly false. I’m not saying that some explanation doesn’t help in the understanding of a wine, but you should not need to fully explain a wine to make it palatable; and just because it’s bio-dynamic doesn’t automatically give the wine a pass or extra marks for trying to make the world a better place; bad wine is bad wine and no amount of explanation is going to make it better.
If you like fruit in your wine then something with lots of minerality or over the top acidity will not appeal to you, that’s a taste profile – but poorly made, off-putting, faulty or oxidized wines don’t get an A for effort just because somebody lets a white sit on skins longer, bury a poop-filled rams horn in the ground at low tide (or whatever your bio-dynamic practice may be), or because you have a fountain that swirls water in ornate patterns from a 2000 year old cistern. Ultimately taste is king.
