NYTimes: Italian Winemakers' Cult

In today’s NYTimes:
NYTimes:ItalianWinemakers

This is one of the most trite/cliche-filled wine articles on biodynamics I have ever seen.

“I can’t drink conventional wine,” Gabriele de Prato told me. “I can taste the chemicals. I can taste the temperature control. A conventional wine tastes dead.”

It probably even made SweetAlice gag when she read it. The author obviously knows little about wine and bought the biodynamics story line hook/line&sinker. Definitely not up to the NYTimes standard for wine articles, or travel articles, either.

The author, Danielle Pergament, is the Executive Editore for Allure magazine. Not one I’d ever read nor am likely to.

Don’t waste time reading this article unless you want a (not even good) laugh.
Tom

Wow I thought you were just being hyperbolic but then I read the article. Blegh.

And, perhaps most fascinating of all, there is the deference to the occult.

“We bottle when the moon is descending,” Ms. Variara told me as we walked into her cellar. Each year Colombaia makes two red wines, a cloudy white and a tiny batch of sparkling pink and white wines. “You need the right moon because she’s alive. She knows she’s in a bottle.”
. . .

“Helena’s wine has a soul,” said Brian Heck, owner of Heck Select, a small importer of Italian wines. “It makes you want to be a better person.”

Tom - to someone who lives in a condo or apartment and whose entire connection to farming is growing basil in a pot, this is great stuff.

I like the simplicity of it. If you aren’t biodynamic, your wine is full of chemicals. Just like that. They appear whether you want them to or not. But they simply disappear if you’re biodynamic. The Cambridge dictionary defines “chemicals” as something produced or used in a process involving changes to molecules or atoms, so according to that definition, pretty much everything we taste would be a chemical.

And it can all be accepted simply by saying, “There’s a lot that we just don’t know.”

And, perhaps most fascinating of all, there is the deference to the occult.

“We bottle when the moon is descending,” Ms. Variara told me as we walked into her cellar. Each year Colombaia makes two red wines, a cloudy white and a tiny batch of sparkling pink and white wines. “You need the right moon because she’s alive. She knows she’s in a bottle.”

Bottling according to the lunar cycles isn’t limited to fringe types, I learned on a recent visit to Piedmont. Many people there were bottling at the end of August because it was a new moon. Fabio Alessandria at Burlotto said that biological activity slows when there’s a new moon, so it’s a better time to seal up the wine. Crazy? I don’t know, but since the moon affects tides, it didn’t seem looney (so to speak).

I mean, alcohol is a chemical, as are pyrazines, thiols, tannin, etc, all my wines are full of chemicals!!!

When someone uses the term “chemicals” as a scare term my ability to take them seriously immediately shuts off.

FIFY.

I don’t know about you guys, but I only eat when it’s a new moon. Drink wine under full moon. Crap once in a blue moon. Which explains a lot, I know.

Huh, no wonder scheduling wine dinners with you is so hard, you can only do them on full moons. Makes it really hard on the werewolves though!

lol, I’ve actually done a full moon dinner!

And…? Did it taste chemical-free?

No, but the wines had a certain “lightness” they don’t have when the moon is in other phases, and gravity isn’t pulling up on the liquid

these people are completely crazy

Who Rath? It’s just because there hasn’t been a blue moon in a while.