Tasting life and energy with the body: the biodynamic resonance of wine

ABSTRACT

Based on two long term research with natural and biodynamic winegrowers in France, this text returns to the principles of biodynamic agriculture in its desire to potentiate the living character of the vine and the soil; living supposed to translate into energy or vibrations in the glass. Why is wine attracted to biodynamics? The hypothesis put forward, which would partly explain the apparently happy marriage between wine and biodynamics, is that the latter helps to give more life and energy to wine and that this energy would be perceived through new way of tasting. Our aim here is not so much to study what this extra life or energy might be as a scientific object as these notions are in any case impossible to stabilize from a scientific point of view. The reason for our use of these unstable categories is that they emerge repeatedly on the subject of biodynamic wines from the discourses of winemakers, enologists, sommeliers and tasters, whether beginners or advanced. These categories of energy or vibrations, still in gestation, refer to forms of wine tasting that go beyond organoleptic criteria alone to extend to the receptivity of the whole body involved in the act of drinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Biodynamics
• natural wines
• vibrations
• energy
• body
• Loire
• tasting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Steiner himself says nothing specific about the question of wine.

2. Demeter, the main biodynamic certification organization, had certified 468 winegrowers in France by 2021, and had certified more than 1000 vineyards worldwide. To these figures, we should add the 150 or so members of the Biodyvin Union. While a few estates are certified by Demeter and are also Biodyvin members, many winegrowers practice biodynamics more or less without seeking to advertise the fact. A total of 600 winegrowers practicing biodynamics in France today seems to be a conservative but realistic estimate.

3. Even if biodynamics can be developed on large scale.

4. See the International Organisation of Vine and Wine website: https://www.oiv.int/public/medias/7943/oiv-patronage-concours-norme-ed-2021.pd

5. Doing without chemical inputs increases risks compared to the conventional method, which can (partly) guarantee the harvest, or correct it using synthetic products, including pesticides.

6. Of which the 500 and 501 preparations are the most emblematic and widely used. The 500 is a preparation made from cow dung inserted into cow horns that have been left to overwinter, dug up and then dynamized and sprayed in infinitesimal quantities on the vines. This is supposed to nourish and restore the vigor of the soil. The 501 preparation contains quartz silica and is based on the same process, except that it is put out to dry. This is designed to address the foliage of the vine.

7. Quoted from interviews conducted between 2012 and 2017 with winemakers in the Anjou and Minervois regions.

8. Among the studies describing the pitfalls of attempting to reify the notion of the terroir (Van Leeuwen and Seguin 2006), we note those of M.-F. Garcia-Parpet for the way they highlight the changes in the socially established hierarchies between terroirs and appellations (Garcia-Parpet 2001, 2014), and Geneviève Teil’s proposal for a specific ontology of the terroir. Teil analyses the terroir as an object-product “in the process of being made,” not as a finished and defined object-thing. However, she specifies: “The impossibility of predetermining a terroir does not make it a pure invention, but a relatively unpredictable production of which the winegrower is not the only master.” (Teil 2011, 18).

9. This was to better understand fermentation, but also to break away from synthetic chemistry, which he did from 1951.

10. Jacques Néauport, Jules Chauvet ou le talent du vin, published by Jean-Paul Rocher, Paris, 1997, p.57.

11. Renaissance des Appellations is a “group” as it calls itself and organises a well-known wines fair in Angers every year. https://renaissance-des-appellations.com/fr/

12. Interview, 7 April 2020. Pascaline Lepeltier has been working as a sommelière in New York for over ten years. She represented France at the World’s Best Sommelier competition in 2023.

13. Added SO2 in the wine. The Demeter biodynamic label allows added sulfur up to 90 mg/l depending on the color of the wine. Up to 150 mg/l can be added to organic wines, and 200 mg/l to conventional wines. The recent charter published by the nature’L or “vin méthode nature” winemakers’ union, the S.A.I.N.S. wine association (no inputs or sulfite) and the older AVN (association des vins naturels) do not allow any added sulfur. There is a tolerance of up to 30 mg/l of total sulfur (generated by the wine and added) within the union, provided this is mentioned on a specific logo.

14. Polyvynilpolypyrrolidone is a synthetic glue.

15. Also expressed by Jules Chauvet (1907–1989), a winegrower who became a chemistry and microbiology researcher in later life. Voir Jules Chauvet, Le vin en question. Wine in question. Entretien avec Hans Ulrich Kesselring, Jean-Paul Rocher éditeur, (1998).

16. Although a study of ten conventional and biodynamic wines did find differences in favor of biodynamic wines from an organoleptic point of view (Reilly 2004). Study not published in a peer-reviewed journal. Another study of organic and biodynamic wines found less clear-cut differences across vintages (Ross et al. 2009) Yet another study found that biodynamically produced grapes had higher levels of sugars, phenols and anthocyanins (the latter contributing to aroma, taste and mouthfeel), (Reganold and Reeves 2005).

17. Interview, 28 April 2020.

18. © Changins – ChG et PaD. See the website : https://www.vin-nature.ch/copie-de-deutsch

19. The ability to bring multiple senses into convergence. See Victor Segalen, Les Synesthésies et l’école symbolique, Fata Morgana, 1981. Or, on a more poetic note, Baudelaire’s well-known poem Correspondances.

20. “En même temps que des odeurs, d’autres éléments du monde sont mobilisés, pensés et décrits” (author’s traduction).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [Project IDAE].

Notes on contributors

Christelle Pineau

Christelle Pineau is a specialist in the anthropology of “natural” wines (PhD). She’s now working on extending this reflection to the anthropology of food, and the senses, the ethnobotany and more broadly, the living. She is interested in the different categories of knowledge, and their powers, or how sensory relationships to the world reshape it. The very concrete question of the ways of how to cultivate and taste the earth is part of the cosmopolitical vision of the world.

Jean Foyer

Jean Foyer is a socio-anthropologist at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur les Amériques. After a PhD on the controversies surrounding biotechnologies in Mexico, he coordinated various projects on global environmental governance and continued his research in Latin America, particularly in Mexico and Panama. Since 2015, he has been conducting research in France on the development of biodynamic viticulture and the relationships with the living and the environment that it reveals.