Does Hanging Deer Bladders Stuffed with Yarrow Flowers in your Vineyard Improve the Taste of your Wine?

Last class, Professor Rapp made short reference to the winemaking "witchcraft" of biodynamic agriculture. While she teased some of the bizarre practices—which include stuffing severed cow horns with "the manure of lactating bovines"—involved in biodynamic winemaking, I believe it may have undersold what is surely one of the most baffling widely-practiced agricultural techniques in the modern world.

After visiting yet another vineyard that espoused biodynamic principles on our Argentina/Chile GST focused on the New World wine industry, I became interested in learning more about the practice, which had previously been described to me as "beyond organic" or "the Cadillac of organic farming".

Suffice it to say, a few short minutes of Googling will surface enough mysticism to bring even the most pious astrologer to his knees.

In addition to the above, so-called biodynamic "preparations" include: "stuffing chamomile blossoms in to the small intestines of cattle then burying in humus-rich soil in the fall and digging up in the spring", "placing chopped oak bark inside the skull of a domesticated animal surrounded by peat and burying in the ground where rain water flows", and packing "deer bladders with yarrow flowers and then hang[ing] them amid the vines". Each preparation is to be properly "activated" by a stirring process known as "dynamization" and applied to the land with due care to the position and influence of celestial bodies.

SF Weekly writer Joe Eskenazi recalls his visit to a biodynamic vineyarrd thusly, "Luke and Sue sit beneath a tree, scooping up handfuls of ripe manure and packing it tightly into cows' horns. Nearby sit four "sausages" of chamomile wrapped in cow intestines. Both will be buried around the fall equinox and unearthed on the spring equinox after having amassed "etheric and astral forces" – for which the horn serves as an amplifier." He notes that both Luke and Sue "believe the well-being of this winery is controlled by cosmic, supernatural powers that descend from the distant heavens and percolate up from the depths of the Earth."

Biodynamic agriculture was divined by an Austrian soothsayer named Rudolf Steiner, who Eskenazi reports was "a self-professed clairvoyant and occult philosopher" that "conceived of Biodynamics during his telepathic visits to the realm of spirits he claimed existed 'behind' our material world."

Indeed, science has not been kind to Steiner's preparations.

Linda Chalker-Scott, a professor at Washington State University, notes that many today associate biodynamic agriculture with organic practices. That is, biodynamic is simply organic farming with a bit of sophistry added on top. However, Steiner himself had nothing to do with the inclusion of standard organic practices in biodynamic agriculture.

This has served to muddy the scientific waters, as some of the studies that proponents of biodynamic practices have pointed to merely compare conventional to biodynamic farming, without controlling for the scientifically verified effects of organic farming. However, Chalker-Scott concludes, "when researchers have compared biodynamic, conventional, and organic farms... by and large there are no differences between the biodynamic and the organic farms".

And, although Professor Rapp mentioned a study (perhaps this one?) showing that biodynamic wines performed better in a blind taste test, one wonders whether the control group included non-biodynamic organic vineyards. Even then, perhaps we should wonder whether this is a matter of causation or correlation. That is, does jumping through all of the biodynamic hoops simply lead one to take better care of your vineyard, even if its scientific benefits are dubious?

For those with more interest, Katherine Cole has a book called "Voodoo Vitners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers".

Sources:
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/08/23/379392/index.htm
https://drinkwhatyoulike.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/cow-horns-manure-mysticism-planetary-alignment-and-biodynamic-viticulture-in-virginia-and-other-eastern-wine-regions/
https://civileats.com/2011/05/03/voodoo-vintners-oregons-astonishing-biodynamic-winegrowers/
https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/voodoo-on-the-vine/Content?oid=2170162&storyPage=2