Cory Cartwright, whom I have never met nor had any communication with, is doing a pretty fascinating thing. He’s celebrating the one-year anniversary of his blog saignee with what he calls “31 Days of Natural Wine.” Alice Feiring has offered some writing. So has Peter Liem. In other words, Cartwright has got the heavy hitters doing some heavy lifting for—well, not a cause, but a worthy idea.

Look, natural wine—organic, Bio-dynamic wine and food are not some kind of flash in the pan. It’s true that BioD is pretty close to a religion as Alice Feiring has told me. There are those who follow it whole, and those who take the bits and parts they like, sort of a “cafeteria plan” for foodies and winos.

But I think it worth the while to pay a visit to Cory’s site if for no other reason than you want to learn something about natural wine. Every wine, great or not, has a story behind it and that’s what makes it interesting. Inside each bottle of wine is a story. The same cannot really be said for each bottle of vodka or gin. Noble spirits though they are, they haven’t got the heart and nuance that drives a wine story.

I’m convinced that there need be no revolution or political movement to bring people around to natural and wholesome food and wine. I think putting it in those terms is so arcane, so “60’s” if you will.

No, what’s required is something at which America has always thrived and that is advocating education and change. Those are not revolutionary things. Education and change are what we have always done—sometimes painfully, sometimes slowly, granted. But we have done it nevertheless.

So I want to invite you to take that first step. Drinking a glass of wine while surfing the web just now? Go check out saignee. Learn a little bit more—and educate yourself so that, over time, you can make a change—just a small one—for the better.

It’s always fun to be in a group of wine tasters when you pull out the next bottle and unscrew the bottle cap. Invariably, though it seems that it is cartoonish or cliché, there are those that will eschew that bottle and say that “they don’t drink wine without a cork in it.”

It’s rather too bad, actually. If you know someone who says this, or if you say it, you’re missing out on some wonderful wines and, what’s worse, you’re speaking out of real ignorance (I say this with love, of course).

Of course, popping a cork on a bottle of wine is now more than just the act of opening and accessing the product. It’s a cultural sound, it means celebration and it means relaxation. For some, it’s a chance to explore something new and to experience tastes and aromas they’ve never had before. That’s a pretty powerful pull. Richard Sanford, founder of Sanford Winery and now founder and proprietor of Alama Rosa, said that he’s learned to “appreciate the snap of the bottle cap, rather than the pop of the cork.”

But the cork is nothing more than the thing that stops the wine from coming out of the bottle while you carry it. Its most important job is to provide something called micro-oxygenation to bottles of wine, which once purchased, are going to remain unopened for more than a year. Micro-oxygenation is simply small bits of oxygen, very small, that over long periods of time seep into the bottle. Of course, too much oxygen will literally kill the wine, but the micro amounts are what help the wine age better.

And if you’re fortunate enough or simply focused enough to purchase good, expensive bottles of wine that you are going to “lay down” for a while in a wine cellar or wine cooler, then by all means, make sure that there is a good, sound cork in the bottle.

But, if you’ve just purchased a bottle of California Pinot Noir, no matter how good it is, it probably isn’t something you’re going to lay down for any more than the time it takes you to find the corkscrew. So, the screw cap is a simple and convenient device, which is useful, less expensive, thereby lowering the cost of the wine by the way, and ultimately, nothing that should keep us from buying a bottle of wine. The fact is, more than 99 percent of wines purchased in the United States are consumed within 48 hours of their purchase. Since this is the fact, there really isn’t any need for a cork.

To be sure, there are bad bottles of wine underneath screw caps. But then, there are also some underneath corks, too, yes? Don’t let the bottle closure make the decision for you. It’s what’s in the bottle that counts.

Some of my favorite bottles of wine capped by a screw cap are:

Alma Rosa Santa Rita Hills (Central California Coast) Pinot Noir
Bonny Doon Ca’ del Solo Albarino, Santa Cruz, CA
Plumpjack Oakville Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley

There are many others, of course. But since I’m in California, I thought we’d start there. Enjoy

One of the things I get to talk and write about a lot in the wine world is something that falls under the heading of “sustainable growing.” It has come to mean grape growing, and really farming of any kind, that seeks to use minimal man-made products in order to foster the growth of the grapes.

Much of the work I do is on California’s Central Coast where an ever-expanding number of wine growers are using sustainable methods. But sustainable isn’t a term that truly defines what is happening in farming today. Ultimately, it’s not a big enough term because the fact is that one can practice sustainable farming and still use man-made products.

Organic farming and grape growing as well as bio-dynamic farming have become more popular and many wine makers are now touting these two processes in their wines. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Organic and bio-dynamic are not new terms.

It was Rudolph Steiner in the 1920’s who brought about the ideas that most farmers now refer to as bio-dynamics. An Austrian philosopher and educator, farmers in Europe came to him in 1924 concerned about the future of agriculture on the continent. Steiner obliged and lectured on a philosophy of farming whereby the farm is as much a closed system as possible.  He extended his ideas about the importance of the individual in society to the importance of the individual farm, the farm as a self-supporting entity and the idea began to include as few outside materials on the farm as possible.

These days, certifying a farm for organic or bio-dynamic labeling is handled largely by a group called the Demeter Association based in Portland, Oregon. “Biodynamic agriculture is an organic farming system that focuses on soil health, the integration of plants and animals, and biodiversity,” said Elizabeth Candelario, Marketing Director for Demeter. “I have heard some say that the promise of organic is delivered in Biodynamic.”

Candelario and the Demeter Association don’t just focus on wine. However, grape growing has become such a pervasive part of farming in the United States (there are wine vineyards in every state in the U.S.), that it occupies a lot of their time.

And while Candelario says that bio-dynamic is the ultimate expression of organic, even those two terms are not mutually compatible. Bio-dynamic farming practices encompass the entire farm from the soil up. “Its strict guidelines go far beyond organic requirements to include biodiversity set-asides, insectaries, livestock integration, closed nutrient loops and the use of homeopathic preparations for vineyards and compost.”

But since wine is, at the end of the day, a pleasure delivery vehicle, the question for the consumer is simple: Do organic and bio-dynamic wines taste better? Taste is subjective after all, and price points will always be a measure of whether or not a wine sells. There is still a market, and it is probably the largest consumer wine market, for wine that doesn’t exceed $10.00 a bottle. Very few of those bottles are going to be from organic or bio-dynamic farms.

The inestimable Alice Feiring, one of the most well respected voices in the wine media told me via e-mail, “On a purely aesthetic level, many wine drinkers get sucked into wine’s romantic vortex because of the way they see the soil’s expression in the glass. If the soil is dead–as it is with conventional farming–there is nothing to express. To many of us, wine grown from organic soils just taste better!”

Wine is after all an organic product itself. It is farming and any good glass of wine begins in the vineyard.

So, here’s a little experiment that I have recently tried myself and it has changed my life entirely. If you have not yet availed yourself of organic vegetables and fruits or even bio-dynamic ones, give it a try. Most major super-market chains now carry a wide variety of organic vegetables. Wines might be harder to come by in a large grocery store, but if you care about drinking wine, you’ll probably want to find a good “bottle shop” or wine store and ask the owner whether he or she carries organic and bio-dynamic wines. Do a comparison side by side. Get a bio-dynamic Pinot Noir and taste it next to a non- bio-dynamic Pinot Noir.

The same can be said for your food choices. The revelation for me was when I cooked an organic free-range chicken on the grill right next to a non-organic chicken. Both were whole chickens and I prepared them both the same way, the ubiquitous and, may I add, manly “beer can chicken.” But when I ate a piece from each chicken, there simply was no comparison. Eating the organic chicken prompted me to say, “oh-that’s what chicken is supposed to taste like.”

Whether or not you’ll have the same experience with your wine I don’t know. But I have certainly found that organic and bio-dynamically grown wines exceed their counterparts in taste, structure, mouth-feel and in every other way.