Free Uncorked by Marco Pasanella Page A

I had to turn away when he described lovingly packing ripe cow dung into a female cow’s horns to make a potion that would fertilize a whole field. Yarrow plant stuffed into deer’s bladder, dandelions stuffed into bovine peritoneum, and oak bark stuffed more ominously into the skull of a “domesticated animal” rounded out this menu of entrails farci. Could this be, I wondered, just his unpolished English, like bad subtitles in an art house foreign film? Was this a joke?
    His practices stem from the theories of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and the founder of biodynamic farming. Steiner is just the kind of Renaissance man I’m inclined to givethe benefit of the doubt to: he was a wide-ranging intellectual who founded the well-known Waldorf schools (now an international network of more than a thousand schools), designed seventeen buildings, and wrote more than forty volumes of novels, plays, and poetry. He promoted ethics and civil equality.
    Steiner’s principles of biodynamism grew out of a series of lectures he gave in 1924 in response to recent crop failures. Biodynamics is based on his belief that there is an objective spiritual world (“anthroposophy”) behind farming; it’s a philosophy that combines astronomy, biology, and a dollop of mysticism. To farm well, according to Steiner, you not only have to reject industrialized agriculture, you have to acknowledge the Spirits that influence crops. Among them are Gnomes, who live beneath the ground and push plants upward; Undines, who foster budding; Sylphs, who wither mature plants; and Salamanders, fire spirits who imbue seeds with the heat they need to germinate.
    More than recycling wastewater, encouraging biodiversity, and avoiding pesticides, the real faith behind biodynamics lies in a series of these preparations designed to spark the “memory of the soil,” thereby, Steiner believed, igniting those supernatural “terrestrial and cosmic forces.” The preparations are numbered from 500 to 508 (go figure). In addition to the recipes Tissot had mentioned, there are cow horn with cow dung (number 500), cow horn with quartz (number 501), deer bladder with yarrow (number 502), intestines with chamomile (number 503), skull with bark (number 505), and peritoneum with dandelions (number 506). There are also stinging nettle tea (number 504), a sweetly scented herb called valerian (number 507), and horse tail (number 508).
    All these concoctions are either applied to the field in minute quantities (grams per acre) or added to compost piles at the appropriate dates on the astrological calendar. Just half a pound of the manure is considered enough to treat two and a half acres of land.
    The science behind the catalyzing preparations remains dubious. A Washington State University study points to increased disease resistance as a result of the oak bark, but only in zucchini! Most other blind studies point to increased soil health, but not more than is found in traditional organic farms.
    And it gets weirder. Are field mice a problem? Just spread ashes made from burning their skins over the vineyards, but only when Venus is in Scorpio. If weeds are an issue, collect some seeds from the target undesirable plants and incinerate them above a wooden flame that is kindled by the same weeds and then add the residue to the “clear” urine of a sterile cow. Mind you, don’t forget to first expose the urine to the full moon for six hours. The aim, according to the Demeter handbook, is to “render the weed infertile by blocking lunar influence.”
    There seems to be tacit agreement among many biodynamic proponents not to let you know more until you’re deemed prepared. Mike Benzinger, founding winemaker of his family’s California vineyard, explains this reticence in an article in
San Francisco Weekly
: “One of the things you have to be careful about is over-projecting information to people before they’re ready,” he says. “Look into history. There have