Stellenbosch and the cosmos 22 October 2007

Going beyond organics, the biodynamic approach is well established at Reyneke Wines,
as Angela Lloyd discovers

Awareness of and care for the environment is recognised on several levels in the South African wine industry. Apart from the generic biodiversity branding, there's the entry level Integrated Production of Wine, while the number of producers taking the organic route is increasing. For some of the latter, this is but a step to biodynamic farming.

Johan Reyneke, who studied environmental philosophy at university, writing his Master's thesis on the environment and development, is a local biodynamics' pioneer in the wine farming field. His academic background, however, didn't automatically lead him to biodynamics, and the journey to this achievement has been hard won.

Reyneke was born in Pretoria and moved with his family to the Cape in the 1980s; in 1988 they purchased Uitzicht, a rundown property perched on the ridge of the Polkadraai Hills with spectacular views over Stellenbosch and False Bay.

As he helped his mother in the vineyards, the irony of reading environmental philosophy one moment and spraying the vines with insecticides the next wasn't lost on Johan Reyneke. But the bank thwarted his desire to go organic: it involve, they thought, too much risk for their loan. In fact, the tiny area he did a trial in proved a dismal failure – the vines succumbing to both powdery and downy mildew.

The experience didn't dampen his wish or determination and in 2001 this self-taught winemaker, with his father-in-law, produced the first Reyneke organic Pinotage.

Johan had been introduced to the idea of biodynamics on a visit to Denmark the previous year. Over a lengthy lunch his Danish host served a selection of wines blind. One wine kept growing the longer it was opened; it was a 1986 from biodynamic guru, Nicolas Joly. As much as Johan was impressed by the wine, Joly's book From Sky to Earth that his host gave him was initially less enlightening: ‘What I read confused me even more. I had made the mistake of thinking organics was leaving everything to nature, whereas it's a question of replacing one set of principles for another.'

Back home, Johan met up with a local biodynamic farmer who set him on the right path. In 2003, the entire farm was put under biodynamic conversion, a process that took three years, organic certification being a required step en route.

Invoking the cosmos
Biodynamics, developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s, works not only on the organic level, but also, more controversially, on the ‘cosmic level’, supposing that the moon and planets have a significant effect on life on earth. There is also a third, ‘spiritual level’.

The preparations for composting and spraying that Steiner developed as part of his system are intended to vitalise the compost and vines, bring the cosmic energies into the soil to meet those rising from the soil itself or re-connecting the cosmos with the earth, as Steiner explained it. His hypothesis was that everything in nature is interdependent.

Making the preparations involves placing manure or plants inside animal parts and burying them for a period, before ‘dynamising’ them in water and either adding them to compost or applying the mixture to the vines. Cranky or creative? Certainly controversial….

Reyneke easily relates to the idea of viewing Uitzicht holistically, but acknowledges that he's pulled between science and energy over the preparations.

‘Why does everything have to be black and white?' he criticises. ‘I see the science but also feel the magic of nature.' It's a level of understanding he calls ‘creative tension'. Take the Preparation 500, where cow manure is placed in a cow horn, removed from a cow that has calved, and buried in the ground over winter before being ‘dynamised’ in water and sprayed on the vines. ‘Science explains that the bacteria in the horn speeds up the composting process; the wet soil in winter is more conducive to microbes and dynamism adds a lot of oxygen,' Reyneke says. It’s a view he accepts as well as the more orthodox one which speaks of the horn manure burial as having ‘the chance to share the earth's experience of "inhaling" and "exhaling" like a living being', as Monty Waldin writes in his book, Biodynamic Wines.

Reyneke is not a dogmatist and readily acknowledges the necessity of making a profit; if he went out of business, a new owner might revert to conventional farming. Thus, though harvesting is ideally carried out on a day when the astral signs favour fruit, Reyneke won't hesitate to pick on a non-fruit day if a heatwave is forecast. He also irrigates, said by biodynamics to dim terroir in the wines; his justification is that local soils are different from Europe’s.

Stellenbosch is pretty well a vine monoculture – as can be easily seen from the farm; how is it possible that pesticides from his conventional farming neighbours don't drift on to Reyneke's vines? He admits he can't say for sure that there is no spray drift, though hedgerows around the vineyards act as a buffer. Helpfully, some of his neighbours have now converted to biodynamics.

Wine quality
Ultimately, biodynamics, like organics, lives or falls for winelovers on the quality of the wines; both systems produce too much poor quality. Johan gave me his Sauvignon Blanc 2006 and Reserve 2005, a shiraz, to try. The sauvignon, barrel-fermented 11 months on native yeast, is in a more oxidative, savoury style, with little evidence of oak; it's a tasty, medium-bodied food wine. The shiraz is stunning; matured only in older French oak, it has a delicacy and complexity rarely found in local shirazes. Distinctive to both is a mineral vibrancy that goes beyond acidity or freshness. Three days on, both wines were still drinking beautifully.

Each back label declares that ‘this wine is produced according to bio-dynamic principles', confirming certification as organic and biodynamic to EU standards. The biodynamic certification guarantees adherence to the farm as an individuality, use of biodynamic preparations, and the planting calendar. Only native yeast ferments have been used, with no addition of enzymes or malo bacteria. Racking is done according to the biodynamic planting calendar, and grape and wine residue is recycled via a compost heap. Free sulphur is below 30 parts per million, total sulphur below 100.

The Reyneke property recently went into joint partnership with Vinimark's Tim Rands; this financial boost promises a local revitalisation of the range. Johan Reyneke's dream of producing wine from all the farm's grapes looks set to be realised.

Believe or not in Steiner's system (and I veer towards Reyneke's attitude of ‘whatever blows your hair back'), rather enjoy the wines for what they offer; in Reyneke's case something expressively different and thoroughly enjoyable.