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My guest for this episode is Dan Durica, and when I asked him about what inspires the work he does, he essentially credited limitations for his inspirations. What if we couldn’t throw fossil fuels at our problems? What if we eliminated the easy solutions we’ve relied on for the past 80 years? What if you couldn’t use fossil fuels to make or sell your wine? No driving, no electricity, no chemical sprays and fertilizers or diesel farm equipment? Answering these what ifs would inevitably cause us to arrive at a very local wine culture in both scale and reach. Putting these limitations on ourselves would make us more resourceful, creative, ecological, and adaptive in our thinking.
Dan lives in a unique community called Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri where he also farms a no-spray, poly-culture vineyard built on the principles of permaculture. He also produces and hosts the Hardcore Sustainable Youtube channel where you’ll find a lot of helpful info about living and growing vines without fossil fuels and get to see what Dan is doing.
Dan also mentioned how far our understanding of what the best agriculture is has grown so much in the last twenty years that the idea of “organic” is kind of outdated. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve joked multiple times about changing the name of this podcast, and that may actually happen soon… when I have a spare minute to redo the entire online infrastructure that it relies on. So… for now it will stay the Organic Wine Podcast… but know that in my heart, and in everything it stands for, it is so much more.
After recording, Dan and I spoke a bit longer and he also proposed the idea that, historically, vineyard establishment has probably taken much longer than it does now. Vineyards were likely integrated into a local ecosystem over decades, rather than years, and thought of as an intergenerational project. Finding vines and other fruit that thrive without sprays can take years of selection, and even breeding. Building fertility and resilience into a vineyard takes years of ecosystem enhancement. I hope to be able to reach back out to Dan in a few years and see how the development of his vineyard has come along.
Also, we both talk about how the future we face will require us to stop thinking of ourselves as grape growers or apple growers or any single vineyard or orchard system managers, and start becoming polyculture farmers who grow a diversity of dozens of crops, and who build a business plan based on much less than 100% production. In California we have just lived through one of if not the wettest winters on record, and that’s following one of, if not the, driest years on record. The northeast US just had the awful combination of an unseasonably warm April followed by a multi-day freeze in May, which devastated the vineyards and orchards.
What Dan is doing, even though on a smaller scale, is an example of what is possible in even the most difficult growing conditions, when you approach wine with a different mindset.
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