The Candy Man and biodynamics

I mentioned yesterday how the Allan Scott winery in Marlborough, New Zealand, has at least one vineyard plot where they’re using biodynamic viticulture practices. I could easily spend a week writing about what, exactly, these practices are, but who wants to read about that? So let’s keep it simple. I’m probably going to get some flack for saying this, but I think of biodynamics as being the Scientology of viticulture. It’s pretty wacky.

Here are some of the practices as inspired by Austrian Rudolph Steiner in 1924:

Preparation 500: Take cow manure, ferment it in a cow horn, and then bury it in a row of vines and let it overwinter in the soil.

Preparation 501: Take ground silica (sand) and mix it with rain water and pack that in a cow’s horn, bury it in the spring, and then dig it up in the autumn and spray the sludge on the vines.

Preparation 502: Harvest the flower heads of yarrow and ferment them in a deer’s bladder, and then use this to make a compost tea that contains fermented camomile flowers, stinging nettle tea, oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal (like a goat), dandelion flowers fermented in cow mesentery (which are the gooey membranes and tissue around abdominal organs), and the pulp from valerian flowers.

So all these goodies go into a compost from which you then make a diluted tea which is then sprayed on your grapevines while you sing along with Sammy Davis Jr.’s version of “The Candy Man.”

Okay, I made that last part up. But not the rest of it. Actually, I think singing “Candy Man” would be better for your grapes than spraying them with gooey cow intestine, but then again, I’m not a true believer.