In this episode, guest Betsy Andrews and host Jess Baum discuss Betsy’s utopian vision of the future of media; how Betsy defines regenerative agriculture and how certification is one step on the path to the planet’s survival; the magic found in both wine and poetry, and the eco-poetic themes that span what will ultimately be her four poetry books based on air, water, earth, and fire.
Betsy Andrews is a James Beard awarded writer & poet. Betsy has more than two decades of experience writing about food, drink, travel, and the environment for publications including Travel & Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, SevenFifty Daily, and VinePair. She is a former senior editor for Zagat and the former executive editor for Saveur. Betsy is also a poet, and her books include New Jersey, The Bottom, and Crowded.
To learn more about Betsy, visit https://betsyandrews.contently.com. To learn more about the Chumash marine preserve Betsy mentions in this episode, visit chumashsanctuary.org.
Betsy Andrews (00:01):
You must mourn what we have lost. You must see it, recognize it, and mourn it and then, through the sadness, find love and go on.
Elizabeth Archer (00:27):
You're listening to the Soil to Soul podcast, brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates. Soil to Soul is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra's senior director of regenerative impact. Season two features accomplished and fascinating wine writers across the spectrum of outlets and backgrounds. Today's guest is James Beard-awarded writer and poet, Betsy Andrews. Betsy has more than two decades of experience writing about food, drink, travel, and the environment for publications including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, SevenFifty Daily, and VinePair. She is a former senior editor for Zagat and the former executive editor for Saveur. Betsy is also a poet, and her books include New Jersey, The Bottom, and Crowded. Listen in as Betsy and Jess discuss Betsy's utopian vision of the future of media, how Betsy defines regenerative agriculture and how certification is one step on the path to the planet's survival, the magic found in both wine and poetry, and the eco-poetic themes that span what will ultimately be her four poetry books based on air, water, earth, and fire.
Jess Baum (01:50):
Welcome to the podcast, Betsy Andrews. We're so excited to have you here today.
Betsy Andrews (01:56):
Thanks. I'm so excited to be here with you.
Jess Baum (01:59):
I'm going to jump right in. You are an incredibly accomplished person with expertise in so many areas, from food to wine to spirits to the environment to poetry. Why wine? What about it inspires you?
Betsy Andrews (02:16):
Well, firstly it's delicious. It's the only drink that's created to have with food, to go with food. It's meant for the table, and I'm a food obsessive. And the other thing about wine is that it allows me to be out in the vineyards, learning about plants, learning about the soil, learning about Earth and being close to nature. And that's a really, really beautiful thing.
Jess Baum (02:45):
You've written for everyone, for Food & Wine, SevenFifty Daily, Zagat, VinePair, Saveur, the list goes on. Newspapers and other print media have closed or consolidated while online mediums have exploded. What do you think the future of food and wine writing look like?
Betsy Andrews (03:04):
Hopefully, some of the legacy publications will continue because I really like writing for them and I think they're really important. They have the resources behind them for fact-checking and copyediting, all those important things that are too rare nowadays. But I think we also need to acknowledge that there are new publications that have started in the wine space. There's Full Pour. There's the Vintners Project. There's New Wine Review. So people continue to be entrepreneurial and to want to create content around wine.
(03:41):
I have a utopian vision of a different way of organizing a media enterprise rather than top-down, profit-driven capitalism, and that would be a collective, something that's collectively edited. People are voted into the collective. Decisions are made by consensus. People can have their careers outside of it, but then they aggregate to make this beautiful thing happen. So I've been thinking about that and actually talking to people about it. I don't know that I'll ever do it, maybe I will, but just a idea that media is not all about the profit, that it's really about people getting together to create something and that wine... Actually, when I think about this utopian vision, it's not just a wine publication or just a food publication, but it's those things in the context of culture and politics, a much more holistic presentation of an online, collectively-driven publication. Doesn't that sound beautiful?
Jess Baum (04:44):
It sounds incredibly beautiful. If you could just create that, that would be fabulous for us. I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that.
(05:03):
In your SevenFifty Daily article called 6 Wine Industry Trends to Watch in 2024, you listed regenerative viticulture at number one, calling it the new global sustainability standard and a sea change for viticulture. So I'm really curious. How do you define regenerative viticulture?
Betsy Andrews (05:24):
Well, because we don't yet have a shared definition of this, the definitions are a little wobbly at this point. As a journalist, I think about questions. So for me, it is a set of questions. And at the center of that is, how well are you taking care of all the beings in your ecosystem? And that's from the microorganisms in the soil to the workers who are pruning and harvesting your vines. I think that the definition is going to have to really become more standardized because at this point, some of the things that are being called regenerative agriculture are potentially what we might call regenerative washing.
Jess Baum (06:18):
Your answer reminded me so much of something that the late great Paul Dolan said. As you know, he was instrumental in the regenerative organic certification and was the chairman of the board of the Regenerative Organic Alliance and also was instrumental in the growth of what is now Bonterra Organic Estates. And he said regenerative organic-certified viticulture was farming in service of life. As you know, Bonterra Organic Estates was an early adopter of regenerative organic certification, which is widely considered to be the gold standard for codifying and verifying regenerative agriculture practices. As a journalist, what is your perspective on the importance of certifications?
Betsy Andrews (07:02):
Yeah, I think certification is incredibly important. Not all certifications are created equally. The regenerative organic certification has incredibly high standards. The things that may have been left out of other certifications such as animal welfare and social welfare, the welfare of your workers, are in that certification, and those are really important because that's part of the ecosystem. They are the beings we need to take care of along with the soil and along with lowering emissions.
(07:29):
There are so many certifications out there, and it's very confusing. So the work that the Sustainable Wine Roundtable is doing is, I think, important work. Looking at all those certifications and trying to come up with overarching, global similarities and standards is a really smart thing to do because from the very local level to the regional level to the national level to the global level, these certifications are really complex and it's a tangle. But I think it's incredibly important because from the perspective of a consumer, somebody like me who really cares about the planet, I can look at that certification and know that there has been third-party oversight and that the winery every year is doing more and has scientifically-proven measures for increasing its regenerative efforts, for decreasing its emissions, for increasing biodiversity, and et cetera. And so that is a guarantee for me when I see that on a label.
(08:36):
I also think it's more and more important from a business perspective, given the fact that ESG, as the financial world likes to call it, which is environmental, social, and governance responsibility from businesses, is increasingly more important, particularly for publicly-traded companies. So that could be a really big supermarket chain that now is looking not only at what it is doing around things like greenhouse gas emissions, it's looking at Scope 3. So it's looking at its suppliers and seeing what they are doing about decreasing their emissions too. And so if you are a supplier to one of those big stores, you now have to care about that or you won't be on their shelves. It's also becoming important for loans and grants, even legally. So wineries have to start paying attention to this for their own survival and also for the survival of the planet, and certification helps keep you on that path.
Jess Baum (09:43):
What ROC is able to do so beautifully is translate across industry and across location. That's also really hard to do, and that's why they have a group of people behind the certification that are constantly evaluating it and potentially changing it to match the unfolding complexities.
(10:13):
You are a James Beard-awarded writer and poet. What parallels do you see between wine and poetry?
Betsy Andrews (10:20):
Well, they're both a combination of craft and magic. So with wine, that magic comes from nature. It comes from the plants and the microorganisms of the climate, the terroir. From poetry, it comes from that terroir in your mind, culture and whatever else is going on inside there that you can't completely control, and you shouldn't.
(10:47):
So as a poet, I always say I might not know where I'm going, but I always know where I am. And knowing where I am, that is the craft. It's the conscious talent and skills that I bring to the work. But not knowing where I'm going, that's letting the magic happen. And I think that a winemaker can fully relate to that. They bring all their skills and all their talents into that juice, and then things happen that they don't fully control. And that's the magic.
Jess Baum (11:22):
What a beautiful way to approach life as well as poetry and wine. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you meant when you said the terroir of the mind?
Betsy Andrews (11:33):
We experience so much, and that is cultural and it's political and it's your subject position in the world and it's nature and it's your emotions. It's just things that happen day to day. It's every little detail. And that's all in there, just a big jumble of stuff that we create into linear narratives, usually. But in my poetry, I like to be really collagist about those things and let these collisions and excisions and overlaps and palimpsests all happen because I think that that is human experience and that's what we have created. It's a very layered thing, and the mind is like that when we let ourselves get away from these very controlled narratives. And in there in that complex place, there are possibilities. We have no idea what those possibilities are yet. That's the hope. That's the optimism that there are possibilities in there.
Jess Baum (12:36):
You recently wrote your third book of poetry called Crowded. I'd like to read a part of the blurb that's from the author, Marcella Durand. Cutting and beautiful, Andrews addresses the dragons within the birds chased by us into extinction, writing toward the true monsters who plunder the planet for reasons selfish and banal beyond imagining. Such is the pace of our fabric's unravel, following our self-inflicted ecological traumas in generous lines of irresistible rhythm and sound. Your phrase, the pace of our fabric's unravel, is so beautiful and also so devastating. Can you unpack the meaning of this powerful statement?
Betsy Andrews (13:25):
Let me read you the three lines from that page that that phrase appears in. Such is the pace of our fabric's unravel. You think it will come in swatches and samples? Guess again. It will be like fast fashion, petrochemical and ill of fit, but so cheap, cheap and matchy-matchy that it's difficult to resist.
(13:52):
So what I was thinking about was climate change is death by a thousand cuts, but climate disaster is not. It can happen suddenly and be devastating. And at the same time, we are lulled into a constant new normal in our whatever, eating our conventionally-farmed foods and wearing our fast fashion, and we need to wake up. We need to realize that it's all unraveling, and we need to take care.
Jess Baum (14:26):
You're so right about climate change being death by a thousand cuts, but climate disaster being sudden and how those two things can both be true at the same time, and yet we continue to not read the signs.
Betsy Andrews (14:41):
We do really need to wake up. And for me, the answer is always love. I mean, this is my third book. It is a book-length poem. It's my third book-length poem. They're all about this topic. They're all eco-poetic. This was the air book. The Bottom was the water book. New Jersey, my first book, was the earth book, and I'm now starting the fire book, which is very relevant nowadays. This book that I just wrote as I'm thinking through my philosophy, in that book it's about mourning. You must mourn what we have lost. You must see it, recognize it, and mourn it and then, through the sadness, find love and go on. That's healing. To look at it honestly, that is healing.
Jess Baum (15:34):
How do you hold all of that as one human? How do you hold the sadness and the mourning and the grief and weave beautiful words out of it without breaking your own heart?
Betsy Andrews (15:46):
It can be very hard for me to take in all this information if I'm not using it in art. When I start to use it in art, I feel like I'm doing something. I'm creating something that can communicate and commune with other people. So it's actually a very hopeful endeavor. Otherwise, I might turn away, but I don't turn away because I use it.
Jess Baum (16:12):
It's almost like you're composting the grief and turning it into hope and love.
Betsy Andrews (16:16):
Yeah, that's a great metaphor.
Jess Baum (16:19):
As really, truly accomplished writer who has many different mediums at her disposal to address the complexities of the climate crisis, how do you think poetry can reach readers in a way that other modalities of writing about climate change can't?
Betsy Andrews (16:38):
Poetry is song, basically, and so it's not just this left brain thing. It goes beyond your conscious mind and hits your heart and your soul, and that's really important stuff. I think that there's a lot of creative nonfiction that does that too. And I find generally, nonfiction and journalism and fact-based reporting to be essential. It's what I do as a journalist and it's what I use for my material and my poetry. But the beauty of being human is that we have souls, and I think we need to speak to the soul for real transformation.
Jess Baum (17:34):
You are currently working on a cookbook, which is coming out in spring 2025 and I truly can't wait to add it to my collection, called Coastal: A Road-Trippy California Cookbook. Can you tell us more about it?
Betsy Andrews (17:48):
It's a celebration of the central coast of California and it's a collaboration with two dear friends of mine, the fantastic, just amazing photographer, Cheyenne Ellis, and the incredible poetic chef, Scott Clark. So Scott was a three-star Michelin chef. He was the chef de cuisine at Saison in San Francisco, and he just burnt out. So he rented a caboose on the side of the Cabrillo Highway in Half Moon Bay and he opened up a destination burgers and pie shop called Dad's Luncheonette. And we did a story for EatingWell magazine, Cheyenne and Scott and I, where we drove down the central coast, road-tripped, ate at all these great little joints that we loved. And afterwards, we had so much material we were like, "Let's do a book." So this book is all of Scott's recipes organized around adventures on the central coast, fishing and foraging, post-surfing breakfast, sailing out to the Channel Islands, lunch in the vineyard, a whole bunch of adventures and with this luscious, luscious photography by Cheyenne and these really creative recipes by Scott. And then I'm the writer. It comes out in spring of 2025 on Chronicle Books, and we're super excited.
(19:07):
I want to give a shout-out for something on the central coast right now, which is that the Northern Chumash Tribe has been working on creating a marine reserve from Morro Bay all the way up the central coast, and people can support that. You can go to the Northern Chumash Tribe's website and read about it and do what you can to support that effort because that's going to be a really beautiful thing.
Jess Baum (19:30):
What a dream of a book to write and to experience. And thank you for sharing that story about what's happening with the Northern Chumash Tribe. Thank you so much, Betsy, for taking the time to connect and to share your voice and your words and your poetry and all of your incredible insight. We really appreciate it.
Betsy Andrews (19:51):
Thank you. It's been really a lovely conversation.
Elizabeth Archer (20:15):
Thank you for listening to the Soil to Soul podcast, hosted by Jess Baum and produced by me, Elizabeth Archer, right here in Mendocino County on behalf of Bonterra Organic Estates, the largest regenerative organic winery in the US. To learn more and to get 20% off your wine order, visit bonterra.com and use the promo code, soil to soul. We're especially proud of our estate collection, comprising four affordable and exceptional regenerative organic certified wines from our Hopland vineyards in Mendocino County.
(20:47):
Original music for the podcast was composed by Mendocino County musician, Julian Sterling. Thanks again to today's guest, Betsy Andrews. To learn more, visit betsyandrews.contently.com. To learn more about the Chumash Marine Preserve Betsy mentions in this episode, visit chumashsanctuary.org. If you liked this episode, please rate, review, and share our podcast to help others find it too.
(21:14):
Next week on the podcast, we'll talk with Kathleen Willcox, a food, wine, and culture journalist who co-authored the new book, Hudson Valley Wine: A History of Taste & Terroir. See you then.