In the Season 2 finale, host Jess Baum and guest Sophie Menin discuss "ecological adoration," how wine helps us be attuned with nature and ourselves, and why soil is the mirepoix of each glass of wine. Then, Sophie turns the tables and asks Jess how Bonterra defines and practices Regenerative Organic agriculture.
Sophie Menin is an award-winning cultural journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Barron’s, Wine Spectator, and Saveur. She earned an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a professional degree in the Culinary Arts from the Institute of Culinary Education.
Her wine writing focuses on the myriad ways that wine connects us with our senses and the rhythms of the natural world. She has just co-authored a book, A Year in the Vineyard, with environmental artist Bob Chaplin. It beautifully captures the yearlong cycle of the vine, framed in the context of the ongoing evolution of viticulture as climate change reshapes centuries of tradition. A Year in the Vineyard will be released on June 4.
Sophie Menin (00:00):
How you take care of your soil is the foundation of what's going to happen in your vineyard.
Elizabeth Archer (00:21):
You're listening to the season finale of 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 Sophie Menin, an award-winning cultural journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Barron's, Wine Spectator, and Saveur. Sophie earned an MA in cultural reporting and criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and a professional degree in the Culinary Arts from the Institute of Culinary Education. Her wine writing focuses on the myriad ways that wine connects us with our senses and the rhythms of the natural world.
(01:12):
She has just co-authored a book, A Year in the Vineyard, with environmental artist Bob Chaplin. It beautifully captures the year-long cycle of the vine, framed in the context of the ongoing evolution of viticulture as climate change reshapes centuries of tradition. Listen in as Jess and Sophie discuss ecological adoration, how wine helps us be attuned with nature and ourselves and why soil is the mirepoix of each glass of wine. Then Sophie turns the tables and asks Jess how Bonterra defines and practices regenerative organic agriculture.
Jess Baum (01:55):
Welcome Sophie Menin to the podcast today. We're so excited to have you here.
Sophie Menin (02:00):
I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jess Baum (02:03):
I'm going to dive right in with the question I love to start with, which is why wine?
Sophie Menin (02:09):
I guess I would answer why not wine? I'm a cultural journalist by training and wine lets me as a writer talk about things I really care about, connection with the environment, attentiveness, attunement to your senses, culture, history, nature. It's all there in the conversation and experience of wine.
Jess Baum (02:34):
That is so beautifully said. You have written a book called A Year in the Vineyard. Through photos and stories, the book documents the ongoing evolution of viticulture at this pivotal moment in its history as climate reshapes centuries of tradition. What was the original inspiration to write this book?
Sophie Menin (02:54):
I'm co-author of the book with Bob Chaplin. The book was originally my idea. I had a column in The Daily Beast almost a decade ago called 100 Summer Nights and it was about that moment in the summer, everything's fresh and cooking so wonderful and we were documenting this from places all over the world. What were special summer meals, but we were also at that time 100 summer nights or 100 days is the average time between flowering and harvest. So we were tracking the cycle of the vine as part of that series and that's the part that stole my heart. And I had the vision for this book, but I really wanted it to be a very visual book and I didn't have the skill set to do that. And then I met Bob Chaplin and he is an environmental artist and artisanal bookmaker besides being a very fine wine writer.
(03:49):
And Bob designed the book and I did all the writing, but then we worked with each other in terms of editing and crafting the way things flowed. And what he really brought was this conceptual framework of environmental art where documentation of vineyard work is part of the process. He has a piece up at the Hill-Stead Museum in Connecticut where it's a formal French garden, but instead of having boxwoods and shaped trees, it looks at what grows naturally. And then he photographs this over the seasons and how it changes. So we took that idea and applied it to vineyards from all over the world. So it's visually linked stories that are anchored by this philosophical framework and also background paintings from his artwork.
Jess Baum (04:45):
How beautiful. Sounds like it's a way to capture life in action and the changes that life brings.
Sophie Menin (04:53):
Exactly. And every vineron is having the same conversation. The cycle of the vine doesn't change between Mendoza and Chablis, but the conditions on the ground are very different and that's where the conversation changes.
Jess Baum (05:11):
And speaking of the conversation and changes that we're experiencing in this book, you write about how wine is on the front line of the climate crisis. In what ways does this shifting ecology change and disrupt the world of wine?
Sophie Menin (05:28):
I think the most obvious ways are with water events and with fire. Those are the ones we can see most plainly. And if you understand that for every degree Celsius the Earth's atmosphere warms the air can halt 7% more moisture, you understand why as the climate gets warmer, we have more extreme climate events and vineyards have to be ready to respond at the same time we can also have more droughts and vineyards also have to be prepared to respond. And very dry conditions obviously can bring wildfires where even if they don't affect the vineyard itself, the smoke taint can bring problems as well.
Jess Baum (06:12):
In what ways do you think this will shift the landscape of wine in the next 10 years, the next 100 years?
Sophie Menin (06:20):
I think vineron are thinking creatively about how to respond to these changes. They have no choice. It's not abstract for them, it's already happening. And so you see it in a lot of ways. There's some places that are doing it very scientifically. If you look at a place like Cheval des Andes in Mendoza, traditionally in the high vineyards in Mendoza, you get a water allocation from the Andes and people would flood the vineyards through these traditional canal systems from the huarpes when they used to grow wheat up there. But they draw theirs into a reservoir and then they use this water, this very pure water for drip irrigation and they have found a way to just give enough water to the vines so that they're stressed enough to root deeply, but that they never are so stressed that they stop growing.
(07:15):
So this has allowed them to harvest earlier, preserve water, and find phenolic maturity and sugar maturity at the same time. Other places are kind of looking forward by really looking more closely at nature itself and how to access trees and mycorrhizal networks and cover crops to create cooler climates within the vineyards and also to create more efficient water systems where all the plants are sharing resources is a very important part of creating more sustainable and more resilient vineyards, which I think is the main focus for a lot of the wineries that we have spoken to. It's how do you build natural resilience in the vineyard?
Jess Baum (08:05):
I really appreciate that you bring the word resilience into the conversation. Something that we saw at Bonterra was the resilience of our regenerative organic certified vineyards in the face of the atmospheric rivers. And there's something to be said for the resilience of the vines when you farm, not just the grape but also the soil.
Sophie Menin (08:27):
I don't think people understand always that organic matter can absorb more water and that non-compacted soil holds more water because the water can seep in and can be held.
Jess Baum (08:39):
What traditions stand to be lost and what innovations are farmers and winemakers using to adapt?
Sophie Menin (08:47):
Traditions that stand to be lost are the ones that are sentimental. I was with Chris Howell at Cain Vineyard & Winery up on Spring Mountain and I was looking at the replanting with him of the vineyard after so much of it was lost in the Glass Fire, and Chris is a great Francophile, but the guillo trellising where you're exposing as much of the vine as possible to sunlight, as beautiful as it is, is not the best method anymore in his opinion for planting Cabernet Sauvignon in the Napa Valley because it's too much sunlight, too much exposure to the grapes. And so he's raised the fruiting wire and he's created instead of two rows of vines per terrace in the terraced vineyards, one row so that the leaf canopy could be wider and allow for dappled sunlight. So anything that's based on a tradition that doesn't align with the conditions today will probably be lost to some degree because adaptations have to be made for the environment we live in now.
(09:55):
But for the second part of your question, what are some of the adaptations that are being made? There's really some that are fascinating. Like at Gaja, they look at the nature of the year in terms of how they manage their cover crops. So in a warm dry year, they'll roll the cover crops in the spring to keep the ground moist and to keep the ground cooler allowing obviously for room for aeration. But if it's a really rainy year, they're going to cut the cover crops so that the root systems can absorb more water, especially on those steep slopes in Piedmont. So this idea of actually being able to be a little bit responsive and reactive and adaptive to what's happening in the moment, but working in a very natural way is I think increasingly important.
Jess Baum (10:52):
You have a degree in culinary arts from the Institute of Culinary Education. How does your background in food influence your career as a wine writer and what is wine without food?
Sophie Menin (11:04):
I think it's a perspective. When I finished the Institute of Culinary Education, I did a stage at Danielle and what I learned was that four-star cooking begins with really a lot of people learning to handle produce really well, getting fine produce, but then really learning how to work with it gently and coax the most flavor out of the produce. And then when you move on to actual cooking, you're always starting, if you're making a stock or a sauce with a foundation and it's very much like the soil, you're going to start with your mirepoix, your onions and carrots and celery or fennel, whatever your aromatics are. And how well and gently you cook those, that's the foundation of your sauce and it's the same thing with wine. How you take care of your soil is the foundation of what's going to in your vineyard.
Jess Baum (11:55):
The way you talk about curating and cultivating those flavors in food reminds me of wine making itself of how to coax the richest expression of the grapes in the glass.
Sophie Menin (12:07):
I think that's right. In the vineyard, that's what's happening. Right. It doesn't happen by itself. It's a conversation in a sense between the vineron and the land and the grape and how to find balance and how they do that really takes not just an understanding of how to make wine, but a real understanding of how nature works, when to go in and prune and shape and when to let nature do its own work. And that's the real skill of a winemaker. It's why we chose in the book to use the expression vineron or it's rough equivalent in English wine grower because in our opinion, that's where the foundations of the wine making happen.
Jess Baum (12:51):
What it really brings to mind for me is this idea of the vineron, the wine grower as part of the ecology of the vineyard.
Sophie Menin (13:00):
They are part of the vineyard without a doubt, and that's why their wine is an expression of their work in the vineyard and then of course in the cellar as well. I couldn't agree more.
Jess Baum (13:12):
Your wine writing focuses on how wine connects us with our senses and the rhythms of the natural world. You're really speaking my language there. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Sophie Menin (13:24):
I really care about attunement. I'm very interested in the way wine makes us stop. Even if you're not in a vineyard, you stop and you smell, you stop and you look. You think about the correlation between the aromatics and what you're experiencing on your palate. You might think about the length or the depth or the texture of what you're experiencing in your mouth, and then you're putting that together maybe with your idea of what this kind of wine could be, what it is, how it surprises you, why you like it or don't like it. And that's a way of being attuned. It's a way of being with yourself and then if you choose and if you're interested, you can open up more broadly because you can really think about where the grapes came from, are they indigenous to that area, how was it made? And it opens up a sense of connection to your own senses and then also to the sensibility of where the wine came from, and that can be a profound experience.
Jess Baum (14:29):
What you're describing sounds almost like a spiritual experience.
Sophie Menin (14:34):
I don't think it's an accident that wine is involved in a lot of spiritual ceremonies. There is in fine dining, I think at its best, a real sense of ceremony around it in the nicest way, not a formal stuffy ceremony, but a sense of honoring the work and the artistry that went into a meal or into a really fine glass of wine. It makes you appreciate how this came to your table or into your glass, and that's at its highest level. It can be a spiritual experience for some people, for a lot of people, a connection to the greater forces of nature.
Jess Baum (15:14):
So wine connects us to the greater forces of nature and being attuned to the world around us is perhaps a way of practicing ecological adoration.
Sophie Menin (15:26):
That's a really lovely expression. I think we all feel more centered when we're in nature. Go take a walk in the woods and you tend to feel better. And so if the kind of attunement that you can have when you really think about what brings your wine into your glass, especially from vineyards like Bonterra, where you guys are so ecologically conscious that there is that connection, it can be grounding in the best sense. I mean, I live in New York City, so I might not get to walk in nature, but I do get to walk through the green market. It's a step or two removed, but it does bring that sort of connection without a doubt.
Jess Baum (16:04):
Absolutely. A concept that we talk a lot about in ecology and in the human interactions with ecology is sense of place. And something I think is so beautiful about wine is that sense of place is central to what it is and to how it shows up in the bottle.
Sophie Menin (16:23):
Matt Kramer, great wine writer, called it somewhereness. I love that expression. It's the somewhereness of a wine.
[[music]]
I have a question for you. When I was interviewing Joseph Brinkley about biodynamics and regenerative agriculture at Bonterra, I asked him what the difference was because different wineries have different definitions that they're working with, and when I asked him about the difference between biodynamics and regenerative, he said it wasn't the vineyard practices, it was the people practices, and I was really interested in that and what that means and could you speak to that a little bit for me?
Jess Baum (17:13):
Absolutely. What we practice on our vineyards in Mendocino is Regenerative Organic Certified viticulture. We are constantly looking at what the term regenerative means and how to define it. It is a term that only really started to be used more broadly around eight years ago. While it's important to note that it's been practiced by indigenous peoples for centuries and millennia, and so what I'm going to speak about is specific to regenerative organic certified agriculture. For us, the crowning jewel of that is social fairness. Regenerative Organic Certification is a three pillar approach and there is verification for each pillar. Soil health is one of them, animal welfare is another, and what we consider perhaps the most unique is social fairness.
(18:08):
And so in service of this certification, we invite auditors annually to audit our social fairness practices for our employees. An auditor comes in and actually anonymously interviews our farm workers, and it keeps us connected and committed to our treatment of our people. What I love about this certification, it's really honoring what we've been talking about. It's honoring the connection of human and agriculture and that connection between human and nature and human as part of the ecology. And it's saying that you can't take the human out of the equation and say, well, we take great care of our soil organisms, but we don't really look at how we treat our people.
Sophie Menin (18:56):
It's so interesting you say that because one of the important themes that came up in the book for me as you started to look at all the different ways people who work consciously in the work is that vineyard workers are highly skilled workers. Pruning a vine is highly skilled work. Knowing when to pick is skilled work, and so taking care of your vineyard workers is an ethical imperative and it's a quality imperative too because they're essential to producing a fine wine.
Jess Baum (19:29):
Absolutely. I totally agree with you. I have one more question for you, and that is, can you describe your perfect day at work?
Sophie Menin (19:39):
As a wine writer, my perfect day of work is when I get to travel because you see things you can't experience at home writing at your computer. I remember being in Sicily on a tour with Planeta, and we had gone from their Noto Vineyard to their vineyard in Vittoria and Andrea Occhipinti came and it was harvest time, and she brought her harvest crew and they were artists from all over Europe who had come to help out and then to listen to her and Alessio Planeta talk about their fermentation as we were there tasting the wines and really experiencing the changes in light from the different areas in Sicily and how that produces different kinds of wine, that it just brings you into the culture of wine making in a way that is impossible sitting at your desk. And the privilege of those kinds of experiences, they're invaluable. It's so special, and you almost have to pinch yourself when you can be there among that.
Jess Baum (20:44):
Beautifully said. Thank you so much Sophie for taking the time to talk to us today and for bringing your incredibly intentional sense of connection to food and wine. We really appreciate it.
Sophie Menin (20:56):
Thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Archer (21:19):
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 U.S. 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. Original music for the podcast was composed by Mendocino County musician, Julian Sterling. Thanks again to today's guest, Sophie Menin. Her new book, A Year in the Vineyard, is available on June 4th. If you liked this episode, please rate, review, and share our podcast to help others find it too. Thanks again for tuning in to season two.