Ep. 610 Monty Waldin on Italian Wine Podcast's 4th Year Birthday Bash! | Biodynamic & Organic

Italian wine podcast. Chinchin with Italian wine people. Before the show, here's the shout out to our new sponsor, Ferrowind. Ferrowind has been the largest wine shop in Italy since nineteen twenty. Have generously supplied us with our new t shirt. Would you like one? Just donate fifty euros, and it's all yours. Plus, we'll throw in our new book jumbo shrimp kite international grape varieties in Italy. For more info, go to Italiancoin Podcasts dot com and click done or check out Italian wine podcast on Instagram. I feel as if I'm I'm having, one of those menopausal hot flashes, but I haven't reached menopause yet. I've been doing that for the summer several months, and Savona's quite worried about me. Honestly, know, I I literally will put a pen down and turn around and then get an album and know it where I put it, you know. Oh, I thought you meant menopause or hot flashes. Oh, I can do anything for a hot flash. I'll tell you. Round one. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. Today to honor the Italian wine podcast for fear anniversary, I get to talk to Monte Walden who has been with us since the first show on March second two thousand seventeen, I think. And this is very exciting. Monty is a wine writer, a TV personality, a photographer, and a biodynamic wine proponent, who is usually the interviewer on this podcast. Never the interviewee. So, yeah. Hi, Monty. Hi there. How are you doing? How is that your name? Joy, Joy. I think that we've met before, haven't we? Jesus Monty. I've already ruined your podcast. I'm afraid. I know. Round two. I have questions. I promise. So before we get going, I wanted to tell you, no. I wanted you to try. Oh god. Round three. So before we do, I wanted you to tell me a little bit about how you got into wine and how you came to live in Montecino Montecino. That's the reason why we do this every day. The the short one about how I got into wine was, my French wasn't particularly good at school. I went to boarding school, very posh, boarding school, but very liberal boarding school. And, my French teacher who was actually French, her husband was the physics teacher, the one of my very bad subjects. And she said I really must go to France for a summer, to to brush up my French and ended up in Bordeaux, to cut a long story short, by purely by accident, although I had made wine myself at home from sort of those kits that you used to get from the chemist or the, I didn't wait till the pharmacy. And, because my cousin, my my father's side of the family, he made mine at home, and I thought I'd try and give it a give it a try myself. Never dreaming that I would end up in Bordeaux. And I just found I had a bit of an affinity for wine, and it's one of the things I I felt I could understand quite easily, relatively. I wasn't always the best student at school. I mean, I wasn't, like, completely stupid, but I wasn't, I wasn't a brilliant student put it that way. And it just felt like a good fit for me, and I kept going back to Bordeaux and then various other places around the world where there were vineyards trying to learn as much as I could. And and there we go, and I got into writing a little bit by accident can't remember how I got into writing, but somebody asked me to write an article or something, and, ended up writing for I've written for Chances and Decanto and various other publications. And I feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. I mean, in the wine industry, you, you get to travel and see beautiful places, you meet really interesting people who have multi skills, you know, whether it's about biology or chemistry or geology, will find the financial side of of of wine. So this is a multi discipline game, really. And every day's a every day's a from Bay, I never ever had a single regret about, being involved in the wine industry. I do feel really, really privileged and it's fun. And, so, yeah, here we go. Thanks a question. Okay. Well, let's let's let's move along. Let's talk about cow so, as you know, okay, I've seen your BBC four. I think it is a series where you buy a vineyard. It's Chris. Yeah. BBC is the is the pub it broadcaster, which everybody can watch or have reached to. And then it's actually was channel. There's a a documentary on on channel four called Chateau Montee where I rented a a vineyard in in the Rousillon region of France and tried to had a lady, a helper in in in in inverted commas. She wasn't hugely helpful to be honest. I mean, she's not really involved in wine or really that interested in wine, but, anyway, we, made a made a wine there, and, it was broadcast as a six part series on prime time TV and on channel four in the UK. And I think it got obviously screened, I think, you know, probably in other countries as well. But that was another another fun project as well, to be honest. Yeah. I'm super entertaining, and I couldn't stop watching it. You did all sorts of crazy things, like deterring wild boar by asking the huntsman to pee in jars so that you could spray it around the vineyard. Yeah. That kind of works. It does work though because they're very obviously, they've been spent their whole life is snuff snuffling around at ground level. So if you pee in strategic areas, then they'll know that the humans are around, and they'll be just a little bit more, a little bit more careful, a bit more wary, and we'll steer a little bit further away. I mean, they can cause a lot of damage to vineyards, and they can certainly cause a lot of damage to humans. I mean, they can easily kill you, not because they want to, but just because they're scared, and they'll bump you out of the way with the tasks and all the rest of them. You can get trampled and and end up with a punctured lung or something, which is not really what you want. So, Yeah. A little bit of micturation in the vineyard. It's never never a bad thing before. You know, it was fascinating, honestly. And then you collected cow paths from local farmers to create your biodynamic preparations. And the one that you were mixing that I okay. You were fermented cow poo and nettle and chamomile to make a tea, but then I wanted to ask you what what was that spray for exactly? And what are some other preparations that are quite useful? Because, you know, it's it's it's really interesting, you know, all of these things. I mean, it it seems complicated, but it it's also if you know how to do it, it seems like anybody could do it. Yeah. I mean, the teas are really are actually, as you said, they're really easy. I mean, if you can make a cup of tea, at home, you can certainly make a tea for a vineyard. So, anybody that drinks chamomile tea before they go to bed, they do it as a relaxing thing. You know, my partner, she's a female. Sometimes she feels a bit, you know, every so often, and she will have a chamomile tea. And it's the same for your vineyard. If your vineyard is stressed because it's very bright or very hot, dry conditions, just spraying a, a tea or a teasan, as they call it, like Camama on the vineyard just gives them a little bit of a respite. And stops them from, from stressing. And it's a very cost effective way of, of treating your vineyard with, I think, apart from respect, but also with, with common sense You don't need to blast the vineyard every five seconds, but, these teas are very useful. I mean, nettle tea is a very important one. You know, nettles have been important in, human development. They're full of nutrients, you know, nettlesoup, that kind of thing. And so if you spray the soil or the vine with a metal, infusion or tea, obviously, when it, you make a tea with warm or hot water, but you don't spray it when the, when the liquid is still hot, you let it cool down, obviously. But you're just giving them a little bit of a boost. And just stop them stressing. And, if you do get stress in a vine, that can, that can affect the flavor. You can maybe get slightly edgy tannins or a little bit of unripeness or greenness. So it's, again, it's a cost effective way of of, working with your vineyard using plants. Nettle to cure your plants, which are the vines, and that for for me makes a lot of common sense. I'm I'm assuming the fermented cow poo, it does something. And you put it in horns, and I wanna know why you put it in horns, and why it so good for the vines because it's like the most famous thing when it comes to biodynamics. Yeah. Well, the preparation you're talking about is called Hall manure. And basically what you do is you take some cow manure. So from a lady cow, a female cow, preferably when she's in milk, and you put, that manure into a cow horn, which is like a sort of a sheath, and you bury it at about, I don't know, a foot or or more in some nice earthy ground, and you do that over winter, you buried an autumn and do it and dig it up in the springtime. And the idea there is that you're gonna create a sort of, enhanced manure that when you mix it in water by hand or or just stirring it with even a stirring machine, you stir it a little way, for an hour, and then you spray it lightly on the vineyard on the soil. And the idea there is it's really encouraging the the the vine or the any plant that you're growing at at the time to dig down and encourage it to dig down and make it more complex or deeper or both the root system. And that's good for the vine is like a foundation for a house. If you've got solid foundations, which is solid root system, your vine can it can start choosing the nutrients that it actually wants to absorb or use in terms of its own particular growth. And that's, really, really important. One issue that we have in in all farming, not just wine, growing is very compact soil and by spraying this, nutrient and microorganism rich spray on the soil is you're creating tiny tiny little pockets of air in the soil to make it more spongy, which makes drainage. More easy, which means that there's less erosion, with less erosion, there's less loss of nutrients that your vines need. And if your vines don't have nutrients, they start stressing, and then more disease resistant. So it's a really simple way of keeping the the understory, the, the the the root system of the vineyard, the foundations of the house, nice and safe and strong. And it's very cost effective. I mean, to make a to make a horn and you spray with a with a horn and a bit of a cow cow pat. I mean, it's, it's just like minimal cost, I mean, I don't know, maybe you get a a a cow horn from a neighboring farmer for free, and with a cow manure, which is for free. You can do it yourself. You don't need any machinery. A kid can do it. An old person can do it. All you need is a shovel. And a bit of elbow grease. And I like again the idea that you can be entirely self reliant. You're not, feeding money to a faceless multinational, concern producing chemical fertilizer, artificial fertilizers you're doing it all yourself. Which is better for your bottom line. It's better for your local community, and it's better for the soil, and it's better for the for the wine itself or the vines and the wine. So it makes sense again for me. So, okay, the other thing I wanted to ask is in between the rows, this is another biodynamic thing that I noticed you you talk about, you know, clover and and putting, you know, bumper crops. I think you call them in between Cover crops. Cover crops. Sorry. That's okay. We do actually put them in with bumper cars. We actually go through them as the vine rose sowing the seeds for the cover crops on bumper, no, I'm checking. But this cover crops, so basically, but people don't know what cover crops, I'm sure you will do, but, between the vine rows, you can obviously plow the vine rows, but you really don't always want to do that, and also situation, sometimes you need to. But the idea is by sowing what are called cover crops between the rows, you can sow flowers which attract beneficial insects, which means that it's much harder for potential pests to colonize completely the vineyard. They may there may be a few pests, but not, too many because there's competition. You can sow cover crops that produce deep roots under the into this into the soil, which allows air oxygen to get into the soil, allows better drainage. So there's less erosion. And you can sow covered crops to provide certain nutrients like nitrogen, for example, if you sow nitrogen fixing cover crops, they'll give a boost, to the vineyard and the vine. We have a a weak vineyard that lacks food, and that's not always the case often in wine, it would do tend to go but you're just providing your nutrients for for the vines. And again, the the nice thing about these things is with soluble fertilizers, the vine absorbs those soluble fertilizers or chemical fertilizers by osmosis when it rains that they're soluble. And the vine doesn't can't really stop itself from taking up those nutrients and you get more vigor, you get thinnest cell walls in the in the vine, and it's, it's leaves, and it's, and the grapes, so you have, more risk of rot because the, the the vine is less robust. Whereas in the organic and biodynamic way of doing it with cover crops, you saw some nice plants between the vineyard. Some of them will give nitrogen to the vineyard, and the vine can choose how much nitrogen it might want to have. It might be a bit hungry, and it can choose, what it eats. It's not being force fed. Again, if you wanna talk about intelligent wine growing, you gotta have intelligent vines and vines that can choose what they eat are more intelligent, I think, than a vine that is on a drip feed. My question is, I I don't know where I heard this, but some wineries are actually planting foods you know, vegetables and things in between the rows. Is that is that something? Yeah. I mean, some of the some of the crop, I mean, cover crops like, I mean, if you sow barley, for example, you could use that to make, obviously, barley, you can use barley for very things. The that normally, though, what you don't want is too much compaction between between the vine rows. Normally, you would with, with something like barley, you would actually cut that in, some stage during the season, and that when the stalks of the body fall over the fall to the ground, they protect it. So if it rains before, let's say, in the in the autumn, then you've got those the body aren't flattened on the ground, you'll get less erosion because there'll be less splashing for example, and slowly, but surely the, stalks of the barley will rot down in a non bad way, and they'll become almost in the soil eventually. So it's kind of quite a joined up, simple way of managing your vineyard. Also we're having cover crops between your your vineyard, between your vine rows means that you get less erosion because if you have a naked vineyard with just bare soil, and it rains and you're on a slope and most the best vineyards in the world generally are on sloping, terrain. If there's no ground cover when it rains, you are gonna lose your your soil. And so having a carpet or a mat of vegetation that just buffers falling rain from above means that there's less risk of of er of erosion. Once you once your soil is gone, you can't go down to the local do it yourself, garden center and say, please, can you give me some three million year old or six five five million year old pleistocene play please because it's not gonna he's not gonna have it in stock. I'm afraid. So thank you. Is it something that's viable for larger, like, economically speaking? Is it, you know, can large vineyards go biodynamic, or is it just not feasible? Like, what do you say to that? No. I mean, we've got some very large vineyards now, like in Chile, for example, that are about six hundred hectares that are that are biodynamic. Doing biodynamic is actually very, very easy. It's similar to organics in the sense that, you don't, organics is a lot about, don't do this. Don't do that. So don't use herbicides. Don't use systemic, sprays. I don't use x, y, z. And Viynamics is a little bit of that, but it's more about do this, do this, and do this. So do make sure that you have cover crops, between your your vine rose biodiversity for, to make sure that there's no erosion that you're getting air into the soil. And all of these things are very So multitasking, cover cropping is actually doing two or three things that are beneficial for your vineyard, not just one thing, in your vineyard. And, really, you wanna see your vineyard as a, an entire organism. So that's not just the vineyard bit of your land. But it's all the land that you have, maybe it's spare fields or a bit of forest or just a bit of scrub ground. All of that is part of your terroir or everything. It's not like the vineyard is just the only thing you're thinking about. You're you're saying, yeah, we have a vineyard. Is what gives us gives us the money, but we have a little bit of forest, we have a little bit of biodiversity. What can we do to make our little bit of land that's not vineyard? What can we do with that to improve in the situation of our vineyard? Or and if it's not directly about the vineyard, just about the the the land entity that you have in general, in terms of biodiversity, because the more biodiversity you have in terms of, I know, birds, insects, microbiology, the more complex your Tairwa becomes, there's more of a story to tell when the journalist come around, but there's also more of a story that you can benefit from by treating your land mass as something very, very diverse and diverse pieces of that land mass. Some of it's productive, the vineyard, some of it is wild, maybe. And, it's a nice way again of looking at your estate about you see your tent wire in a different way. It's not just about the vineyard. It's about the whole land holding that you have. How how long does it actually take for a regular vineyard to become biodynamic to convert? Like, a year or two years? Okay. So legally, it's three years. So if you're using herbicides and pesticides, etcetera. You switch to biodynamics, you have to stop using those. And three years left, you get certified, which is done, which is done by an independent body, which is called a certification body. So you can be certified organic or certified biodynamic. And they they follow international rules or national rules. That takes, three years from start to finish. And so in the in the beginning of the fourth year, you are, you can then, say that you are certified organic or certified biodynamic. Okay. Biodynamics, of course, is connected to Rudolph steiner and this sort of religious side. Right? And so what do you say to people to separate the sort of esoteric stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I just see I I don't see it as any kind of religion. I mean, I I'm quite cartesian. I mean, I I got into biodynamics because I tasted the biodynamic wine, and it was so much better than the other wines that I've been tasting at the time, which was in Bordeaux, and I'd spent a lot of time in Bordeaux. I'm in the practical area of the biodynamic, world. I'm not really into the really esoteric stuff. I mean, people who are a little bit esoteric, that's absolutely fine. But I'm quite cartesian about that. I see Biodynamics as a bunch of tools that I can or cannot use, and I using those tools, I want to understand them, how how I can get the best out of them. And also empirically, you can see the differences that Biodynamics makes in terms of, I said, before, you know, stronger routing, vines that are not over vigorous. They've they've found their balance, that the, the ripeness, levels of the pip, as well as the skin and the juice all tie up. So you've got extra. It's in terms of red wines, for example, you've got red wines, which are obviously maceration wines after soak, in the tank with everything with the pips and all the rest. So if you have unripe pips and alcohol, which is being made by the yeast during fermentation, alcohols are solvents. So if you have green pips because your vineyard wasn't in balance, you're gonna get green tannins. So, and with Biodynamics, you're not gonna get that if you do it properly. Obviously, if you don't do it properly, you maybe not get the best results, but you probably get slightly better results than say a conventional farmer. And, for me, the, obviously, the mantra that wine is made in the vineyard, it's very much like that in biodynamics because you really can do so much with the very basic biodynamic tools in terms of deeper routing, more complex routing, more erect, physiological, the way the vine actually grows itself. It's if you look at its shoots, rather than the shoots drooping over the top wire, shoots are really pointing up towards the sun. The roots are really deep or more complex. So you have a a vine that's really extending itself. It's got long legs. It's got high arms, and it's got a a a tummy in the middle, which is where the grapes are. And that has a really strong stomach, you know, somebody punches that stomach. It's really robust. So this idea that you've got, plants that are looking after themselves, they're growing in the right way. They they know where to put their roots, they know where to put their shoots, they know how many grapes they can carry, to do the job properly because their job is not making wine, their job is about making ripe pips in their in their various quotes to have babies, and that's really what they're trying to do. And Biodynamics makes that a little bit easier for them. It just allows them that freedom to to do what they really want to do. And and I think the majority I think of Biodynamic growers, as I know, haven't been following it for a long, long time. The vast majority switched to biodynamics because they they like the taste of the wines that they have. They're not really into the woo woo stuff. They they're doing it because they're in a results driven business and they get results with biodynamics. And a lot of them say, Monty, I don't know how this works really, but it does. It's not very scientific, but that's what people say. So I was going to ask you a couple more questions, but you know what, we're running out of time because we have, you have an not me. You have an interview with, another producer in about ten minutes. So I'll skip to the end. I wanted to ask you, actually, Oh, there's so many things I wanna ask you. I I just I don't even have the time. Okay. So what's your favorite interview? Over four years? What interview? I don't. Honestly, I just don't know. I mean, I I I've I've had interviews where I kind of not dread dive, but I thought, well, I don't know how this one's gonna go. And often the ones that you are a little bit fearful about are the are the best ones. I mean, I've been so many. I mean, I think I don't know how many interviews I've done, but I get when I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time literally going around board and knocking on people, knocking on people obviously, with a pen and a piece of paper, at the time, and and with a really, probably horrible haircut in those days. But it's just I'm curious about how people make wine. It's it's like, I guess if a foodie would would love to hear the recipe for, well, how did you make that amazing omelette? You know? And you wanna know where did the eggs come from? What color was the shell? How big was the yoke? How did you crack it open? What temperature? You know, all that sort of stuff? And tonight asking why makers questions. And, and they often not all of them, but the vast majority are very happy and very very happy to share their knowledge and tell you exactly what they do and why, and the best winemakers, I think, have a grasp of the technical aspects of winemaking. Obviously, it's a it's a living product, you know, without yeast and and bacteria and and all sorts of things, it doesn't come to life. And you have to be empirical as well in terms of the costs as well of of the actual grape growing, you know, in terms of your labor costs and and all the rest of it. So you have to be a multitasker as a wine grower. You need to, embrace many disciplines, you know, from biology to geology, finance, marketing, all sorts of things, you know, people are having an affinity with people, whether they're your your, whether the your employees or that your importer or distributor and maybe a foreign country that you can't get to or maybe you don't speak the language so well with. And I think it's a marvelous industry, full of a lot of very, very interesting people and interviewing people is I find fascinating I like to hear. People stories and I like to see hear them bring to life what their everyday reality is. I find it really interesting. Alright. So penultimate question then. This is a little bit on the lighter side. So I had to try an dig some dirt up on you, which I found nothing, but I did find a Beedale's website, your old school. And it said that you were asked to bring something you had made to the Beedale's entry tests in nineteen eighty. And a twelve year old, you arrived clutching a bottle of your homemade orange wine. Can you please elaborate on how you made this concoction? And you worked well. Yeah. I think it was made with some fruit juice and some, I think fruit juice and a bit of water and some yeast. It was a very long time ago, but I had to bring, I brought I had made a chess table, I think, from my, at my previous school, and I brought that, and I brought some homemade wine. And somehow, They allowed me into the school. It's a very creative school. It's called Bideos, and it's a coeducational school, supporting school, and you could wear your own clothes. If you're a girl, you could wear a skirt or jeans or whatever it was, you didn't have to wear a uniform, lord of the boys. And, it was a great place to to be because it allowed you whatever you were good at, you're encouraged to follow it. And I wasn't always particularly academic, and I wasn't the worst in the in in in the class, but as I said, I would be it was because my French wasn't that good. I'm a French teacher who was French, told me to go to France and, thanks to her, Odille. She, she managed to get me to France, and, and I discovered wine and, never looked back. So thanks, Odille. Cool. Well, honestly, I appreciate you, like, talking to Humering me. Let's, let's say, thank you for humoring me, and something I didn't mention. You had written a book on Biodynamics. So my last thing will be to ask you where you can find your book. What's what is it called? And, you know, tell me where we can find you. Okay. So the website is it's pretty it's free. It's a free website. It's not like a Playwall. It's just called, w w dot chateau monte dot com. And the book that I've written, I've written quite a few books, but the book, if you want to know how Biodynamics actually is is is done, it's a book called biodynamic Wine and it's published in Oxford from a company called InfiniteID. And so I think it's probably about fifteen pounds, US pounds, something like that. But it tells you everything about Python. You read some of it. You narrated on the the podcast as well. You narrated some chapters from that here as well with I okay. Oh, yeah. It was a while ago, wasn't it? Yeah. It just tells you about the lunar cycles and the practical aspects of Biodynamics. It's really not the fundamentalist book. It's it's it's very, very down to earth and easy to read. If I say so myself, I'm not a Taliban as it when it comes to biodynamic for me. It's a tool, and I kind of explain the tools, and, you can make your own minds up about whether it's, woo, woo, or whether it's common sense, or or whether probably it's a a little bit of both But, anyway, and I got into bias, as I said, because I've worked for conventional wineries, and organic wineries in various places, and the best quality for me was the biodynamic wineries that I worked for. And that's how I got into it because, for me, having tried all the different ways of making the cake, the biodynamic cake was the best one. Cool. Alright. No. Thank you so much. And, yeah, I guess that's that's all she wrote. I'd have one last question, you know, after four years of working with us here and you know, having Stevie Kim as your how scare how scary? One to ten? How scary Stevie to work for? Three hundred and seventy five. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, HimalIFM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time,