Biodynamic wine article and question

Eric Asimov's recent column in the New York Times entitled When the Wine Is Green deals with organically and biodynamically grown wines. It had an interesting factoid about biodynamic wines which I've heard many times before . . .

Biodynamic agriculture is essentially what the wine writer Jamie Goode has called “a supercharged system of organic farming,” in which the farm is viewed as a self-sustaining, self-regulating eco-system. While biodynamics has become notorious for seemingly weird practices, like filling cow horns with dung and burying them in vineyards, and aligning certain chores with phases of the moon and stars, several scientific studies have shown it can be effective even if the underlying reasons for this are not yet understood.

Now, I've never encountered any of these scientific studies, but I suspect that the application of biodynamic growing and winemaking was unlikely to be randomly assigned to winemakers and certainly was not done blind (with the winemakers not knowing whether or not they were applying biodynamic practices). For purposes of establishing causation, this leaves all sorts of possible confounds that could explain increases in wine quality that have nothing to due with the biodynamic practices themselves--chief among them that only really odd people were originally willing to take a stab at biodynamic winemaking, and it might be odd people that make better wine--whether burying cow horns with dung or addressing their grapes in archaic plural subjunctive verb forms. (The organic side of biodynamics I would think has a real effect--it's the above-and-beyond organics eco-philosophical accoutrements I've found hard to swallow.)

The reason I bring this up is I wonder if a lot of the attention the spread of biodynamic practices will result in a devaluing of the 'brand' of biodynamics (and not meet the hyped expectations of biodynamic's boosters). When I hear that major corporate winemakers (eg, Benziger) are going biodynamic, I find it hard to believe that any quality differences seen when the early adopters switched to biodynamics will be repeated when the bigger players switch over. Any thoughts?

I'd love to see these scientific studies.

Setting aside for a moment who does the evaluation and whether it is double-blind, I've never really understood what the criterion of success is when evaluating BD. Wine quality? Does quantity come into the equation? In a business case it would have to be both. Then, of course, there are costs associatied with BD, to be balanced against a price premium. And how do you flatten quality out into a single dimension so you can say it has improved. And what do you compare it with? A fair comparison woudl be putting an equal amount of effort into another methodology. And over how many years do you assess the changes over? Etc, etc...

And, yes, I do think the BD brand will become devalued. But there will always be another bag of tricks to look forward to.

I would hardly call Benziger a major corporate winemaker. And Benziger "went biodynamic" several years ago, btw.

I would hardly call Benziger a major corporate winemaker. And Benziger "went biodynamic" several years ago, btw.

My bad, poorly chosen example. What makes it worse is that I now remember visiting Benziger a few years back when they told me they were biodynamic.

Not sure what led to that brain hiccup . . . and it wasn't even me confusing Benziger with Beringer (though I've probably done that too in the not-so-distant past).

Thanks for the reality check, Hoke.

interesting factoid

It's an interesting factoid that factoid was coined to mean something that wasn't a fact.

From Wikipedia 'The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"'

It's an interesting factoid that factoid was coined to mean something that wasn't a fact.

Indeed that is interesting, but I think Bernard Shaw probably had more influence on language for many members of my generation than did Norman Mailer--as did his network, CNN, that repackaged a factoid as 'a trivial or insignificant fact; a fact that is amusing or entertaining but has little serious value', per Random House.

Oh, and sorry for the pun on Shaw's name, but I couldn't resist . . .