Cultural Insurrection by Jonathan Nossiter

Author:Jonathan Nossiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Biodynamical

ONE OF THE UNQUESTIONABLE GRANDFATHERS of the natural wine movement is Rudolf Steiner—even for winegrowers like Elodie and Raphaël, who remain skeptical of his guru status and don’t follow his agricultural practices, known as biodynamics, in a literal way. An Austrian philosopher active between the two world wars, Steiner viewed agriculture as a potential salvation for people ravaged by unbridled urbanization and what he considered a general loss of the sacred. The link between the cultivation of the land and one’s personal cultivation was self-evident for him. He had witnessed how the First World War ignited two dangerous tendencies. The first was the emphasis on specialization, which limited people’s ability to view any situation as an interconnected whole. The second was the introduction of murderous chemicals, destined to cut people off from their ancestral roots in the earth, from their active role in nature, from themselves. In what he called Anthroposophy (“the wisdom of man”), Steiner proposed a vision radically opposed to the compartmentalization and fragmentation of industrial modernity. He wrote widely across numerous fields. His views on education, for example, have spawned the Waldorf schools, present across the globe and known for their emphasis on the interdependence of all human gestures, physical, spiritual, and intellectual. At a Waldorf school, a child, like an adult among the vines, can’t simply work on one aspect of a given thing, but is encouraged to take into account an entire ecosystem. Any given gesture is only a part of a larger whole. Children of course study geometry. But they will also become conscious of the geometry of their own bodies and of their physical activities. And of the natural geometry inherent in a plant cultivated in the classroom.

As for agriculture, it’s not difficult to imagine why Steiner insisted on polyculture and biodiversity—practices that had defined agriculture during its ten-thousand-year existence. That is, until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution with its unbridled materialism and obsession with productivity. Steiner wrote as early as the 1920s that it was suicidal for both man and the planet to cultivate a single plant to the exclusion of all others. Not to take into account the vast interconnection of animal, vegetal, geological, and bacterial life would prove devastating.

He anticipated by more than a half century the ecological catastrophe that the agrochemical industry was to provoke: the death of soils, the nutritional death of the resulting fruit, and the premature death of those who consume it. Meanwhile, a Frankensteinian society, compensating hysterically, created chemical cocktails to retard the death of men but hasten the death of man.

Farmers and winegrowers who practice Steinerian biodynamics are as different from each other in both their theory and practice as the thousands of philosophers who have drawn on Plato (say Descartes and Schopenhauer) or all the filmmakers (Kubrick and Visconti) who have been influenced by Eisenstein.

I couldn’t imagine winegrowers more unlike each other in temperament, desire, and understanding than Aubert de Villaine, proprietor of the world’s most venerated (and expensive) wine, Romanée-Conti

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