Episode 170: Reviving Degraded Soils Through Biological Farming with Jake Neustadt and Morgan...

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. We, either fortunately or unfortunately, we are living in the times of the ancient Chinese proverb, may you live in interesting times. These are certainly interesting times. I think for many of us, they're very challenging times. And you know, it's in those, those interesting and challenging times that you have both the greatest risk, the greatest resistance to change and the greatest opportunities. It's kind of this, this interesting contrast where the, you have the greatest opportunities that are, that are emerging in these challenging times and also the, the greatest risk for many of people who are already well established. And so it's, and this is true across the entire agricultural sector and perhaps in almost no space is this more true than in wine production, where we have dramatic decreases in wine consumption and particularly in lower grade wines. As I understand it, that's really the, the top, the premium wines that are the best performing. And so there's, that's where the opportunity is and also where the challenge exists is how do you get there? So I'm delighted to have this conversation today with Morgan and Jake. Thank you both for being here. I'm not going to try to communicate your story. You've got lots of different things going on. Tell us a bit about the scope of your work, what all you're involved with and how you got here.

Yeah, so Jake and I are with Bedrock Wine Company, a winery that I founded back in 2007. When I started, it was just me working out of a 550 square foot chicken coop, fermentations outside, everything done by hand. And gradually we've grown up a little bit. And, you know, the overall goal of the winery since day one, though, has been to work with really old vineyards in California. I think what people don't realize is that we have some of the greatest sort of viticultural or agricultural treasures in the world and that we have vines that are in the ground that date to the 1880s. So some of the very first vines that were planted on resistant rootstock, so to a root louse called phylloxera. And then we even have vines that are own, rooted in very sandy soils that date to the 1890s. And within these vineyards, we have incredible genetic diversity. So at our home Bedrock vineyard, for instance, we have over 29 different interplanted varieties. And among all of the vineyards we oversee and farm, we have over 50, including varietals that have no matching genetic fingerprint and worldwide databases, which means they're extinct. Where they originally came from. In Europe, but they still exist in our vineyards in, in California. So, you know, I feel like in some ways we're kind of curators of a museum on top of, you know, hopefully making delicious, you know, soulful wine for people to enjoy. And what we really love about that too, is we really make wine that is truly and distinctly Californian. When you have vineyards that are kind of based around a real melting pot of varieties like Zinfandel, which is Croatian in origin, and then varieties from Spain and Portugal and France and Italy and Central Europe, that hodgepodge of varieties only exists in California. So it's sort of one wine that we make here that we really aren't looking elsewhere for inspiration, which is not something you can say if you make Pinot Noir, the great Pinot Noirs originally are from Burgundy. If you make Cabernet, the first great Cabernets are from Bordeaux. But when you make these old vine field blended wines, they're really unique to California.

Morgan, you got the company started. Jake, what has been your journey and story? What got you involved working with these, these old wine vineyards?

So I came out of school from actually University of California, Davis, so one of the more well known wine programs. But I came out just as a very green undergrad working in cellars, making wine, but then found myself wanting to get into the field and actually accepting a job on a field crew for a full season down in the southern island of New Zealand in the Otago region. So I worked, shoot, thinning, fruit, thinning all the way to harvesting for a full season in New Zealand. And that led me back to California, keeping in viticulture. So I took a job, a one year job at a winery called Ridge Winery, which was one of the, along with Ravenswood, which is in Morgan's family, one of the original old vine makers of Old Vine Vineyards, of these mixed Zinfandel vineyards, also one of the early wineries that pushed organic practices. So I worked a full year at Ridge, and through the connection of Ridge and the Historic Vineyard Society, which is another thing to talk about. But both Ridge and Bedrock are in the Historic Vineyard Society. And my mentor at Ridge, David Gates, who's their president of Viticulture, connected me with Morgan because essentially at that time, which was 2015, Bedrock was making the same production that it is now, but with half the people with Morgan, was overseeing all the. All the vineyards that we had that we were farming. So essentially I got hoisted onto Morgan as Here's someone who can help you with this project.

We refer to David Gates. At Ridge, oftentimes as kind of the Yoda of the wine industry. So when he calls and says, hey, we've got this extremely promising intern who may be the best intern we've ever had at Ridge, you. You pay attention. And. And thankfully we did because Jake has really been instrumental in kind of taking what I kind of hoped for on the broad level and really on the day to day implementing it and looking at it. And it's really been, you know, my right hand. As we've sort of gone through the trials and tribulations of moving these old vineyards, many of which have been very traditionally farmed via a lot of tillage, usually no cover crops, oftentimes dry land farmed, and moving those into, you know, non till organic systems with holistic grazing practices, um, and all that good stuff like figuring out how we can run a roller crimper in the vineyard and do all of that stuff. So, you know, we've learned a lot over the last, you know, 10, 11 years as we've, you know, weathered droughts, we've got wet seasons, you know, but every year I feel like we come out, we've learned an enormous amount, which is also what makes it so fun in many ways. I'll also say it's very rare that I don't walk a vineyard with Jake and I'm going home to look something up because he's already like engaged with a new idea that I haven't even thought about. So that's always really, really special.

Morgan, tell us a bit about the, the scope or the scale of, of Ben. Of bedrock. What, what scale are you operating on? Just to give us some perspective for the different things that you're trying.

Yeah, so there's not a lot of old vineyards left in California, so we kind of have to go to where they are. So they're sort of smaller pockets and they're quite spread out. So our sort of home core vineyard is bedrock vineyard right in the middle of Sonoma valley. We have 152 acres in total there. 33 acres are the 1888 planting. So that's actually one of the largest chunks of old vines left in Northern California. But then we farm vineyards up in North Sonoma county, closer to Healdsburg. We have one vineyard in Napa. Then we also farm in Contra Costa county, which is out in, in Antioch, which is actually just. It's surrounded by warehouses and tract homes, but there's 1890s planted vines and sand right on the delta there. And then we also have a vineyard that we farm in Lodi. So sort of all told, we're, you know, close to, you know, 300 acres, but spread out across a pretty wide geographic swath.

Jake, when, when you think about, if you have that geographic distribution, and Morgan mentioned a key point earlier, you have these historic mines that, and historical vineyard management, where you have soils that have been tilled for decades or perhaps centuries plus that have potentially become quite degraded. What are some of the challenges and how historical cultural management looked like, and what are you transitioning it to? What does it look like today and what do you hope for it to look like in the future?

Right. It's a big question. And every one of these vineyards that we've taken on to rehab has had such a different past. And because of their vastly different climates and soils and context, the plan has been very different, but the trajectory is always the same, or that the set of goals is always the same, but, but onto different contexts. So I'll take Bedrock as an example in Sonoma. So Bedrock has a history unique from some of these older vineyards in that it was put onto irrigation relatively early and was actually farmed for white zinfandel during the, during the 1900s or, you know, the 70s, 80s, 90s. And that meant they were pushing these old vines with a lot of water, a lot of fertilizer to be highly productive. So it went in a very, very conventional direction. Whereas some of the other vineyards we take on are still in a very traditional dry farmed context. So that means there's no irrigation. They're usually cross cultivated, or because there's no irrigation, you can till in both directions. So you get this, what's called a dust mulch on the field. So those are just vastly different starting points, neither of which are where we want to be ultimately, but, but they, they yield very different problems and are a much different transition. So that's, that's kind of the broad scope of what we deal with, but.

That'S some of the history of, of where these various plantings are coming from. Where do you hope to take them?

So again, and it's, it's still context dependent in, in that like at Bedrock, for instance, we have water there. Some vineyards we truly don't have water. And if we do, it's salty. At bedrock, we have all the tools to take a very aggressive, I would say, soil rehabilitation approach by using our irrigation system to be able to apply biology and also support the vines through a no till transition. And then out at Evangelo, which is our vineyard in Contra Costa county, we only get an average of 8 to 10 inches of rain out there. It's on sand. Whereas at Bedrock and SONOMA we get 30 inches of rain, both very Mediterranean. So this rain is highly concentrated to the winter months. But so at Evangelo we are taking, we are using the tools we have, which means we are still cross cultivating that vineyard, but we've changed our foliar program dramatically to support the vines from a nutrition standpoint. And that's already brought in a lot of resilience. So we're kind of trying to maximize vine health at a vineyard like that with the tools that we have. And then maybe that'll unlock a next step to be able to look more at what we can do with that, with that soil.

I think fundamentally what we're looking at in both contexts though, is building soil biology back. So when we're in a dry land system like Evangelo vineyard, we almost have to think about that as sort of top down soil biology where we can feed the plant via foliars and hopefully that helps with root exudates and feed biology around the vine roots. While as at Bedrock vineyard, you know, we are very aggressive in trying to build soil organic matter back up the crimping animal integration. And you know, because in that situation, in terms of what we inherited, you know, we had soil organic matter 10 years ago at like zero 3.4%. And we've been able to build that back up to four and a half to 5%. And that obviously has a really profound effect on water capture in water holding. So, you know, we see 20 to 23,000 gallons per acre for every 1% increase in soil organic matter. But then also really critical to that is because we're a non till you here in Northern California, we get hammered with atmospheric rivers, which means we get a lot of our rainfall all at once. So if you're in a system, a traditional tillage system, for instance, and you have tilled your soil, or you've spread compost, tilled your soil, seeded your cover crops, and it's the end of October and then all of a sudden we get nine inches of rain. You have no roots in the ground. You, a lot of that rain runs off. So, you know, for us it's been about, you know, critically capturing that. And you know, we run soil analysis and we also run soil analysis on the surrounding chaparral. So we kind of know where the vineyard started back in the 1880s and what would sort of be a natural soil here. And then we're trying to kind of rebuild and allow kind of Mother Nature to repair itself in some ways via our practices.

I'd like to come back, Jake, to you in a comment that you made about working with foliar applications and kind of building biology from the top down. But before we go there, I want to Morgan, I want to ask you about your vision as a curator of genetic uniqueness and these. These various genetics that are no longer readily. That are not widely grown or no longer readily available necessarily. How. What is your vision of bedrock and the scope of the work that you're doing? Are you expecting to see those genetics become more broadly utilized again at some point in the future? What. What's the vision behind that?

Yeah, I mean, I think some of it is we don't fully know the answer to it, but what we do know is that as we see weather weirding and climate change in certain areas, there's certain varieties that have narrow windows where they do particularly well. And a number of those varieties are the ones that are widely sold and planted throughout the world, like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and Cabernet. So at some point, we're going to have to start thinking about what varieties that we can plant that will be better adapted to the evolution of climate. I mean, it's getting warmer and warmer in Napa, and, you know, you see people that are already starting to plant varieties that hold acid better, that stand up to extreme heat events better. So, you know, in the context of being part of the Historic Vineyard Society, part of what we've done is actually gone through and taken cuttings of all of our rare varieties and then worked with University of California, Davis to clean those up of virus, because a lot of these old vineyards have varying levels of virus in them and then have them available as sort of an open source through their ranches and through their sort of germplasm or whatever you want to call it. So that means that not only do we have California selections of varieties of more popular grapes like Grenache or Syrah or Petite Syrah, we even have 1888 planted cabernet at Bedrock. We have some of the oldest in the world, but also the really rare things like moular and persan and etre de la duit and all these things that we have two, three vines total that we've ever seen in all of California. So I think we're just kind of trying to capture that. I think part of it really feeds our vineyard practice is that, to me, almost all we often get asked how old a vineyard can actually age to and for me, I feel like every old vineyard that I've seen that's gotten torn out has. It's been because of humans. It's because of. They become non economic, but non economic because vines haven't been replanted. As they've died, people have really drawn down on soil, bank accounts, they've created a lot of compaction, they've, you know, they've weakened the vines to the point that they become more and more prone to pest pressure. And all of that then nets to the fact that they are no longer economically viable and then they get torn out and replanted.

So most of those are a reflection of management or all of them, really.

Exactly.

So, yeah, human management. So that's the. Yeah. So, you know, that's the thing here where we really feel strongly that the way that I think based on the health response that we're seeing from our plants over the last six, seven, eight years, as we've moved into these practices, it really feels like we're able to kind of reverse the tide in these vineyards in terms of what their ultimate longevity might be. And that means that we're also going to better be able to preserve, you know, the, the remarkable diversity of genetics that are in there.

You know, there's several directions I'd like to take this discussion, but when you mentioned cleaning up the viruses in the, in the cuttings, I understand that on one level, but if you haven't yet listened to the podcast interview that I did with Benny MacLean from Florida Citrus History and the historical context, once they cleaned up the viruses from genetic propagation is when genetic resilience went down the slide. It's like, what are those viruses doing from a. From a resilience and future disease resistance perspective that we don't fully recognize or appreciate at this point.

That's a really interesting point, John. It's something we talk about all the time because there's this. The wine industry is so focused on virus, and rightfully so, for a lot of reasons, but our old vines have basically every virus you can have, and.

They, they survive, they thrived with them.

Right. And it's. It's a question of. I don't know. Of course, a lot of them were planted into much healthier soil than we're planting vineyards now, but they. And then I don't know what virus load they had when they were planted. I'm sure there was plenty, but they. Right. They don't have any of the issues that we see with young vines being planted with Leafrol 3, for example, which will not ripen, which will not thrive. But then these old vines that have all these viruses, deep roots, all these things do really well. And that is always something I find fascinating.

I don't know how appropriate it is to think of mammalian immunity as an analog here, but when you have. You actually need viral exposure to develop antibiotics, antibiotics to analog viruses and to. To create some immunity and some resistance to. I don't know how appropriate it is to have that conversation, because it's not domain that I'm particularly expert in, but. Or have a lot of knowledge about. But it's. It's certainly something to think about. I think it comes down fundamentally to this different perspective of. Of agriculture and of the microbiome. Is do we have an antibiotic approach or a probiotic approach? Are we collaborating with the microbiome, or do we believe that things need to be sterile to be the most effective?

Absolutely. And I mean, I think in the wine industry, too, that concept really plays very distinctly to the idea of quality. Right. Because the greatest wines in the world, people think, are extremely reflective of their fancy French word, their terroir, where they're grown. So you would think that. And I think this is really what Jake and I kind of think about a lot is a vine that are in better communication, that are working synergistically with the soils that have more alive, soils that have more biology. We feel that in the winery, we see that those wines have a better sense of place. That bedrock almost is more bedrocky now than it was 10 years ago. And which is just a really fascinating thing. Cause it's obviously extremely complex, and you can't reduce it to a single variable or factor. But at the same time, we're seeing not just our vineyards becoming much more resilient to heat events, to droughts, to floods, but that. But also seeing a increase in quality, which is, you know, fundamentally also very important.

So, Morgan, let's build on what you just said. Jake, I'd like to come back to you with. When Morgan is describing the increasing resilience that you're observing, I'm sure you're doing many different things. What, what are. What are the different things that you're doing? What are the effects that you're observing just from a. From a practical implementation and management perspective? You mentioned foliar applications a little bit ago, but I'm sure that they are one piece of. Of a broad number of different things that you're working with.

Right. I'll kind of start. Go through a season, kind of starting with where we're at right now. So we just ended harvest. We just got our first rains the other day. And right before the rains we no till seeded. This is at Bedrock vineyard. So on the whole hundred acres, no till seeded, a highly diverse cover crop blend. So that's essentially all annuals of legumes and forbs and grasses that will grow through to January where we'll bring in our shepherd who helps us out to do non high intensity grazing. So we run about 300 sheep an acre for 24 hours at a time to 48, depending on the amount of biomass, and then move them through. So everything will get bitten and trampled once and then the regrowth that comes back because we tend to get incredible regrowth after the grazing up to, you know, four, four feet plus of COVID crop. And that will get normally crimped with a roller crimper, rolled down or high mode or a combination of both. And the goal is of that in our, in our context is after, you know, after March for us, there's typically no rain until around now, until mid October. So our goal is to create a nice thick mulch layer on the top of the, of the vineyard floor to protect one, to hold moisture in and prolong the moist period for biology. And then also once everything does dry out, just to protect from outright heat and solar radiation. So that takes us through, you know, the summer where we are, you know, focusing on foliar nutrient management, all these things, and then all the way to this time of year where we go back and in seed again. So that's our, I guess that's mostly floor management, but that's a huge piece. And that's what we've been doing for six, seven years consistently is that program.

And was it in that seven year time frame that you built organic matter levels from with these cover crops from half a percentage point or less up to 4 plus.

So that in some ways the transition really started more back in 28 2010, when the vineyard was moved from highly conventional to more what I would call traditional organic viticulture, especially in this, like in the high quality wine region. So that involved a lot of compost, like 3 to 5 tons an acre of compost over the whole hundred acres, spreading that tilling that in seeding a cover crop, growing the huge massive cover crop, knocking that down, disking it in, having bare ground all summer. But that certainly helped a lot at the beginning to bring the soil. Morgan, you'd know better than me. But from that like half percent to more, like two to two and a Half percent organic matter. And then it kind of plateaued until we kind of started the next phase of practices.

I think that was the real tricky thing is we began to get really frustrated with sort of traditional organic practices that were so tillage base because it really put a ceiling on our capacity to build soil organic matter. And also, just from a carbon standpoint, it's like you grow these huge cover crops after you've spread a ton of compost, and all that compost is arrived by truck, 24 tons at a time from a yard, and all the stuff that's upstream of that. So it's really intensive in terms of inputs. It's really hard to sometimes get it all timed because if you have a rainstorm coming, spreading the compost, discing the compost, getting the cedar on, if any of the, you know, things break, you're kind of in a bad spot. And so that's sort of like why we really started, you know, thinking about what we could do next in terms of moving into non till. And I will say keeping the ground covered is profound in terms of what it does for grapes in terms of weathering heat events. So back in 2022, we had six days where it went to over 112 degrees in a row. And our neighboring vineyards that were fully tilled, the heat that was coming off the reflected heat was like 160 to 170 degrees. And that's reflecting back onto the fruit. And in that situation, the fruit begins to degrade its anthocyanin, its color, which is really critical to the quality of red wine. While as our vineyards had been roller crimped and had a nice thick thatch on them, you know, they were still like in the low 90s, high 80s. So you also figure that the underground soil biology is also able to stay alive. So that's just like one really profound change that we've just seen just by simply, like, starting to keep the soil covered.

That reflected heat, those reflected heat numbers that you gave me, there was a much bigger delta than I expected.

Yeah, no, I mean, the first time, like, I was out there, I took my, like, pizza thermometer and just was like, you know, for the oven, was pointing it at the ground. And I was like, this cannot be correct. And so then took another couple implements. But, yeah, it was like, you know, a 50 to 60 degree delta between the two.

Wow. And I can only imagine. Well, obviously it means a lot of things for, for the anthocyanins and wine quality, but also, you just think about the fundamentals of photosynthesis.

Yes. And the water stress, all that stuff. I would also say that we started cover cropping and crimping on an experimental basis back in 2,015 and 16. Who. I think, and I think that that's a really important thing. I think what we did learn, though, is that if you move right into that and you don't take into account vine nutrition levels, you really can stub your toe on yield lag on creating excessive, a lot of competition for vines, and you can kind of see a drop off there. So from what we learned is that we almost have to think about the vine nutrient status as sort of one trajectory, rebuilding the soil as another trajectory. And then eventually those two kind of come together as you sort of rebuild the biology in the system. And what we've also seen is once we started grazing on Haney tests, within a year we are seeing 4x the time. So amount of soil biology. So like the grazing really almost like turbocharges everything.

All right, hang on a second here.

Sorry, I threw a lot at you there.

No, this is good. But just the way you framed the conversation around matching vine nutrition with. With the COVID crops so that you don't have a yield loss effect. Let's, let's go into that, into a little bit more detail. And this, this is a topic that I find so important because there are. There's come to be within certain groups this, this expectation that as we go through a transition, we should expect to see a yield loss. And I'm of the opinion that if you have a yield loss, it's because of poor agronomy, not because of a certain set of practices that you may or may not do. So I'd like to better understand what you observed and experienced there.

So when we first started roller crimping, it wasn't every site, but I'll. I'll stick to bedrock. But when we first went, you know, one year we were doing that compost system I described, the next we were doing a full crimped floor. And this was before we were looking at SAP. We were taking dry tissue analysis. You know, we were doing typical viticulture monitoring. But we saw in those first two years of doing that kind of what everybody warned you about. And this is such a common conversation in the viticulture world right now about going in on tail and your loss of vigor. And, and we definitely saw that, but we were not looking at nitrogen in the right way. For instance, we weren't looking at timing of nutrient applications to try to compensate for what has changed in the system. We were no longer getting this massive flush of green manure every time the vines were coming out of dormancy. But we were not adequately accounting for that change. So we saw pruning weights go down by half, yields go down by half, you know, like really extreme figure losses. So it took us kind of taking a step back and of course, learning a lot more to learn how to make those transitions successfully without seeing those. And now we're able to do that.

So when you think about Morgan, the way that you framed the discussion, I forget the exact phrase zoology that you use, but something to the effect of the trajectory of wine nutrition versus the trajectory of soil nutrition status. How are you thinking about that?

So I think the way that we think about it is it's almost hard to overstate how beat up soils in a lot of these old vineyards are because they literally have been disked into oblivion for a lot of times just to powder for 100 plus years. So you're just starting from like nothing. So it really is like, so really is quite a shock to the system if all of a sudden, vines that have sort of been kind of holding on in that environment are all of a sudden then finding themselves in competition with other plants that are around them. So the way we think, is sort of thought about it is that sort of we think about, and this has really helped our more recent transitions and other places that we've done is we really think about the vine health and the vine nutrient status. And we. And this is an area where like SAP analysis has been really, really critical for us to be able to see how nutrients are being translocated throughout the plant, what we might need to supplement via foliar or other means to make sure that the vine is not excessively freaked out by all of its new companions in the field. And then as we gradually build soil biology back up and we get to 4 or 5%, so organic matter, and we actually get real nutrient cycling going on in the soil and the biology has been rebuilt, then we can kind of like, you know, step back a little bit and kind of allow the system to actually operate as it probably operated when the vines were first planted, when there still was 4 to 6% organic matter in the soil before it had been tilled to powder for a century, you know, so. And then the, you know, the compaction as well in certain sites and all the stuff that comes with that. And so that's sort of like what we look at it now and then, you know, and what we Find so fascinating too. And we work with green cover seed, who I know he's been on the pod before, but, you know, now figuring out all the things about quorum sensing and once you build into those systems and when we can now have, I think our cover crops this year are 22 different plant species across eight different families and trying to build as much diversity as during, you know, the winter months. It's, you know, that part's just been fascinating. And it's just been fascinating to see the. The vines, now that they're sort of in a proper system, how much longer they hold on to their leaves for how much? I think probably post harvest, carbohydrate uptake is improved because the canopies are still intact. Things like that where we. There's just, you know, things that we see in terms of plant health that we just didn't see before.

As you. As you practically. What is different today from what you first started observing 10 years ago? What are you doing differently today from what you were doing 10 years ago?

So one of the first things we did even before we were looking at SAP, it goes back to what I was saying about just considering what has changed in the system. So one thing we started doing was supplying nitrogen, in this case at bedrock, which is organic soy protein hydrolysate, supplying it much earlier than is typical. And what had been typical for us to give the plants what they partial part of what they would have been getting from that green manure breaking down, which was highly leguminous. So one thing was just a little bit of water and nitrogen early, because what we were seeing was just shoot growth starting and stopping much, much earlier. So just greasing the gears a little bit at the beginning in that way. And that was kind of the first breakthrough. And since then, it's been following nutrition with the whole season. So in grapes, we spray for powdery mildew in an organic system every two to three weeks with wettable sulfur. Wettable sulfur is really the only thing we use for mildew. And that isn't ideal, but. But what it does allow is it means we're set up to spray quite consistently. So fitting these other. Basically making our tank mixes more useful than just sulfur is such an easy addition to the program that it has fit right in. So we're able to evaluate SAP and spray, evaluate spray, you know, six times or more throughout the season.

Oh, my. Do I ever have a magical product for you?

Yeah, I mean, it is sort of one of the great challenges of the wine industry is just sort of the omnipresence of powdery mildew pressure. And honestly, certain grapes that the market has kind of selected that they like, like Chardonnay, is extremely prone to it. And then the areas where they're considered to be qualitative glutenly good is where the powdery mildew index is off the charts all year round. And so then it sort of, so in some ways it's kind of silly. But you know, what I will say is we've seen powdery mildew pressure go down as a result of these practices. It just seems like plant cell walls are healthier. So the pressure has gone down. And I think my greatest hope is at some point we get to a point where the plants are healthy enough that we really don't even have to think about it. There's a couple vineyards I know that have been able to do that. But then also really, the resistance to insect pressure has been, you know, in Zinfandel, which can be very prone to Pacific and Willamette spider mites, we no longer have spider mites. We have incredibly diverse insect populations that keep each other in balance. Knock on wood. At bedrock. We still have not dealt with vine mealybug, which has been a real issue in some parts of California. And so it's just. And then leaf hoppers out in Contra Costa county, which were a real issue starting this year when we started actually spraying a couple of AEA products, we literally, they went away like the neighboring vineyards had them, but we, we didn't. And that was, you know, I mean that, that stuff's all very, very interesting to see, but also allows us to kind of monitor plant health in many ways. Because if we're seeing susceptibility to virus, I mean, I think you've talked about it a lot where, you know, pests attack weak plants. So if the plants are stronger, you know, you're going to have less pest pressure.

Have you. I'm quite curious on, on many plans, particularly on annuals. Once we start working with nutritional support and microbiome support, often there are changes in epigenetic expression. You start seeing changes in leaf expression or node expression. There's just, there's all types of subtle changes. Sometimes they're much more obvious than others. Have you observed any of that changed expression on these older varieties? I'm curious how these long live perennial plants might respond differently than, as compared to a short, short lived annual plant.

You know, in this case we've been, we've been really tracking SAP and applying for about two full seasons now. And the main change I've seen is mid season canopy color without any, any extra nitrogen. We're not. But just. So the color of the canopy has been a major one. Things like leaf size, node length, I haven't seen as much of. But we are hoping, you know, with having now two full seasons of the vines having their nutritional needs met, to see things like cluster number change, hopefully increase some of these things and even shorter internode spacing. We hope to see that.

I would add though, Jake, that, you know, there are some points that we were walking the vineyard this year where we were almost feeling like the leaves were thicker and glossier, Right?

Yes.

And so like, and it felt like there they were just more, there's more substance there. It's almost like the cell walls were thicker when you touch them and you sort of crumbled them. Yeah, they snapped a little bit more. So, you know, that's just in, you know, we had a very mild growing season this year though too, without a lot of heat events and heat stress. So again, need more, need, need more data over more years. But at the same time, I, I feel like you're definitely seeing a physical response within, in some ways. Within, within the plants.

Yeah.

And I can't wait for my, my quip about the powdery mildew earlier. I can't wait for things to get through the regulatory channels of you to be able to use pinion out there, because what we're observing with pinyin is you're going to be able to kiss your powdery mildew challenges goodbye simply as a reflection of changing the microbiome and the plant's immune, immune system response so strongly. So I can't wait for you to see that.

I mean, that would be an absolute game changer for the wine industry. I think there's something like 85% of pesticides applied to the grape industry are for powdery mildew. So whether that's organic, whether that's organics and sulfur and silad oil and stuff like that, or whether it's conventional, systemic, so it would be, you know, that's, that's a real, a real potential change.

So along with these changes in canopy color and disease and insect resistance, I think the obvious question, particularly for a wine grape grower, is have there been any changes? How, how. Kind of two questions. How has the quality and the terroir of your wine changed over the last decade plus, but also over the last couple of years of more accelerated changes?

Yeah, I mean, I think the, the quality has, I feel like, increased significantly in part because we just weather heat events better. And I think that there's just more resilience and that, you know, as we kind of talked about earlier, without, like, you know, when we don't have reflected heat in the vineyards, the vines don't get as stressed out and they don't get as water stressed. And the result is that we can kind of slow down ripening and sugar accumulation for. For us, you know, if we have a really hot August, which is when the vine is really sugar loading for the most part, like, you know, sometimes what we see what happens where we get, you know, sugar in advance of flavor, because we're looking at other physical factors like seed browning, rachis, thickness, like all, like all these other elements that we look at. And what I've really seen over the last eight to 10 years, and I think it's been extra so the last couple of years is we're seeing physiological development and incredible flavor development at lower potential alcohols. And the vines are also holding on to their natural acidity better. So that makes for a better fermentation and that also makes for higher quality. Because here in California, we have a lot of sun. We're kind of known for making high octane, sort of more alcoholic wines. And so anything that we can do in our vineyards to kind of combat that naturally is a really good thing.

Can you translate that for a. For a non wine grape fermenter? I'm not even quite clear on what it is you're. So when you talk about high alcohol, what is that a reflection of from a biochemistry perspective? And what is the. Yeah. What does that mean from a quality profile?

Yeah, so really the alcohol percentage is sort of based on how much sugar comes in with the grape. And at some point you get to a point where there's so much sugar that you will not be able to ferment the it dry. And then in the winery, that's when you do things like add water or tartaric acid to supplement, which is something we try to avoid because we feel like that dilutes quality. So really, yeast kind of have a maximum fermentation capacity of about 16 to 16 and a half percent alcohol, which is quite high by sort of worldwide standards. I'd say on average, red wine is about 13 to 13 and a half percent alcohol, and white is 12 to 13% alcohol. But, you know, in California, it's, you know, it's not uncommon to see wines over 15% alcohol. But what that does oftentimes is if you don't have balance, it just makes the wine taste fiery, it makes it taste hot, it makes it taste sort of unpleasant. And so really, one of the key factors when making high quality wine is finding balance between the acid profile, the tannin and the structure, which is all the polyphenolics and anthocyanins and the sort of feeling of fruit weight in the wine. So, you know, for us, we are always trying to make wines that have great balance and great density, but aren't particularly alcoholic.

I'm just going to open it up more broadly. What, what important topics or what important things have you observed in as your vineyards have regenerated that we haven't talked about yet? What were some of the really memorable moments for?

I mean, I think maybe that when we started doing Haney tests, which we've only started doing for the last couple of years, and seeing the amount of biological improvement from grazing compared to blocks that we did not graze, that was really eye opening. Like when we, after just a couple years of grazing biology was four times the level of areas of the vineyard that we had not grazed on.

CO2 burst. CO2 respiration is what's increasing.

And was that with identical cover crop management?

Yes. Yeah. So this would have been like a purely vegetative cover cropping, crimping, and then the same thing, but with high intensity grazing. And actually the vineyard that had less respiration had been under crimping for longer, but the introduction of sheep really seemed to push respiration. And that was across a few different block examples.

Yeah. And I think playing on that, what's been really surprising too, is it's given us confidence to rethink how we develop young vineyards, in that we now have blocks that we're just planting, that we are putting immediately into organic non till, which is pretty sort of contradicts what the very standard treatment is in the industry, where typically it's like you plant young vines and you try to, via tillage and herbicide, eliminate all competition. And we've kind of gone the opposite direction. And it's been really fascinating to see how verdant and healthy the canopies have been and also how good the quality has been. And also the fact that it's quite economic. You know, even we're now just sort of moving into full cropping and we're, you know, going to be getting four to four and a half tons per acre on these blocks, which for us is quite good.

At what age.

So that would be on fifth and sixth leaf.

And are you seeing those vines come into production earlier than they would have historically or is still a similar timeline.

A similar timeline to. To what would be a standard program.

We also have the goal of those blocks to convert them to dry farming eventually, because that's, I think, one of the factors in California we really need to think about. When we kind of think about the core of sustainability, you have to think about which resources are the most scarce and water is scarce in California at times. So I think what we're so excited about is we basically, we dropped fruit from one additional year to really push root growth. But I think we're going to be able to, because we've built soil organic matter and we've built biology. I think it's going to expedite the process of us being able to wean those vines off of water and still have them, have very happy and productive lives. And that's, you know, that's a very exciting thing for us to see because it's almost allows us to do it all at once, rather than develop the vineyard and then undo all the effects of the tillage via cover crops and crimping. And then so it, like, sort of shortens the timeline by probably up to five years.

Wow.

Another interesting thing that we didn't mention, I think, on young vines is we're just from a heterogeneity standpoint is we're actually taking a lesson from the old vines, which I don't even know if Morgan mentioned, but all of those old vine vineyards that are so genetically diverse are actually fields blended. So all of those different varieties that Morgan was pointing out, they're often in the same block. So we have blocks we call Zinfandel, but are actually 28, 29 different varieties all mixed together. And we pick that all at once. We fermented all at once. And that's very, very much not the norm in the wine industry, but it was the norm in the 1880s and 1890s. So we are actually planting young vineyards as mixed variety as well. Some of those are the traditional California field blends of Zinfandel, Carignan, Morved, Alicante. And then others are we're taking some of Portugal's traditional field blends, just looking at another hot, arid region and planting mixed Portuguese varieties altogether. And that's. That's just looking at the benefits of diversity, even just at the variety level.

What does that look like from a. From a management perspective? Are there. Is there the need to prune varieties differently or manage varieties differently anyway within the field? Are you managing them largely homogenously across varieties?

So there's an element of that. And so, for instance, I'll take the example of Carignane, which is in a lot of old vineyards. And it's a beautifully vigorous variety, very dry, farmable, but it's hyper prone to powdery mildew, and in some ways it's overly vigorous. So a lot of our crews, and we have the benefit of having experienced crews at all of our vineyards and they're able to go through and spot the Carignan vines. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge to spot it once you know what you're looking for. And then when they're going through and shoot thinning, they'll take extra, they'll take the basal leaves off the Carignan, they'll do extra opening up because we know in three weeks it's going to close back up again because of the vigor. So there is an element of that. But. And it's certainly not a management style for more anal retentive farmers in some way. But there are other ways that it makes things easier. And I think Morgan would agree that having that diverse varietal mix really smooths vintage variation. So in a really hot year, for instance, Zinfandel can sometimes shrivel and get really raisinated. Under really hot conditions, Carignan will weather any sort of hot conditions. It'll hold its acidity, it'll hold its color. More ved will never skyrocket in sugar, for instance. So in hot years, some of these mixed varieties will cover up some of the issues with the dominant variety and vice versa. So you will get, we think, kind of a higher baseline quality year in and year out by having a more diverse field.

So when you have this vine diversity, are you. Does this look like varieties still planted together in rows or just complete random scattering of or somewhat uniform distribution of a variety across an entire field?

So Morgan wrote a whole thesis about this. But in, in the old vineyards, it's, it's a bit of a mix. But there does seem to be, even, even if it looks random on, we actually map all of our old vineyards, variety by variety, and have them all mapped out. And you will find reason in the patterns. Once you map enough, not at every vineyard, but at a lot, you will see like, oh, they planted more Carignan on the edgier, lower fertility soils because they knew Carignan was more vigorous, or they'll plant more vet in the swales because it's a late butter and so it will bud after frost. Risk is over. So there was definitely intention in the Centennial Vineyards with our young vineyards, we will plant not down the row because you never want the temptation to pick them separately, but instead we'll plant maybe on the diagonal or have some sort of pattern. So we're kind of aware of what's in there. But even now, we consider the topography of the block when we're planting young vines.

What's really fascinating is this practice kind of flies in the face of the last 30 years of sort of modern winemaking in terms of wanting control and then picking your cabernet separate from your Merlot, from your Cab franc, and then blending those later. But it's been really fascinating, and I love it when things like this happen, is that there's now a lot of research that's been done showing that when you actually co ferment different varieties that have different levels of color, that have different types of phenolics, that have different types of aromatics, they actually will polymerize with each other, they will co factor, they'll stabilize aromatics. So you actually can create much greater complexity by having more ingredients in the soup in some ways than if you're just were to take those exact same varieties and ferment them separately and then blend them later. So that part, to me, is just always faster, fascinating. And so in some ways, you kind of have to seed control as a winemaker. And there's sort of like an element of almost picking on gestalt because not all the varieties are going to be perfectly ripe at the same time. But you just kind of got to go with be like, okay, it looks good. And also, if you really know your vineyard, you also know when canopies start to just look a little different, when leaves are turned ever so slightly. And then you just be like, okay, this vineyard's done. It's ready to. For its fruit to come off. And then you. You pick it. And then that doesn't even get into the really fascinating element of how plants communicate under the soil with each other. And, you know, that's a complete. An area of almost no research, but I think is very fascinating.

And that was one of the. One of. I mean, several things that you just said are quite interesting. But that is. That is one domain that in. In small grains production, wheat production. Now, then this is happening in the uk it's happening in Canada. There's a number of growers here in the US That I'm familiar, that have been having. That I've been having this conversation with as well, where they will commingle and plant five different wheat varieties that have Similar harvest windows, and they get greater disease resistance, greater insect resistance, and higher yields than from any one of those varieties alone. And it's just like, how do we, how do we explain that? I mean, it's. It's plant communication. It's that quorum sensing, it's that sharing of resources and all these things where these plants are truly collaborating with each other and, and perhaps sharing immune pathway secrets and, and other things that we don't even know about yet at this point. Yeah, they're sharing information with each other.

Yeah. It's the next frontier in agriculture, I think, is. And there's just, you know, we, we. I think we barely know what we don't know about what's going on under the soil in many ways. And so, like, it's just, you know, it's very exciting.

What do you see as the frontier? What, what are the new things that you're working on? What, what are the ways that you want to see your vineyard continue to progress and grow? What do you think you might be doing differently or experiencing in the near future?

It's a big question. I mean, there's a. There's a number of things. So for us, I think, you know, right now we just graze with. We do mob grazing with sheep, adapted paddock grazing, which is great, but to me, I'd be really interested. We have a neighbor who actually, it's a smaller operation, so they can do it, but they literally will move, you know, like eight or nine different types of animals at a time. So when you're looking about creating a greater diversity of biology in your grazing, what that looks like. And then, you know, for me, it'd be fascinating if there's ways to integrate other revenue streams into the vineyard sort of year round. We, Whether that's cattle or whether it's sheep or something else, in terms of just trying to figure out a way to diversify that element while also being of benefit to the land, I think that's a big part of it. And to me, just broadly from an industry standpoint, I think it's really important to talk about these practices and to show what we think we've gotten right and what we've gotten wrong with other people. Because just in terms of selling wine and the way that the wine industry appears to people on the outside, you know, bottles of wine can sell for, you know, 50, 100, 200, $500 a bottle. You know, there's, there's margin there. So in some ways, I feel like there's a responsibility within the wine industry. To try to be moving forward the conversation about responsible agriculture and in that element. And I feel like there's more steam gaining as that is going on right now. And I think that, you know, that's, you know, I think that's something that's both exciting and also absolutely necessary, particularly as we try to sell to a whole new generation of consumers that are coming up that really care a lot more about, you know, what they put into their body. And the really cool thing about wine is you can really get all the way upstream of what you put into your glass in terms of who grew it, how it was grown, the ethics of it, the vine age, all of that stuff. And, you know, so it can. The complexity is scary, but at the same time, it's also what makes it. What it makes it so fascinating. So it's kind of like integrating the agricultural element into that conversation.

I find so interesting about our conversation. I came into this conversation kind of like I. I've heard some large numbers about how dramatically wine consumption is dropping and how there is this growing need for differentiation and how there is this intense interest in adopting region of agriculture on scale because of the need to differentiate. But what stood out to me in, in our conversation is the tremendous heat resilience and the climactic resilience that you're experiencing with these different management practices and how I think we should reasonably expect that to become the foundational requirement in the into the future. Like, we are going to need heat resilience on a regular basis going forward. We already have a pattern, a recent pattern that we can observe that that's going to be the case.

Absolutely. And it, and it really, you know, there's something that, you know, there's, as you sort of talked about at the beginning, there's incredible opportunity to change people's minds by showing them how these practices work and that they do work. But it is also very frustrating when you drive down, you know, Highway 29 in Napa, which is surrounded by some of the most expensive vineyard land in the world and everything. There's not a single thing growing on the floor of vineyards. So there's, you know, a lot of work to be done then or sort of like. And I think Evo from Gurga Shill's chat talked about it a bit, but also sort of like sort of demonstrative grazing, but without any real theory behind it. So you just sort of like put out a couple of sheep. And I mean, most cynically, I see vineyards that, you know, have just sprayed herbicide and then they have sheep grazing that herbicide sprayed soil and it's just like, you know, but. And then they posted on Instagram and it's like, as we know, grazing can do incredible damage, but it could also do incredible good. It just has to be deployed properly. So also just educating people about that, that part of things as well. So it's, you know, there's just a lot, there's, there's many lifetimes of work to be done to progress the conversation. I think.

Jake, there's. I have a feeling that I could have a long conversation with you just drawing all the things out that you're holding in reserve here. But I'm realizing at the very beginning of our conversation you mentioned this idea of building biology from the top down with foliar applications and we never came back to that. We touched on it a few times, but we never dug into that in detail. So look, you can follow on to any of Morgan's comments that you would like to, but I'd also love for you to dig into that a little bit of how you are dealing with these dry land situations.

Right. So like I said, Evangelo is our other. So we have Bedrock Vineyard and Sonoma, Evangelo and Contra Costa county. And those are two pillars of estate vineyards and they could not be more different. So like I said, Evangelo has almost no rain. There's no water. The only water we have is for, is for spraying with a solar well. So there's. We've been, we just decided that we are going to go all in with tracking SAP consistently and, and addressing things and just in seeing where that takes us because we do not have a lot of avenues to improve soil like that with the limitations of that system. So it's very interesting to see. I mean, so we see all these increases in canopy health and photosynthesis, even just in the sugar levels on SAP analysis. And to know that then the vine has the excess energy to be improving the microbiome around its roots, it's getting to a place that we could not get with a tractor. You know, it's were able to give the vines the ability to essentially bespoke their microbiome when they did not have the energy that they had before. And the same thing is true at Bedrock, where we are inputting biology and improving. But the main thing that's happening is that the vines are, have the, have the energy and the tools to foster their own microbiome in a way they haven't in the past.

So what indicators are you observing of that?

So we, that's a good question. So, and I would love to know more about what indicators we could be looking at because it's not that easy to mine your vine roots and dig them up. And look, we do know from our cover crops in the soil that we are seeing rhizo sheathing and things that we have never seen before. And that's from more diverse mixes and then of course better inoculants in a, better, better seed coatings and all these things. But the, I would say the biggest indicator that we get is there's plenty of evidence of natural nutrient cycling of things increasing in the vine that we did not add directly. So that, that, that, that would be one of the biggest things I've seen. And that's even more prevalent at Evangelo, which is dry farmed, where we know all we're giving is these foliars and we're seeing increases in things like phosphorus and these things that we are not applying. So, so we imagine that that's part of what's going on.

Yeah, you know, the large part of the thrill and the beauty of these, of working with these biological ecosystems. We're now in this particular moment in time. Well, it's been true for the last half a dozen years, but input costs are at an all time high relative to fertilizer costs and so forth. And there's, it seems there are constantly new people discovering the power of biology to release the nutrients that are already present in their soil profile. And of course, if you're going wine grapes, you have the capacity to go down to a depth that's measured in feet or yards or meters. And it is so, it's so much fun and so enjoyable to see that whole ecosystem just begin working and you start getting results that are greater than any of those that you would have imagined or forecasted. And I think that's in this particular environment that we find ourselves in, is that, that opportunity and that optimism and that conviction that this can happen and does happen is, is the encouragement and the direction that many growers need to go in.

Yeah, I agree completely.

What I, I've already asked you what important topics we should go into and I, I really, I, I feel the need that we need to have another follow up conversation because there's other conversation, other discussions I'd love to dive into. But I want to be respectful of your time and of our audience's time. So I want to say thank you for being here, thank you for the work that you're doing, thank you for sharing your wisdom and Your experiences and where. Where can people find out more about your work and dig in deeper?

Yeah, so if anything, I have a writing problem. So if you go to our website, which is bedrockwineco.com There's a lot of material there, ranging from the wines that we make to the history of wine in California to our farming. There's some really great quotes from Jake on there as well that I think really cut to the core of what we're. What we're looking at. We also have our own podcast called Bedrock Wine Conversations. And, you know, we just got, you know, regenerative organic certified. And so we did a whole pod on, like, what that process looked like and what that entailed, because there's definitely some, you know, hoops to jump through and things like that. And we also have other people on that we consider to be very important in terms of leading the conversations around regenerative viticulture within the wine industry, specifically people like Jason Jardine at Hansel and folks like that. So, yes, you can find us there. And then, you know, I'm still on social media somehow, so you can find me on Instagram as well. And I'm usually just talking about geeky things about grapes. So. Yeah, and Jake is on Instagram as well, and. And you can always email us.

All right, well, thank you both. Thanks for being here. Thanks for your work, and let's catch up soon. Hopefully, I'll see you next month.

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having us, John.

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