The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger Page A

attracted some prominent adherents and admirers over the years, including Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow, and it also serves as the basis for the Waldorf education movement (also known as Steiner education), which flourishes to this day.
    In 1924, Steiner gave a series of lectures in Germany in which he laid out what became the core tenets of biodynamic agriculture. Steiner, in his early sixties at the time and in failing health (he died the following year), was asked by a group of farmers in Silesia (now part of Poland) to help them find a way of reversing the declining quality of their soils and crops, a crisis that they attributed to the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was an issue that had long concerned Steiner, who often lamented how much poorer fruits, vegetables, and meats had become during his lifetime, a downturn he blamed on industrialized agriculture. In response to the farmers’ urgent request, Steiner traveled to Germany and delivered eight lectures prescribing not just a remedy for their problems but a new, revolutionary approach to agriculture. He told the farmers to stop using chemicals in their fields. In this, he was doing nothing more than embracing a central precept of organic farming. But what he went on to suggest would set biodynamic agriculture apart from mere organic farming. In Steiner’s schemata, the farm was not simply an incubator of life but an organism itself, in which everything was intrinsically connected to everything else. A sick chicken had repercussions for the tomatoes; a diseased tree was a problem for the cows. Likewise, said Steiner, each farm was part of a larger biosystem; the earth itself was an organism, and it was clearly linked, gravitationally and otherwise, to the sun, the moon, and the other planets.
    Steiner’s theory of agricultural management was an odd amalgam of the autarkic and the universal (the cosmic, really). He proposed that each farm essentially be walled off from the rest of the world—that it be operated as an entirely self-sustaining entity, devoid of outside influences of any kind. This would require, among other things, using homemade fertilizers and pesticides, and Steiner instructed farmers to employ a specific array of homeopathic preparations, which he numbered 500 through 508. Preparation 500, for instance, was meant to promote healthy soil and involved filling a cow’s horn with cow manure, burying it in the field in the autumn, and exhuming it in the spring. Preparation 506, a compost, required placing dandelion flowers in the stomach lining of a cow; this was to be planted in the earth during the winter months and dug up in the spring. For rodent control, Steiner turned to the skies: he prescribed catching a young field mouse, skinning it, burning the skin, and spreading the ashes across the field when the planet Venus occults the Scorpio constellation. He also instructed the farmers to plant their crops and harvest them according to planetary alignments. He claimed that the position of the moon and the other planets had a clear, demonstrable impact on all phases of a plant’s development and that only by getting in sync with the rhythms of the solar system could the farmers restore their farms to health and improve the quality of their crops.
    In 1981, Nicolas Joly, a young winemaker in the Loire, found a book about biodynamics at a secondhand store and took it with him on a skiing holiday. Entranced, he reread the book several times before returning home. Joly had recently taken over his family’s winery, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, a legendary domaine set on the Loire River a few minutes outside the town of Angers. Coulée de Serrant is part of the Savennières appellation and produces a wine by that name, made from the Chenin Blanc grape. Coulée de Serrant’s Savennières was once among the most esteemed French wines; the celebrated food writer Curnonsky famously declared it to be one of