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

the five great white wines of France. Although the wines of Savennières had since fallen out of fashion, eclipsed in popularity by more opulent Chardonnay-based wines, Coulée de Serrant remained one of the most recognized names in French viticulture.
    Joly stumbled upon the book at a time when he was experiencing a crisis in the vineyard. He had been using chemical treatments for several years, and like Steiner’s Silesian farmers, he had watched as the quality of his soil and of his wines steadily eroded. To discover at that moment a book that perfectly described the problems he faced and a method of farming custom-designed to combat those problems was fortuitous beyond words. But for Joly, the biodynamic approach wasn’t attractive simply because it promised to restore his vines to health; he also found its philosophical underpinnings appealing. Joly had just left a career as an investment banker (he holds an MBA from Columbia and worked for several years in New York) to take over Coulée de Serrant. But familial duty was not the only thing that brought him back to the Loire: he had grown disillusioned with finance and numbers and conventional modes of thinking and living. He was open to new ways of looking at the world, and he found in Steiner and biodynamics a tonic not just for his vineyard but for his soul.
    Joly fully converted Coulée de Serrant to biodynamism in 1984. Today he is its most outspoken and militant advocate within the wine world. His book, Wine from Sky to Earth , a combination how-to guide and philosophic meditation, is considered the ur-text of biodynamic viticulture (in the dedication, Joly credits Steiner’s writings with giving “profound meaning to my life”). He organizes large tastings of biodynamic wines in cities around the world and uses these events as a chance to preach to the converted and proselytize to the uninitiated. His style is unfailingly charmless and hectoring. An evangelical and missionary, he believes that biodynamism offers the only path to good wine. He also contends that the world is on the brink of environmental apocalypse and that embracing biodynamic viticulture is no longer merely a choice; it is a moral imperative (“We have reached the time when nature will implement its law on earth”).
    Ironically, while the biodynamic approach appears to be yielding better wines almost everywhere that it is applied, it seems to have taken Coulée de Serrant in reverse. In fact, it is widely agreed that under Joly’s management, Coulée de Serrant’s Savennières has become a stinker. That has been my experience: I have consistently found Joly’s wines to be ungenerous oddballs, emitting off-putting aromas and flavors. For Joly, the result seems to be a secondary concern; what apparently matters most is the process. “Before it can be good,” he has said, “a wine must be true.” Likewise, his book includes this nugget: “A biodynamic wine is not necessarily ‘good,’ but it is always authentic .”
    Joly, with his fire-and-brimstone style, is a fat target for biodynamics skeptics, of which there are many. A lot of people regard the method as New Age hooey. Stu Smith of California’s Smith-Madrone winery, which makes some of the best wines you have probably never heard of, thinks that Steiner was a kook and that the biodynamic method is “a hoax” that ought to be accorded “the same level of respect we give witchcraft.” He has even set up a website called biodynamicsisahoax.com. In an article for the magazine World of Fine Wine , Douglass Smith and Jesús Barquín (the former a New York investor and wine collector with a doctorate in the history of science, the latter a Spanish wine expert and professor of criminology) dismissed the biodynamic approach as “a vista of starry eyes and good intentions mixed with quasi-religious hocus-pocus, good salesmanship, and plain