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A few months ago, I was pretty impressed with Biodynamic farming. It seems that a lot of people are taking to it, especially wineries that want to create that closed system that gets them all this press because they're the first to do it and it's a big deal and it's good for the environment and it's good for the food you eat and the wine you drink.       I argue with absolutely none of these points and I believe that Biodynamic is a very good thing. I just have an issue with it being bandied about like it's some kind of revelation and the people who are doing it are these gods. Yes, it does take some effort to set up, but in places like Europe, it doesn't take nearly the man hours to get something like this running as it does in the US. For, it is the case that this is really the traditional method of farming that people have been practicing for centuries and haven't left behind like we did in the US, because Big Pharma says that they have a "better ways" to farm. (As a sidenote, I didn't link to the Wikipedia article on what Big Pharma is because it just redirects to a list of the top pharmaceutical producers and not that this term of negative connotations used to describe the ever-widening umbrella of companies that saturate our lives in bad ways. It makes me wonder if it's another case of Wikipedia vandalism, but I digress...)       I return back to the example of my cousins in Slovenska Bistrica. They recycle pretty much everything they use. While this isn't the closed system you need to have for biodynamic certification, it's a massive start above and beyond that in the US. All of their organic waste from cooking either feeds pigs or gets put back in the land via composting. They save the seeds from one harvest to put back in to the next. They don't use chemicals to grow the foods on their plot of land. They have their own bees for pollination as well as delicious, delicious honey. Yes, it's not Biodynamic, but what they're doing on a home level is even above and beyond what we call Organic in the US.       It's because of this and tasting the productions made by Biodynamic producers that I'm a bit skeptical as to how the word gets used. For instance, the Slovenian wine maker, Movia seems to keep having more and more gimmicks, yet the quality of their wine seems to be dropping year after year. It's still good wine, but it seems that they're more interested in having new and exciting things happening at their winery as opposed to just producing good wine, which always and forever will speak for itself.       So just watch out for how Biodynamic is being used. I think that in the US, for most of us, Organic is all that we really need to worry about. Biodynamic producers might be making products that are "cleaner" if that's what you're most interested it, but as far as better, I think it's just a marketing blitz.

Biodynamic agriculture is nothing new (in fact, it's based on really old principles) but I've only really heard about it since the start of this year. A very excited and blustery Slovenian by the name of Aleš Kristančič, who owns the Movia Winery started talking about it at a wine dinner I was at. His winery practices it and he made a great deal about how others are coming to him to learn how to do it.       It got me wondering as to what it was. At first I guessed it was just a different name for 'organic' food growing. But, this was only part of it as it takes organic and goes beyond it to create a completely enclosed system for producing whatever it is that you want to produce.       For instance, a local wine producer in Sonoma, Benziger, grows all of their wines biodynamically. They're to the point where they even have Demeter certification, which as I understand it is that biodynamic equivalent of being certified organic, albeit a much trickier thing to accomplish. I'm not sure if it plays in to it, but they certainly make very fine wines up there.       Beyond these wine examples, I received an email today from Numi Tea stating that some part of their teas were now offered as biodynamic certified. I definitely smell something of a buzzword with this because as Evil Blue (Walmart) starts selling organic items, it will cheapen the whole term and maybe at some point negate it. Because biodynamic requires so much more work, thus decreasing the bottom line, I could never see a major retailer like them touching it. And this, is quite fine by me.