Farming for Wine at Agricola Foradori: Biodynamics, Cover Crops, and the Honor of Being a Farmer
There is something special about farming for wine. Winemaker Theo Zierock of Agricola Foradori discussed the topic during my visit. In this video, i’ve put together some of his most passionate highlights.
This is third of quite a few long format videos featuring Theo at Foradori.
the value of regional farming
cover crops
the traditional and modern ways of trellising a vineyard
and the honor of being a farmer.
Don't miss this fascinating fifteen-minute video.
Special thanks:
Transcript:
Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words.’ There are also some Italian words that I have difficulty knowing how to spell. Any persistent errors are mine alone and not Theo Zierock’s.
Or, watch the video. It is awesome.
Theo Zierock:
So we as the lowest food wasters in Europe, still waste about 40% of our food. Often people say, "Ah, you work biodynamically, but you cannot feed the world with that." I don't need to feed the world with Teroldego you know what I mean? You want to keep it as close as possible as seasonal as possible because seasonality is obviously always a guarantee of I'm not buying the shittier stuff. If I buy oranges in June or tomatoes in December, it might not be the most mindful way.
So, we have the big vegetable garden over there. So now it's planted for the winter vegetables because we found that it makes more sense to concentrate on those because in summer here, everybody has its own garden. So it's sell tomatoes for the lot of work that they are to a good price. But if it comes radicchio, kale or stuff like this, they buy it, or potatoes, they buy it like hot bread.
The schools are here so the kids all pass by here. And when I was 16 maybe, but we were harvesting the pergola near the road and basically this mother, it was the first days of school so it made sense that they were coming home from, she was bringing the kids home. He was maybe 12 or something like that and I guess he fucked up in school, whatever, I don't know. But the mother was dragging him and we were harvesting and then she said like, "Well if you don't study you end up like these guys." I said, "What? You bitch. What does that mean? Because we actually harvest the grapes to produce?" This is still this 80s attitude or this modernist industrial approach that is very still very diffused here and that if you are making agriculture is because you didn't make it to become a lawyer. At the same time, the lawyers sit at the bar because there is no jobs for them because they're like 5 million lawyers in Italy.
This is a pergola planted in the 60s, so it's already after the golden ages, obviously, so you have some old vines. But the main thing is that at the time they were still planting between five and seven meters of distance. So in this case, the pergola obviously gives you the possibility to raise the cows to plant vegetables. They would plant them under the vines, not like we do in the middle. But this is to say that Mr. Taminini always planted his vineyard as the guy from the cooperative told him to. So he just did because he was selling the grapes. So he just did what they told him.
So in the 60s it was still like this. And now we're walking up to the 80s and you see how the indications of the massification of our area actually change also the viticulture.
So the 70s start to be like this, which is still almost okay, but obviously it's pushed together. You start to have more plants. And obviously, when it comes to humidity, we are sandy soil, so this means we have... The humidity goes away quite quickly. But if we have droughts, if there's no water, we suffer a lot because obviously clay keeps the water, sand doesn't. So when we have a drought like this summer, it's much more dangerous for us than if it's a normal humid summer. We have kind of almost tropical summers here. So you have intense rain showers in the late afternoon for half an hour because either, well this is quite unique that you have a bit cloud, but usually it's either raining like it was before or it's sun. There is no, I don't know, there is no fog, none of that because the humidity clashes against the mountain, releases.
So in the summer, the water we can handle, the drought, we can't, but the water you need to be able to handle with more space, with more sun heating the ground. And if you close the pergolas like this, it's very hard. So you kind of have to go through with the tractor every week to spray to just in case. So it goes together. So the necessity of having this weakened agriculture because it's not professional anymore and the necessity of planting more grapes and producing more, kind of went hand in hand in their development. And so they fucked up a system.
We have more than 35 different genotypes of Teroldego. So it's the varieties within the varieties, but that's a very low percentage in the Campo Rotaliano of people that have this variety because in the 60s, some San Michele at the institute, they isolated these two types for more sugar and more quantity.
So they just said, "Okay, this geno of Teroldego and this one, they're good." So they paid people to plant those clones. And so most of the Teroldego here is also Teroldego that is hard to make good wine with. So it's a very long process of replanting the old genetics to actually keep the elegance of Teroldego alive. Otherwise you just have a simple red wine that tastes kind of like shit. And that's also the reason why we have so much Grillo because when my mother started, we had nine hectares and six of which my grandfather planted with those clones because he was selling them to the cooperative. So he was making wines with the old vineyards, which by the way are the three hectares of Granato. They were planted between 39 and 56. And the others, my mother, when my father arrived, he was a geneticist, so that was his thing. And he said, "Well, if you want to actually succeed in bringing back Teroldego to go to the gold... It was a wine for the German speaking aristocracy in the north. So it was an export hit. So if you want to bring it back at that quality, you cannot work with those clones. It's never going to happen.
So the first thing she did when she was 20, she cut down all the six hectares of clones. We had no money at the time and she replanted the massive selection from the old vineyards in Grillo. So Morei Sgarzon, are two vineyards are in Grillo. So six hectares in Grillo because of the 80s. All right, you want to sell the wine? Well then within three years it has to be extracted and dense enough, otherwise it's not going to work.
And with pergola it wouldn't have worked. Today we would plant pergola. So we harvested here last week, weird, weird harvest. We have very low alcohol, not a lot of acidity. So the wines in 2022 will be very approachable right away, or very juicy wines not the best vintage for hyper long aging. So, this is how it went into the 80s. So they pushed it even more together. And this is also, we always roll the tips up. We don't cut them, but here is the only place where we actually cut because at least we get a little bit of sunshine.
But this is a disaster. And you have to add the fact that to produce 230, 260 quintals per hectare, the only way to do that is to just open this in May and close it in October. Which means even when it's not raining, you're producing humidity. So it's obvious that then you really have to every Sunday spray, spray, spray and you fill your soils with copper. Luckily, because it's so sandy, there is not so much compression of the soil because sand is hard to compress.
This guy. They also, where's the other one? They always come when there is tours to show off, I guess. It's always the same, the more people, if there's more than five, then both cats come. They were supposed to hunt mice, but that's not happening.
I guess the simple presence of them makes the mice stay away. But we had a lot of mice three years ago it was kind of a problem for the garden. So my sister got these cats and it's now we don't have a lot of birds anymore because they kill birds apparently, prefer them to mice.
But you see here the sand. Well, obviously there is a lot of organic matter on the top sand, so it almost looks like it's clay, but it's actually not. So this is not very compressible, which is good for us. When you have, you go to Piacenza, when it rains, the tractor has to stay away from vineyards. If you walking, you have shoes made out of clay on your feet and here it's nice and easy.
So Teroldego was mentioned as a variety the first time in official documents in the 1300s but it's mentioned under different names around the year thousand as Teroldeco so, so the varietal history is with this name at least thousand years. Then you add another six, 700 years of selection from when the Romans drop officially the first with this vinifera here.
So we have the story of this place producing wine is quite long also compared to others. There is other areas like [foreign language 00:09:44] Lagrein was on the hillside further up even in Bolzano since the Middle Ages. So the whole valley was actually full of vines, especially because it was not that much work. Viticulture is very efficient potentially in terms of what you do. Especially before we had all the phylloxera, mildew, before all that stuff came from industrialization effect, from faster steam ships. Phylloxera most likely arrive because just half the time between one side to the other of the Atlantic and all of a sudden you can bring stuff because it doesn't die on board. So it's with evolution, compared to 500 years ago now it's a lot of work, but never was really that much.
The last 10 years we've, we've stopped doing any cover crops because we reached a very good balance in the vineyards, especially here on the plain. Also cover crops is one of those things that is very cool on Instagram, but in fact, sometimes I see colleagues planting this huge field of beans, I mean unless this is a desert, you don't need to put that amount of nitrogen in your soil. It's fucking your plants up.
Yeah, "My wine stopped fermenting..." Yeah, because maybe your APA is through the roof because you're bombarding it. So it's always a good sign, is always when you have metals. Like broadly plants that produce oils like wheat, like how do you call it? Well anyway, any plant that you can make oil out of tends to suck a lot of nitrogen out of, condenses. It's a fire plant, it takes a lot of nutrients out to produce something that you can burn.
And then on the other hand you have fava beans or these, I don't know what you call it, but these are plants that actually add nitrogen and they're water plants. So depending on what you need, you will work with one of the other in the cover crop. Nettles were in the middle, they don't belong to one or the other. So having nettles, in fact, also nettles are known to work on nitrogen high ground, but at the same time they have the same, they need the same nutrients as marijuana for example, as cannabis. But they're balancers. While cannabis uses a lot of nitrogen nettles don't use a lot of nitrogen. And if you have a lot of nettles around, especially also if you have a lot of different plants, if you don't have a surface that is dominated by one plant, it tends to mean that it's fine. They are working it out.
If there is an emergency, you will have one of the seed or one of the plants exploding and dominating. So that's signaling something to you. And in the last 10 years we've not have any problems and so we're fine. This is [inaudible 00:12:43] it's a sour plant. Try it. Very good actually in the salad as well.
It's a plant bountiful. There's a lot of stuff going on, which is great. And so people say, "How don't you have cover crops." They're like, "No, you do your cover crops." I know where we plant ramps we let it sit for a year and plant something that extracts nitrogen the year after. So, don't think that cover crops still here in blooming Instagram posts are anything positive.
So, this is one thing that is quite unique. So because we have a very sandy soils, phylloxera hates sand, that's why people always say river beds are, you can find very old pre phylloxera vineyards in river beds or obviously volcanic soils. But it's mostly has to do with the fact that phylloxera doesn't like loose soils and so phylloxera doesn't like this place and which is good.
So, we can do marcottage. So this, the Italian's call [foreign language 00:14:02] so when this plant died three years ago, and we just pulled down the plant nearby and it rooted and it's fine,. It goes into production the first year. There we have the example of what we did this spring, same thing. So dead plant here, we pulled this over and now it's growing and in the first year it already produced. So this is less expensive, more efficient, and more intelligent than actually buying plants.
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FTC Compliance: I currently work for Cutting Edge Selections which represents Louis Dressner Selections and Agricola Foradori in Ohio and Kentucky, but this blog and podcast are completely separate from that business relationship.