Oddly enough, at Troon Vineyard, the end of the previous harvest coincides with the beginning of the new. As we picked our first grapes of the 2021 vintage last week, we also emptied and pressed off our amphorae wines from the 2020 vintage. Ten months after we put the freshly picked vermentino into our amphorae, we are completing our last step of vintage 2020 while we pick our first grapes of 2021. To me, this always feels like the previous vintage is reaching out and touching the next. 

As a biodynamic winery, we aspire to understand nature’s rhythms and cycles. This requires our focused attention as humans seem to have lost the ability to naturally connect to those rhythms that the rest of Earth’s beings sense so well. Indeed, there is no more obvious example of those cycles than the seasons on a farm as we move from dormancy in winter to bud break and flowering in spring, veraison in the summer, and harvest in the fall. 

But there are so many more cycles that occur that, while we don’t sense them, we can see, feel and taste their results. During these last months, the wines aging in amphorae have gone through a complex dance as the characteristics of these unique terracotta vessels circulated the wine and lees in their distinctive way. In our soils, beneath our vines, an incredibly complex population of mycorrhizal fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and earthworms have gone through their complicated, intertwined cycles that only now we are starting to understand. Above ground, our diverse wildlife: myriad birds, mountain lions, snakes, coyotes, rabbits, bears, and seemingly infinite varieties of rodents and insects live their natural life cycles alongside ours. These cycles were unbroken for millennium until humans started to break them. Now, more than ever, we not only have to foster them but, once again, become part of them ourselves. 

We also picked the last grapes from an older block to be replanted next spring. For those vines, that is the end of their life cycle. Something to be respected and, for us, pulling vines is always a bittersweet moment. I hope we have alleviated some of their struggles during their last seasons as our efforts dramatically improved their health in these last years. Next spring, we will plant new vines, and a new cycle of life will begin. This vintage, we are also picking our first fruit from vines we planted three years ago. They are now strong and vigorous and ready to go onto this next cycle in their lives. 

During the same week, we buried our recently harvested stinging nettle, which after a year, will be transformed into Biodynamic Preparation 504. Just before we buried the new, we dug up last year’s stinging nettle, now rich, feathery BD 504, to be applied to our new compost piles this autumn. Another cycle was completed and started again. 

Agriculture has a natural rhythm — unless we disrupt it. On a biodynamic farm like Troon Vineyard, we are surrounded by natural cycles, and it is our job to nurture those rhythms. Plants have developed incredibly effective natural systems over the millennia. Most of the problems with agriculture today deal with the devastating results caused by our disruption of those systems. It’s time to listen to nature instead of trying to tell it what to do. 

At dawn this morning, we picked syrah for the first time from one of our new blocks planted in 2019. Hopefully, the beginning of a new unbroken circle.