Grapes Got Wisdom | Felix Egerer | Barrels and Roots

In this episode of Barrels and Roots, I sit down with Felix Egerer, a viticulturist farming vineyards on Vancouver Island for Unsworth Vineyards and Blue Grouse Estate Winery. We talk about how a kid from beer country in Germany ended up building a life in wine, why vineyard work is so much more than growing grapes, and what it really means to listen to the land.

Felix breaks down the hidden world beneath every great bottle of wine, from living soil and microbes to regenerative farming, biodiversity, pruning decisions, and the way vines respond when something is out of balance. What I loved most about this conversation is how much it moved beyond wine and into life. We talked about slowing down, paying attention, respecting nature’s cycles, and remembering that harvest is not the only part of the season worth celebrating.

This is a conversation about wine, soil, farming, patience, and the deep connection between people, place, and the land. Whether you love wine, care about sustainable agriculture, or just want to understand what really happens before the bottle reaches your table, this episode gives you a whole new appreciation for the vineyard.

What do you think we can learn from vineyards about slowing down and paying closer attention to life?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

That's like the ultimate goal every year. It's like, oh, we'll get to harvest, and then it'll then it'll be good. And all of a sudden, you miss all of spring and summer, and and everything in between where where the beauty happens. And you see here, it's like, okay, the swallows showed up. We know it's bud break. Or the robins showed up, so we've got another month and a half. All these little steps along the way, the the elk have lost their antlers, and the bears are coming out of their dens, all that kind of stuff that gives you little cues to what's going on around you when you might not fully understand it because we're at the mercy of nature. Nature always bats last, which is one of my favorite parts of the job. Coming into it with a plan, especially in an environment like here, where we're a mile and a half from the ocean and almost the the west the westernmost vineyard in in North America, and you you can't take anything for granted. Last year it stopped raining in May and didn't start in September. The year before it rained right through. That's why people put wine there in the first place or wine grapes. And that's why people make it. And then they give it to a salesperson who do their thing, which is also art, science, and magic to sell it. And then the consumer either drinks it right away. I think a lot of wine in the world doesn't make it past 24 hours of sale in consumers' hands, or sticks it away and then it resurfaces in, like you said, five, 10, 20 years, and it's turned into something completely different.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

All right, welcome everybody back to the Birrels and Roots Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Trace, and I have an awesome guest with me today. Would you like to tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_02 2:06

Yeah, thanks, Sean. Hi. Um, my name's Felix, Felix Eggerer. I am a viticulturist in Bridge Columbia on Mancover Island, and I farm vineyards for Unsworth Vineyards and Bluegrass Estate Winery there.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Awesome. How did you get started on this path? What was it that got you going down this overall path?

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Viticulture. That's a good one. I've been doing wine in one way or another my whole adult post-high school life. Um, I was born and raised in Germany and didn't get into med school because my grades weren't good enough, and so I went into wine, which seems super logical. Um yeah, I I started in 2010, started working in a winery as a pre-internship before I started going to school, and a couple days in it felt like the right thing to do for the rest of my life. Cleaning tanks with some pressure offer from the inside. Um faced that through five years of schooling between Germany and California, harvest around the world, and very much on the winemaking track for years, like most folks who who enter the industry, and then figured out after a couple years of doing that, that nobody really wanted to work in vineyards. And it was fairly easy to get nice jobs, and you got paid to be outside. And I haven't looked back since. So I started managing vineyards in 2018, also in in British Columbia in the Okanagan Valley, and then transitioned to Vancouver Island in 2022 at the end of 2022, and haven't looked back since. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

It's awesome. It's like I love how those paths find us, and sometimes something that seems like it's a disappointment, like not get into med school, can be the thing that leads you to where you're what you're supposed to be doing, or like what you actually can like really love and enjoy. But did you grow up around wine? You know, was there a bottle that calls you to wine? You know, was there a special, you know, like oh yeah, that's the one? Or was it just something that was around uh, you know, in your family and your life?

SPEAKER_02 4:07

The latter. I grew up in in southeastern Germany, just outside Munich, so very firmly in non-wine country, in beer country, actually. Um, I grew up in a in a city that's home to the supposedly oldest brewery in the world from 1040. And wine was around on dinner tables. My mom, as a kid, grew up in the Mosel area, and so she would help pick grapes at a at a local winery, family friends. That was really the only connection to to the product, other than it being everywhere in Europe. It's a very different, at a very different level, wine and beer that are just the beverages that are around all the time, and they're they're very common elements of of dinner tables and not necessarily special occasions.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

That's interesting. I um I grew up not around wine at all until I moved to the Napa Valley and I kind of discovered it from living there. You know, I I moved into that region, and it was just this wow, this is special. But what that made me fall in love with it was learning about the learning about the the people behind it. Because I thought it was so interesting to see these people out working in the in the vineyards and out growing this amazing thing. Um, so yeah, it's really awesome like that. I want to ask you another question though, because you know, what does a viticulturist actually do?

SPEAKER_02 5:32

That's a really good question. We do a lot of things. Um all the farming out out in the field that it it's every day of every year. There's not a time that we're not busy right now. We're just hitting bud break. So the beginning of the the actual growing season, although I always look at pruning as the beginning of the growing season where we where we get to shape the season ahead and seasons to come. And um then we spend the next five, six months cultivating the vines around our vineyards, taking care of the property around it and the people. Harvest time rolls around here late September, early October. This year seems to be on the earlier end so far. We had a pretty dry and warm winter. And then we get a couple weeks off after the nets are off and everything is packed away. Seasonal folks go home and we're we're back to the races. We're back to maintenance work and starting pruning again in November, December. Cycle never ends.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

One of the things, too, that I think that people have um we live in a world that everyone wants something new, you know. And yet, you know, ancient cultures and civilizations under the cyclical nature of things. That, you know, things would come and there was this ebb and flow. Um, and that there was the beauty to that, you know, the beauty of the seasons, the beauty of trying things and and seeing if they worked, and maybe they did, and then, you know, iterating in the next year trying something different, you know. And I I think it's always interesting how you know we can be in touch with those cycles and and learn to enjoy them. Because I think that when everyone wants something new and there's just this constant race for the newest thing, it makes, I don't know, it makes the world a little bit less of a rich place, in my opinion. I don't know. Tudly, toddly.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

We see in wine, we we often talk about age of vineyards, and some of those old vines are really um revered in the world. Uh the oldest vines I've worked with, I think, were from planted in in the late 70s, and you walk through that block that's been in that same spot, seeing everything day in, day out, no matter what, not being able to move for 50 years. And it makes you feel small because you're just there, you're part of its journey. Um, much like we're part of other people's journey in the world or or wherever wherever we go. And it does its thing. It doesn't matter what the weather is, it does its thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

And I think as as humans, we can learn a lot of a lot of hubris that I um I'm fascinated by I I love you know, growing up in uh I grew up near St. Elena. We head over to the coast all the time, over to like Bodega Bay, but we are we stopped over at Armstrong's Woods in the California area. And the Armstrong Woods are this beautiful red woods. And you know, you go in there, some of those trees are three, four hundred years old. You know, you're looking at this this thing that has been alive and has been growing from way before, way before the US was even a country, you know, way before, and you in they I this one tree fell down during the storm, and they cut it in half, and then they they chart out the lines to like, okay, this is where Columbus came to the new world. This is where this, and you're just looking at these lines going, oh my goodness. And to think about a plant that has been planted, you know, and we go and you see someone, and we have all of this new digital tech that makes things fast, you know. And one of the things too, like, and I'm not gonna hate on AI, I there's enough people doing that, but what I think about like I got to work on a movie, right? And everyone's like, oh my goodness, Hollywood's gonna get replaced. I remember when I worked on this one great movie and we got to film, and they were shooting on film. It was uh I was working in Hollywood a while back, and then you know, they they had to go into post-production and then they had to go into marketing, and it took a good year and a half after the movie was made to come out with this product, you know. And like you think about grapes that are planted, when are they actually going to be harvested? And when will that wine actually be drunk? You know, it could be five, 10, 15, 20 years from the inception of that thing. And it like, and the the reality is is that vine came from somewhere else. It came from, you know, some type of either a cutting or whatever, however, they grow them. Like, that's the wild part too. You know, it's like it's this thing that has continued uninterrupted back for eons, and it's so wild to think about that, you know?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

It is absolutely it's it's fascinating. And then you entered after stage left the soil, which every single little molecule of carbon floating around has been inhaled, exhaled by people, plants, animals for millennia, and it's the same carbon that cycles over and over and over and over again. And getting to be part of that cycle for a tiny little moment in time, why rush through it? It's gonna end faster than we want it to anyway. And so one of my favorite things is like just stop and smell the smell of flowers, just don't forget that. We we tend to forget it. And in viticulture, we're we're in rows, we have trellis left and right, or vine rows, whatever they look like, left and right, and we're chasing harvest. That's like the ultimate goal every year. It's like, oh, we'll get to harvest, and then it'll then it'll be good. And all of a sudden you miss all of spring and summer, and and everything in between where where the beauty happens, and you see here, it's like, okay, the swallows showed up, we know it's Bud Break, or the Robins showed up, so we've got another month and a half. All these little steps along the way, the the elk have lost their antlers, and the bears are coming out of their dens, all that kind of stuff that gives you little cues to what's going on around you when you might not fully understand it because we're at the mercy of nature. Nature always bats last, which is one of my favorite parts of the job. Coming into it with a plan, especially in an environment like here, where we're a mile and a half from the ocean and almost the the west of the westernmost vineyard in in North America, and you you can't take anything for granted. Last year it stopped raining in May and didn't start in September. The year before it rained right through. And every region that grows wine in the world has that intricacy, and I think that's what draws a lot of people to it. That's why people put wine there in the first place or wine grapes, and that's why people make it. And then you take this product, the grape, and you give it to someone who does their magic, their science, their art on it, and turns it into wine. And then they give it to a salesperson who do their thing, which is also art, science, and magic to sell it, and then the consumer either drinks it right away. I think a lot of wine in the world doesn't make it past 24 hours of sale in in consumers' hands, or sticks it away and then it resurfaces in, like you said, five, 10, 20 years, and it's turned into something completely different.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

It's wild, right? It's super wild. I didn't even think that was like one of the the most you had two like mic drop moments in there, but like the one that got me like we're folks so focused on harvest that we missed spring and summer. I, you know, have been building a company, I'm raising a daughter, both things that take a lot of energy. And yet, you know, you're like sitting there, I gotta do this right, I gotta do this right. And then the reality is you got to sit there and smell the roses, like you said, man. The other day, I one of my favorite days of my life happened last week. And and I I will say it easily, one of my favorite days. Uh, my daughter and her cousins came down and we watched Project Hail Mary, and we went to see it together, and it was just so much fun. Like those little movies. I remember those movies, some of the first movies I saw as a kid. And it's interesting too because you know, when you're growing something, you don't always think about where you're going with it, but it's so beautiful like that. When I wanted to ask you this too like what makes growing grapes, wine grapes different from growing other crops? Good question.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Wine grapes are their own beast. So we're dealing with a perennial, first of all, um, that wants to grow as big as fast as possible. It's in the wild, grape vines tend to grow in riparian areas and find a tree, their natural trellis, to climb up on. And then they go up to the sun, sun, sun, because there's a lot of canopy above. And we take this plant out of its environment and force it for lack of a better term, into something that works for us, that works for our machines, works for humans as as laborers, and put in a trellis, put it in whatever your vineyard looks like. For us, it's a lot of VSP vertical shoe positioning where we are. Um, other vineyards, say Napa, very different-looking canopies. And that perennial nature means that you get one shot a year, which is similar for annuals, but then that shot, whatever you do, affects definitely the next year, probably even more than that. Three years, five years, ten years down the road, one bad pruning cut taking off something that you've built for years by accident, can can destroy an entire vine structure. And depending on how how bad it is, I don't know if you've ever cut a hedge or anything at home. A tree, you take off a big limb and the tree doesn't like it, and then it just dies. And I have seen that so messed up, man. And that that is it makes it harder to a certain point, but also nicer because the vines get used to where there are and get used to reacting to it. And you can really see, because of its perennial structure, the following year you get to pruning and you see how well you did on shoot thinning or pruning that year before, or sometimes even five years back. We prune in a way where we encourage the vine to grow big. We we keep a lot of old tissue to to build like a big reserve of tissue, sometimes referred to as saplow pruning. And you can you can count the seasons growing out on the wire by looking back from where your shoots are now in our system. We've been at it for I've been here for three years now, and we've we've gotten most of our blocks to a shape where all of a sudden pruning becomes easier and it becomes natural because you get up to the vine and the logical choice is the is the right one to make. And those plants, yeah, keeps you on your toes. You do can't just switch it over. Same with varietal choice or or rootstock choice. You get one shot for hopefully 30 plus years. Um hopefully you don't have to plant it again in your lifetime. That that would be that that would be the ideal. It's extremely expensive to do, and vines, they take a while to come online, anywhere from three to five years before we first harvest, depending on what your farming philosophy is and and your context. And then you get into this adolescent stage and then move into maturity of the heart, where the grapes are really good, for the vines, the fruit is very expressive. And once you get into older vines, then slowly yields start coming down naturally, and the vine ages out to the point where it may or may not be commercially viable to still farm it. You've got some of those grandfather vineyards all around the world. Um, a lot of them, California has tons of vineyards that are that are really, really old that were planted in the 1800s and still are still farmed. Um, Australia has a lot of old vineyards like that. There's some around Europe, but that's not the norm. The norm these days is probably in the 15 to 20 year range where it's rinsing. And realistically, most wine in the world is farmed very intensively, um, and it's a lot of inputs to produce wine that is at uh at the entry level.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

I I just am blown away by like you talking about that. Like, I I I get anxiety thinking about the scale of what you guys have to grow. Like the the size of the vineyards and the the sheer scale. Like, I think about like I did, I I used I I learned my video like background on film, film cameras. My dad bought me this camera and said, here you go, son. Now now with digital, it's great to click, click, click, it all saves on your memory card. It's easy, right? You know, but when you were working on film, like click, click, click, you know, and what there were times where some of my cameras didn't have that little box that lets you see whether there's film inside, you know, or it didn't have a mark. You're like, oh man. And so this couple times earlier on, I was like, let's pop this thing open and see. And I was like, ah, damn, clap it back shut. And I was just like, I just messed up that role. Get some cool light leaks and all. I mean, it's cool. But to think about the idea of getting right large vineyards, you know, that just it's it's wild to think about it. And like you're right. I remember in high school or college, I got this thing, and I had a really great teacher, um, biology teacher, and he was also so so great with plants. And he grafted all of these apples onto the apple trees behind his house. Like he said, he had an apple tree behind his house that had like seven different varieties of apples growing off of it. It was awesome. But why I bring that up is because I did some pruning of my bone, my my bonesai that he got me into, and dear God, one wrong prune, and the plant's like, yeah, sorry about that, man. You did a good job, but I'm dead now.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

And you're like, no, don't die. You know, that's not so sad. But you know, it's so tough, right? You talk about I I have an experience with that, it's not easy, but I want to ask you too.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

You touched on something with soil. Like, why is soil such a big deal when it comes to wine?

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Without it, wine doesn't exist. Right? That's if it was a one set one sentence answer, that's that's what it is. Then that doesn't even take uh terroir into into consideration, right? It really is soil is this really interesting matrix of minerals, of microbes, of a whole bunch of other things that comes together and uh enables all life above it. It's it's most most folks don't know, or if those have never seen soil under a microscope, really li a live soil, it is carnage underground. It is constant. When when we talk about carbon cycling, that's microbes killing each other and eating each other and m making minerals available to plants for them to take it up and then grow as a result. If if we remove the soil part, which we've done successfully, supposedly, as humans, in in greenhouse operations, um, like a lot of hothouse tomatoes that are soilless media, or cannabis is a big realm where it's soilless media and the plants grow. They they look like plants, they produce things that are that look like what plants produce, but a hothouse tomato is never gonna taste like a tomato that was grown by your grandparents in the soil in the backyard. Never, no matter what you do, yeah. Unless it actually grows in live soil. And that once once I shifted that in my head, it was that was a rabbit hole I never came back from. It's a rabbit hole that. Has a million different side quests, basically, and shifting that in viticulture or any farming, be my backyard, be it we have a market garden at uh at the wine for a restaurant, seeing things come to life, plants change and their products change. And all of a sudden, when you work with systems instead of trying to dominate them and make them do what you want them to do, they'll come around and tell you what they need. To function in the way you want them to function, and you give them that, you give them the support, and your life becomes so much easier and so much more beautiful because you then have those flowers to smell, like we alluded to earlier. And you have a vine that grows happily with everything that it needs, and you don't have to go out and do a bunch of things to it that you don't want to do, where you suit up with Tyvek and everything else just to dominate it and make it survive, make it produce the crop you want to produce.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

I grew up in um kind of like an agricultural preserve area outside of San Diego, North County San Diego. And the uh the school that I went to had been there for a long time before that became an agricultural preserve. But they grew um orange trees and a lot of avocados, and it were naval oranges. And my little schoolhouse, like it was like there was a high school there that my parents taught at, and it was like a boarding high school. But I there I went to the like the one-room grade school for a year. It was a nightmare. Um, but it was wild because we had these these three orange trees out in front of the school, and they were these trees produced the best oranges I've ever had in my life. Nothing before or after has ever compared to these trees. The oranges that came off these trees were like grapefruit. They were huge, they were juicy navels, and no one did anything to them. No one was like overseeing these trees. Like the one guy came back, he'd cut them back once a year, just like a little bit, but they produced the most amazing fruit. And years later, I was like, I know that the school was getting um uh the school was getting transformed and they had sold it to someone else. And I was like, oh man, I got a chance to go back down there. And I wanted to get one of those trees, I get a cutting or something, so I can grow one of these trees now. But and then suddenly someone said something to me. She, they're like, you might be able to, but the oranges aren't gonna taste the same. I was like, what do you mean? It's from the same tree. And they're like, but it's not that same soil, it's not that same ground right at that spot that is just so rich in whatever it's rich in, it's got whatever it's got going on under there. But it's just it's like magic to that to that orange tree, and it just produced the best oranges, and it got me thinking about location and how that affects wine, and so it's always fascinating to me to hear about that. But I wanted to know because you you talk about regenerative farming. Like, what does that actually mean?

SPEAKER_03 25:13

That's a really good question, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:18

The agricultural world and uh processes and everyone else is debating it, and I don't think there's one right answer to it. I have my version of it. My my opinion is that regenerative is all around outcomes, regenerative outcomes rather than what you what you put into it. It can look many different ways, and it doesn't have to be one thing which differentiates it from a lot of other dogmatic, in my opinion, practices or or frameworks of of farming. To me, regeneration is about restoring healthy soils, vibrant soils, mineral-rich soils that cycle in a way nature intended them to do, where you have the breakdown of minerals and organic matter by microbes who then in in turn feed whatever plants are growing on it. It's an environment that's not monocultures, even vineyards, even though we have a lot of grass or other plants in between. Realistically, we put a thousand plus identical copies onto each acre of vineyard land, and it it really is. We we call them clones, specific clones, each each vine is the exact identical genotype that we pop in there and we create this monoculture. And nature abhors monocultures, she really does, and so having a system with a lot of diversity, diversity in roots, diversity in plant families, um diversity in people, happy, healthy people who are thriving, really a system of abundance, that's what I see as a result of regenerative farming systems. Some of it I like outcomes or the outcomes way of looking at it, because I can I have proof. I believe in science, I believe in data and numbers, and so I can see, I can look at a soil, I can dig up a spade full of soil and compare it to the last time I dug it up in in a similar spot right next to it, and see, are we going in the right direction or are we going in the wrong direction as far as recovery of the soil, soil health improvements go? Is the texture different? Is it better? Does it smell different? Does it look different? Um, how deeps do the root how deep do the roots go? Are those plants doing their thing? Is the organic matter breaking down? Put it under a microscope. Are there microbes in there? What kinds are in there? Which have the population changed to to the last time we looked? And same on the plants, looking at the plant itself, um, disease pressure on it, how does it hold up? Is it even susceptible? I strongly believe that really, really healthy plants that are thriving and growing in healthy soil that is actively cycling are pretty much free of disease. Disease exists, pests and disease in nature exists to take out the garbage. They find the plants that are not healthy in one way or another. They might look healthy, but if they're not physiologically healthy, they'll take them out. That's why we have swarms of locusts that still exist in North America these days in the Midwest. And uh they fly around and they will decimate one field and then skip over the net the neighboring one, frog it, and go somewhere else. And there's something about that field that they're just not interested in. Yeah, the science of it is like it's infrared emissions and all that kind of stuff, but it really comes down to a healthier plant that signals that you're not you're not gonna be able to digest me. So I'll be unhealthy. And that really that if everything is firing in all cylinders and there's a system of abundance, and soils are growing in their carbon content to what they used to be before we put a vineyard there, that's true regeneration for me. And with it comes yeah, you hold more water, you store it deeply, it doesn't run off. Things cycle, you support more life, you increase biodiversity. And at the end of the day, as a farmer, you increase your profitability, whatever that looks like for you, whether that's financial, whether that's personal, your time, you get more time back because you have to do fewer things. Um it it there's no one set of rules. It looks different for every person because it's so context specific. Even in, say, a place like Napa, you look at the valley floor, it's vineyard on vineyard on vineyard on vineyard, and operations will have different goals for for each little property. Each winery will want something else out of it. They're looking for something else for their people that are involved for the product, and so I don't think there's a label on like this is regeneration, other than we are moving in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Right? I love that, man. I love it. I uh I think it's fascinating how um it's this we're so disconnected. I think it's so fascinating to think about how connected everything are, and I didn't even think about all the microorganisms in the soil. But anytime I watch those, I I grew up on eating whole foods, and that's the thing that's in my house. We're really big on, you know, like if it comes out of a box and you don't know what it looks like, we're not eating that, you know. And my my wife's family, we live in a uh a very much a food culture. I'm living, I split my time between Vietnam and the US. And Vietnam, man, like I go up the street to the fresh market and it is fresh, like it is really great and fresh, and not always great farming practices here by far. They especially there's some really bad stuff going on, but um it's interesting to see the connection people have to the soil, you know, and whether you really what was it? There was this wild thing that I was reading, like every seven years, our our entire body is like essentially replaced by like what we're eating, and so that's the crazy part is is like I might be from America, but I've lived in Vietnam the past 12 years, so like everything that makes up me, like the physical makeup of me came from the soil here, you know what I mean? It's wild like that because we're we're constantly changing, you know. And I don't know, it's just like an esoteric thing, but I want to ask you this too, because you know you talked about this a little bit. Um actually, you really talked about it. Like healthier soil makes healthier grapes because the uh they they're more resistance to things. And I actually I I saw I see that too. Like I eat really healthy, I exercise, I never get sick. Like, I just don't get sick. I have my team, like we have like flues that whip through my team constantly. People are runny noses and everything. I just don't get it, but like I'm also eating healthy and taking care of myself, and that that resistance is wild. But you know, you talked about some people. Um, and I want to ask you this like, what's are some mistakes people make when they try treat farming like it's just chemicals and shortcuts, you know?

SPEAKER_02 32:49

I don't call it mistakes. I've never met a farmer in my life who is purposefully doing harm. Every farmer I've met loves their land and is doing the best they can with the information they have to look after that land. And some people are so constrained financially that they can't do what takes longer to, or they don't, it's just them, so they can't be out walking, walking their land, let's say in vineyards, walking every block once a week to see what's going on and taking samples and measuring like that. Um, so there's no I I think it's a mistake that we make it where we diss people, especially in our industry, who are not something or other. It's like nobody's special, nobody's better than anyone else. We're we're all farmers, we we we're doing what we can. And so there are practices or there are products that we know of that have certain impacts on plants, a lot of chemicals, agrochemicals we use, be that fungicides, be that um herbicides, insecticides, aren't really targeted. Even sulfur, which is one of the most commonly used fungicides in in the vineyard industry, which it's it's a natural product, so you can use it in organic, you can use it in in many other systems, it still impacts insect life. It still impacts if it if it protects your vines from a pathogenic fungus, it also affects the beneficial fungus that lives on the leaf, that lives on the soil wherever that plot falls. And these mistakes, missteps, whatever it is, opportunities. I see a lot of opportunities everywhere to to make subtle shifts, um, to to think outside the box. And and really we we often look at uh treating symptoms and just treating symptoms over and over again, which I believe modern medicine does the same thing. It's like we we have a symptom, oh, there's something for that. But you look at some of the older medicines, you look you were talking about Asia, you look at TCM, they take the symptom and and they go all the way back to what could it actually be? And it might be that your runny nose actually has something to do with part of your gut, your microbiome inside you. And so that has a shift going away from symptoms, taking a step back and looking at the system as a whole, and be like, oh, my disease pressure is high, maybe because I put on a whole bunch of fertilizer and create a hedge that I have to cut back 17 times a year. This is hyperbole. But it's it's rarely, it's rarely one thing. It's all interconnected, and a lot of failed conversions that I've seen where people and have been a part of where people try to they go from a conventional to organic in the vineyard and they just stop doing things and switch out the products to certified organic products, that doesn't work. Because like your mindset, your mind frame, everything has to change when when you're looking at it. And the way you look at yourself too, and your your staff and whomever is in that orbit, it often takes more work, it often takes more money, doesn't have to, and things might look different. The vineyards in our operation, they look a little hairy at times, and other times they don't. And so I think we're we're we're used to vineyards looking like this perfectly pruned box hedge with golf green in between, and that's that's not reality. There that's not saying that vineyards like that don't exist that are humming along and working in a beautiful system where everything is in sync. I'm sure they do. But a lot of them don't look like that, and thankfully it's becoming more and more accepted. I don't know if it's a generational shift, a consumer shift, where we're seeing a lot more imagery used in marketing and all other parts of vineyards that have stuff other than vines and grass growing. You throw a sheep in there, and your marketing manager is gonna lose their mind. And that doesn't mean that sheep are something that works. I've had terrible experiences with sheep when when when they weren't the right tool at the right time in the in the vineyard. And there's yeah, lots of opportunity when when you start looking, taking a step back and looking at the system as a whole. That's really weird.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

You're speaking my language now. I um I finished 90% of my doctorate in Chinese medicine, and I uh actually in acupuncture Chinese medicine, and the whole idea of balance is something that is so interesting to me because nothing exists at extremes. Like, I mean, any extreme is gonna teeter and flip swing the other way. And the reality of life is that we most of the time we're in the messy middle. And, you know, it what really is important with life is finding that equilibrium, finding that balance between those two opposites, you know, and so that's really interesting to think about the equilibrium of the vineyard, the equilibrium of the plant, the equilibrium of the vine, you know, all of these different things, the equilibrium of the of the winemaker, of the person, of the person growing it, you know? You know, and I want to ask you this because I have heard people that have said this to me, and I was like, is that right or not? Some people would say like some vineyards feel more alive than others. Is that a thing? Or is it just that the different soil and conditions cause each vineyard to look different?

SPEAKER_02 39:10

I do think they yes, they there are some that feel more alive than others. I've I've seen it, I've felt it. When when you walk into a vineyard that is imbalance, where systems are working the way they are designed to, are meant to by nature, and you have soil that is healthy, that is well flocculated, that holds a lot of water, you you walk and you experience a certain amount of bounce in the soil as you walk. Where if you walk on soil that is cultivated over and over again and maybe has no grass growing on it, it's bare and it's dry, it's hard as a rock. You won't be able to get a shovel in the ground there, where the other soil you can almost dig your hand in and pull out a handful of soil and it's all crumbly and rich. And looking up from the soil, there's critters everywhere. You gotta swat flies, other insects out of your face, because they're everywhere on the canopy, on the ground, in the ground cover. Um, there's birds, other sorts of animals. I was uh I was in in Australia last September, and we were touring vineyards, and there were kangaroos and wombats everywhere, and echidnas. And if if if you're doing things to the land that are harming nature's systems, those creatures disappear, and you end up with a really sterile environment that has more cultivated ground, bare ground, however you achieve that than anything else. It's gonna be a lot hotter, it's gonna be a lot less humid, which is sometimes the goal. People want to increase the temperature or decrease the humidity to regulate pest pressure. And you'll be hard-pressed to find a variety of insects. There might be one insect, and all of a sudden that population explodes because there's no beneficial preying on it for each insect that we consider a pest as humans. There's a multitude of insects and other creatures who prey on it. And in a balanced system, it kind of comes and goes in waves. It's, I don't know if they still teach it in high school, but I remember my days in in biology, we did the the fox and rabbit example, where one year the population of rabbits explodes. The population of foxes comes up because they have a lot of prey, and then slowly comes back down the rabbits because they're being eaten by all the foxes. And so slowly the foxes um decline, and it's this dance, this give and take, these subtle shifts in the system, and don't have that. Everything is sterile and dead. We go and spray it out, we spray whatever we do, say an insecticide, even if it's targeted, we take out a whole chunk of that system, and all of a sudden everything else dies. And someone who can fill that vacuum emerges. Nature abhors a vacuum in the soil and above ground. If there's an opportunity, they'll put something, it'll put something there. We'll see. We see in cultivation, often a whole everything gets covered by the same kind of weed, weed in in air quotes, undesirable is what I like to call them. That that emerges. And usually it's something that we don't like. You have thistles that come up, thistles, spiky. It's nature's way of telling you, quit doing what you're doing, back off. I'm spiky. I don't want you to disturb this piece of land. Vine weed, another one covers everything, climbs up vines. It's just it's there to cover the soil because nature doesn't like that. Nature wants everything covered and in material that photosynthesizes, that's green to produce carbon that then goes into the ground eventually and and feeds the underground cycle. It's carbon economy underground, day and night.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Yeah, that makes so much, so much sense. I um was curious about this too. Like, I you had said it a little bit, but like, do you think the vines can tell you when something is off in the vineyard? You know, you were talking about the thistles and stuff. Can the vines also express that as well?

SPEAKER_02 43:27

I believe so, if you pay enough attention. There's shades of green, there's the way leaves turn to or from the sunlight, there's lines of tendrils that that as a climbing plant they produce to hold onto things. That's why they work really well in trellises because they grab onto wires and and support themselves on the way up. If you take the wires away, everything flops, which in some growing systems is desired. And tendrils are really, really sensitive to shoe tips and tendrils. If you watch them closely. The wine, if the vine has enough water, tendrils will be stretching for the sky, really, really tall, and turge it. And if your vine is a little drowdy, the tendrils are the first to go. The shoe tip is kind of gets a little floppy because there's not enough water to create pressure in the cells in the plant. And other parts of it too. You look at the bark, um, you look at your take a vine out, you have something like cankers or or other diseases in the wood that that can spread if if a vine is not healthy enough to fight through it. Um I I absolutely agree. We have even within a block, sometimes there's a patch of vines that because soils are so variable, they'll be growing on something that it receives the same treatment as the whole other block in most cases, because we don't have that pinpointed people. There are that can farm with that level of precision. Um, most can't afford afford to do so or don't know how. And so you've got this little pocket of vines that might just not be doing really well. And you can see it, they'll be stunted in growth, everything else. So I absolutely believe that you can walk into a vineyard and you can you can get a feel of what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

100%. I I love that man. It's so powerful. If someone wanted to start caring more about the land, what's one simple lesson they could learn from a vineyard?

SPEAKER_02 45:34

A hole. Really, really go into your vineyard and dig a hole and see what it looks like underground, smell it, taste it. If it smells good and earthy, you're you're doing good things. If it's soft, if it's crumbly, if it looks like chocolate cake or cottage cheese, the the soil, and you take a bit of it, dry it out, and then put it in a cup of water, if it holds together, you've got glues underground that are produced by by microbes that are holding it together. And if it just kind of dissolves into mud, then that's not happening. Um there's there's good toolkits, observational toolkits that that are available um specifically for viticulture, through say something like the um Regenerative Viticulture Foundation. They're based out of the UK and operate, have a huge presence in California now, um, working, especially in the Paso area, also in the in the Napa area, where there's simple vineyard-specific things you can check for your infiltration. You bang a little piece of PVC in the ground, dump some water on it. Depending on how long it goes into it takes to go into the ground, it gives you a score. So there's certain metrics that are easy, very accessible. Everyone has a shovel, everyone has a spade or a piece of PVC and some water, dump into it, and you can start trending it, and then take your result and take a step back and say, okay, this is not so good. So what am I doing that might be affecting it? Or this is great. What am I doing that might be making it that good? Let's do more of that. Let's take it to another level. And the as far as the lesson goes from from a vineyard, it'll be like take a step back, look at the system as a whole, and in most cases, stop doing things rather than doing more things, like get out of the way. A lot of things we do, we're we're in nature's way, and she doesn't she doesn't appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 47:46

Uh it's interesting too when we work with people in Chinese medicine uh about health and wellness. The problem is evident before they get sick. Little red marks on the face, little hives popping up on your body, little aches and pains that are actually symptoms of something is out of balance. And if you ignore those, you'll get something bigger that pops up. If you ignore that, it's going to be something much bigger. But if you pay attention to the little things, are your bodies talking to you every single day? Are you willing to listen? Like that's the big question. You know, the plants are talking. Are we speaking their language?

SPEAKER_02 48:30

Totally. And are we in the right mindset going going into our job, going into the vineyard? I I work with some folks outside of viticulture, and one of the ladies I worked with, she's she's uh she works in equestrian environments. And she was the one who told me if you show up to a horse with a bad attitude, you might as well just go home, because that horse will pick up on it, and will probably it won't end well for you because horses are gonna take. And we see it with our pets at home. If we're we're in a bad mood, our dogs pick up on it, and I believe the same is true for plants. You you tend a garden with a good attitude, it's gonna grow. You tend to garden with a poor attitude, it's not gonna grow, or it's not gonna grow as well, it's not gonna be as delicious. And it's part of that experience where we can connect with whatever system we're working with at a at a higher level. Is it energy, is it spirits, whatever, whatever it is. It it is whatever it is for you that that makes it work. It's an individual experience, and every person will feel something different when they walk into a vineyard, a different level of connection. And if you don't, then that's great too. That's that's absolutely found. I love that, man.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

Well, where can people go and find out more about you and what you do?

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Me and what I do. Um, we've got the old LinkedIn, that's how you and I connected. Um got the websites Unsworth Vineyards and Plugrates Estate Winery, um, the the company websites. We've got some blurbs of what it is we do. Um, the Region Viticulture Foundation. I I am honored to be serving as their technical advisor for for Canada, um, which is a great thing. It's a really, really good community that's growing and that exists without labels at this point and is really transforming viticulture step by step. We've created a program called the One Block Challenge, where the goal is to get people in a growing region, growers together to overcome that barrier of entry. Start in one block, do one thing. Do one thing, observe it. You don't have to go whole hog to to change the way you you approach your farming. It often doesn't make sense because it goes wrong, then you're out of business, especially these days where the wine industry is in a tough spot uh really worldwide, it doesn't matter where you are. Um additional risk is not necessarily something that is is uh is a wise thing to take on.

SPEAKER_01 51:20

I one last question. If you were to have a glass of wine for yourself right now, uh what would you pour?

SPEAKER_02 51:29

That is a tough one. Um I have a real soft spot for aged semillon. Um like aged bone-dry semillon that has 20, 30 years on it, preferably Australian. I think those are some of the more memorable wines. It's it's one of those varieties that really shows where it's from because it doesn't, it's not hugely aromatic, very lean. I I tend to prefer wines that are lean, steely, and and can show what's been done to them over over their their life in the vineyard and and the winery, and then bottle. Um, so either some old SEM or some old Riesling.