Wine 9 min

Biodynamics

On Rudolph Steiner, evil gnomes, cow horns buried in winter, and why none of this is as crazy as it sounds

Biodynamics is the oldest modern form of organic agriculture. Originally conceived of by a man named Rudolph Steiner, the system grew out of a series of lectures he gave in Austria in the early 1920s. Despite the popularity of many of his ideas, many people may not realize that Steiner believed in some absolutely cah-razy stuff.

An important part of biodynamics is something called preparations. One of these preparations involves placing the dung from a well fed, lactating cow into the hollowed out horn of a female cow and burying it in the earth to ferment over the winter. After a certain period of time the horn is dug up and the contents are stirred into water in a very prescribed manner — you can't just put a stick into a bucket — which you then spray onto the vines. It's essentially a small quantity of a very high quality compost tea. Seen this way it makes total sense.

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