Organic Farming at Grgich Hills Part 4

Winemaker Ivo:

I was pessimist about our future as farmers until recently. There is such a renewed energy interest in microbes, in soil, now we are linking it to all these microbes in our gut, we have same microbes – they are very similar and it’s a similar concept. And all these allergies in young kids which you never had a generation ago, can be explained to sick soil and what we eat today. So I will diverge a little bit from the subject because it’s bigger than your average Napa wineries and organic red wine.

What we eat today – food has lost 30-70% of nutritional value. So we are eating food but we are not getting good nutrients. That’s why we have all these disease, cancers, allergies. What the heck! Food should not be… we should not be allergic to food! There is poisonous food that you avoid, but normal food – why would you be allergic? Like gluten? Well, what’s going on is there is far more gluten in wheat than it used to be through this wrong farming. So, by proper organic farming, not only can we make better wine, but we can feed people better. Again this is not strictly related to making the best wine or organic red wine but this is important. People need to hear this

So, there is a solution for our problems – many problems – if we turn to organic especially for Napa wineries. Everything we grow should be organic. We will solve global warming because CO2 can be captured in soil. We can store carbon in soil. So with proper farming, we can reduce emissions easily of CO2.

So you may ask me, if this is all so easy and simple to do, how come people are not doing? Well there’s our government, there’s lobbyists, there’s petrochemical companies, they’re making billions every year, they don’t want change because that’s how they make money. If we all go organic, you don’t need fertilizer so what will happen to these companies? They’ll go bankrupt so they fight. They don’t care what’s best for populous, unfortunately that’s how it is, they only care for their profits. And also there’s pharmaceutical companies, they love us being sick because that’s how they make a living. The more sick we are, the more medicine we ask for, and they make money. It’s like they say, follow the money. And money is evil many times. If everybody has good intentions, we would all be changing and we would have a much healthier society. Look at our healthcare – we spend by far most money in the world on healthcare and we are number 45^th in health. We are very unhealthy people. So you see, that doesn’t work. It only works for medical companies. Not for us. Again, I diverted here but It’s all linked and relevant to Napa wineries and organic red wine or Chardonnay.