I’ve come to visit Bress vineyard in Harcourt, just south of Bendigo in central Victoria, and I’m up to my elbows in fresh, steaming cow poo.
Now, as you know, when you travel to a winery, you’re usually invited into a nice, clean cellar door and offered a taste of a few wines.
This, obviously, is no ordinary winery visit. There is a nice, clean cellar door here, and there are some very good wines for tasting. But as soon as I pulled up in the car park, winemaker Adam Marks dragged me off to help him make some ‘cow pat pit’.
Which is why I’m now pushing a wheelbarrow full of poo across a paddock towards a waiting shallow hole in the ground. We’ve mixed the fresh manure with crushed eggshells (from the chooks that Marks breeds on the farm), basalt dust and a few sprinklings of herbal ‘compost preparations’ - chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark and dandelion among others - and the poo concoction will now sit quietly, covered, in the pit for a couple of months, gently fermenting. After which, says Marks, it will be mixed with water and sprayed onto the vineyard as a kind of liquid compost.
Spraying cow pat pit - also known as barrel compost or manure concentrate - is just one of many methods used in the system of organic farming called Biodynamics. And Adam Marks is just one of an increasing number of Australian grape growers and winemakers adopting Biodynamics (or ‘BD’) in their vineyards.
In some ways, an Australian Biodynamic wine movement is no surprise. Organic food and environmental issues, once the preserve of fringe-dwellers and hippies, have moved very much into the mainstream in the last couple of years, and it was only a matter of time before more people in the wine industry started turning green.
Having said that, though, it is in many ways surprising that so many vineyards - at least 50 across the country - are embracing Biodynamics in particular rather than organics in general: after all, Australian winemakers tend to be a no-bullshit, pragmatic bunch, and some elements of Biodynamics are, well, pretty wacky.
For example, as well as applying the manure concentrate and compost preparations (or ‘preps’) already described, Biodynamic farmers also spray a prep called 500 (derived from cow manure that has been buried in a cow’s horn over winter) and 501 (ground-up silica buried in the horn over winter), diluted to ‘homeopathic’ concentration in water that is ‘energised’ by stirring (first in one direction, then the opposite, in order to create chaos).
Not only that, but many of the BD vineyard activities such as planting, pruning and picking - and winery activities such as racking and bottling - take place according to phases of the moon and positions of the planets and constellations. And spraying the preps occurs at specific times: 500 in the afternoon, when the earth is ‘breathing in’, 501 in the morning, when the earth is ‘breathing out’.