- Speaker #0
So those local communities, farmer-to-farmer networks are so, so important. And I think it's really uplifting because farmers should be our heroes. We often blame them for things, for the cost of food or for climate change and methane or whatever. But without farmers, we would all be dead. I think the main message is start small, but please start.
- Speaker #1
Hi, Stephen.
- Speaker #0
Hi.
- Speaker #1
Thank you so much for welcoming me here in this beautiful vineyard. So for a little bit of context, maybe you could tell us about where we are.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, sure. And thanks for having me here. So we are at Domaine Mirabeau, which is a farm that we bought about... about five and a half years ago. We are just north of Saint-Tropez in the south of France. So we are on the Plan de Mour, which is a plain just before the Massif de Mour mountain range, which is what shields us from the Mediterranean. So it's one of the most beautiful parts of the world that I could imagine living in.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it's such a beautiful place. And you've been very kind to welcome me here in the vineyard and spend the last couple of days here filming and recording prior to this conversation. And yeah, I just fell in love with the place.
- Speaker #0
Great. And you met some of the farming team yesterday as well. And you've seen some of the work we're doing.
- Speaker #1
I did. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
That must have been interesting for you as well.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Maybe you could start by introducing yourself briefly.
- Speaker #0
Sure. So... You can probably tell from my accent, I'm an Englishman, I'm not a Frenchman. I have been in the wine trade in the early part of my career. I became obsessed with wine when I was doing my gap year in Australia in the 1980s, so long before you were born. And I became fixated with the beauty of the wine regions, the wonderful alignment of the vineyards and the vines and the beautiful products they produced. So I started... in the wine trade in my when i left university doing delivery driving delivery trucks around london set up my wine company when i was 24 um decided to get out of the wine business to pay off the debts i'd accumulated during my 20s and went to telecoms in in my 30s um so between 30 and 45 years old i was working in telecoms i met my wife and i really missed the wine business and i said i want to get back into the wine business but i want to go and own a vineyard i want to make wine And she thought I was crazy and said it to all my friends. But after 10 years of persuading her, we finally sold the house. And that's the only money we had was from the proceeds from selling our house. So I was undercapitalized. I didn't speak any French and never made wine before. But nonetheless, we moved down here in 2009. And we just made our 15th vintage. We created a wine brand called Mirabeau. So we are Maison Mirabeau. We're now selling in close to 50 countries around the world. our biggest markets are uk usa and australia although we're selling a lot in europe as well but it's just been an incredible journey so you moved from england to france um
- Speaker #1
And being so passionate about wine, why didn't you first buy a vineyard?
- Speaker #0
Good question, because that's what I thought I would be doing. But one of the things I did a lot of, and I'm very grateful I did, was talk to people who knew more about this than me. And I met a guy called Matthew Stubbs, who's actually another Englishman in the south of France. And he said, Stephen, what experience do you have in farming? I said, well, none. He said, look, can I explain to you about the three Vs? I said, well, what are the three Vs? He said, well, viticulture, you know, growing grapes. It's very, very difficult. Do you know how to drive a tractor, Stephen? Do you know how to look after a vineyard? No, okay, that's true, I don't. He said the second V is vinification, is turning grapes into wine. That itself is a science and very technical, and you need to learn about that as well if you want to do the whole thing. He said the third V is vendre, selling. He said that's the bit that... farmers struggle to do, winemakers struggle to do sometimes. And there's an obsession in France, particularly, about owning the whole supply chain, doing everything yourself. So, you know, I see people at wine fairs who've still got mud on their boots because they were driving tractors the day before. So he said, you know, if you can create a brand, find the best farmers to work with, you know, get a really good winemaker on board, but don't obsess about owning the whole supply chain. He said, that's what you should do. So that's what I did. So we created a brand. Mirabeau. We started to find the best growers in this region to work with. We found a really good winemaker and blender. And we created the brand and put the wines in the bottle and started selling. And that's where, I mean, that was really good advice, I think, because that's where we put all our energy and all our capital. Because obviously farming is very capital intensive as well. But we basically built the brand first, and then after 10 years of brand building, we raised some money to buy the farm. So we did it the inverse way.
- Speaker #1
I see. Yeah, you started with the third V, moved to the second one, and now finally the first one, which is actually growing grapes for wine. I often hear that viticulture is a very intensive farming activity. It's one of the agricultural activity that uses the most pesticides, a lot of soil disturbance and erosion. Is that true and if so why is that?
- Speaker #0
So it is true, sadly. The plant we used for the grapes here in all wine production is Vitis vinifera, and it is very susceptible to fungi. So we have in particular mildew, so downy mildew and powdery mildew, which are big problems, especially in damp regions. So like in northern France, a real big challenge. And in the UK as well, where we're growing a lot of grapes now. So in itself... we have that challenge of fungi disease on vines. You then add into that the monoculture practice that most vineyards still practice around the world. It's unstable, so disease is going to be rife. So that's why I think a regenerative environment provides many more opportunities to control disease. But we'll still have the challenge with vitis vinifera being prone to disease, which is why now people are working on hybrid. vines, hybrid grape varieties, so that we have more disease resistance. And also, oftentimes it's grown in marginal areas, areas which haven't been selected for crop practice. And it can be quite tough. So we often, like here for example, have big extremes in climate. So it can be incredibly dry. you know, then have floods and then have forest fires and so on. So it's a challenging plant to grow at the best of times, but then you add on all those climate variations. It's a real challenge.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, okay. At what point of your... journey into wine did you learn about regenerative and you had this maybe this light bulb moment that's that you had to change we had to change as a society the way we we grow graves for wine it was a very specific light bulb moment um so
- Speaker #0
when we bought the farm and this is going to sound crazy but when we bought the farm here we spent five years looking for the right property to buy and this was the 40th property we looked at we thought this is it it's surrounded by nature reserve it's beautiful we knew that it was making great wines um we didn't do any soil analysis or anything like that which in retrospect is like crazy um but we were naive um brits in france trying to do something different um and we knew you wanted to farm organically we knew this is the minimum we should be doing um and so we actually converted straight away to organic farming here but i suddenly realized that organic was going to give me a list of things i shouldn't do you It wasn't going to give me a direction that I should be taking the farm, and it wasn't going to repair the soils. It was just going to stop doing the bad things. And I was sent an article by a friend of mine, written in the New York Times by the wine journalist from the New York Times called Eric Asimov. And he did a feature on a lady in Oregon, a wine farmer in Oregon called Mimi Castile. And she had amazing, they were amazing pictures. I was drawn to the pictures she had. ducks and sheep and all sorts of wildlife in the vineyard. There was no bare earth anywhere. It was a very different picture to what I'm used to here in Provence, which is bare earth with the monoculture. I thought, wow, this is amazing. So I've read the article. I then reached out to her and Mimi basically drew me into the world of regen. And she said, look, this isn't being taught anywhere. be careful, Stephen, because you might be considered a bit wacky. She said she was often considered to be an outlier when she started farming like this. It's rather untraditional to let your vineyard become overgrown. by nature, although clearly we're doing it in a controlled way, but still it's bucking the trend. The trend of those beautifully manicured vineyards in Napa or Bordeaux where there's only one plant growing. There's no weed or mauvaise herbe, as we say, a bad plant in France. Even that terminology is all wrong now you understand the world of Regen. So yeah, she basically helped me get going, but also the same. time I thought, well, as I'm learning this, I want to share it with others. So we actually also met a Danish permaculture expert who happens to have a house in the village I live in. And we decided to create a nonprofit to share our learnings with others. So it's a bit of a mouthful. It's called the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation. But the idea is everything that we learn, everyone who we meet who's doing this, let's share what we learn with everybody else out there. And it's been a real eye-opener.
- Speaker #1
I would love to start by focusing more specifically on this place right here, this vineyard that you bought now about five years ago. First transitioned organic and now to regenerative. So maybe you could tell me more about the... the journey so far?
- Speaker #0
Yes, well, it's not been a straight line. It's not been without its challenges because we had put on the farm basically somebody in our business, a friend of ours, who we knew who was great at driving tractors, but he wasn't a farmer because we had a consultant advising us on farming practices. So that was fairly straightforward when it was organic. because organic is a checklist almost of things you don't do. It wasn't giving you that framework of what you should be doing. So to say to the consultant, actually, I don't want to just farm organically, I want to farm regeneratively, he was saying all the right things. Yeah, great, Stephen, I'm really into that, and let's do this together. But the amount of arguments we had over the years and continue to have, because I wanted to go hardcore regen across the whole farm, as soon as I knew about REGENT, and he was like, Steven, you can't let the vines go cold turkey. Let's go this, let's do this slowly and do it in a controlled way. And we still need a plow after the combine, after the machine harvest has been over the vineyard. We then have to decompact the soil with a deep plow. I'm like, no, we mustn't plow, we've got to stop plowing. So it wasn't straightforward. And because there's no guidebook really, as to how to farm regeneratively. And we were doing the best we could, and that conflict was really good, because I probably would have killed my vines. If I'd suddenly stopped ploughing, the root systems were very, very close to the surface because they were used as surface-based fertilizers. So if I'd stopped ploughing, introduced cover crops, I could have killed the whole vineyard. And that's the reality of not going at this too fast and in an uncontrolled way. So he was right to slow me down. In hindsight, I probably would have done one parcel or one block at the beginning and tried a few practices on that and then figured out how I can then scale to the rest of the vineyard. In particular, understanding what practices are working well. And for example, with looking at my big pile of compost over there, I would have budgeted much more carefully for compost. because I think that's now an integral part of, or probably the most important thing we can do to increase the soil organic matter. So I would have chosen a parcel. I would have done better analysis of, you know, before I started, and then comparing with parcels that are very similar, but I'm not doing regen on, to really understand the differences. But look, we're still, it's, I think with regen, it's always work in progress. you know, nature is fickle. The challenges that she throws at us every year are different. But we can always find solutions within the natural system. So I guess the biggest challenge has actually been around not just pace of change, but also bringing my team on board as well. And that's where we talk a lot in the whole Regen world about including your farming team and everybody around the whole Regen movement. They have to be knowledgeable, they have to be open-minded about it, and we have to bring the whole team along as well, because it's very observational. We have to have people who are looking out at things, looking out at any disease challenges you might have that you hadn't spotted. And if the farmer's just getting in his tractor every morning and doing his thing and not really engaged, then... he or she isn't going to be a very good supporter. So bringing the people on as well is another thing that's been probably the biggest challenge, actually, because you're breaking convention. This isn't being taught at agricultural colleges. around the world, at least not in any great scale. Oftentimes in this part of the world, we've been farming vines here for more than 2,000 years as a species, and clearly we're very set in our ways. And oftentimes vineyards are inherited from families. And if your father's given you a vineyard and you say to him, thanks dad, but you've been doing it all wrong. I'm going to let the whole thing become overrun. That can lead to some real social pressures as well. So it's, which is another reason why I think you should start slow. It's a big thing to change.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so... What about the team that you're working with here? Were they already on the vineyard when you bought the place and started? And how did they react to having to change the way they've been farming their whole life?
- Speaker #0
I bought the team in here and when we knew we were going to go organic, we thought it's relatively straightforward because it's very easy to follow that framework. So it's been a challenge to bring them on that journey, to be honest. But because I'm impatient and I'm not a farmer, you know, I'm a townie from London and I want to see things happen quickly. But you can't do that with nature. And you can't do that with other people either. You know, especially if it's kind of shifting a paradigm and not what they're used to. But one of the fun things happened after a couple of years is the people that used to live here on the farm, they came back to collect some post. And they said, Stephen, what have you done with the bird noise? It's deafening. We never had that before. And that was completely unprompted. But simply because we'd planted a cover crop, we'd... been trying to bring nature into the vineyard the birds have come into and that was the most heartwarming thing that i've ever had and the best compliment that we can have that they noticed the increase in nature and i think it's become a much more beautiful place than it was before as well yeah i can i can imagine um
- Speaker #1
this morning when i was setting up i saw a big flock of birds right here right behind me in the in the vines and i thought this this must be a sign of region regenerative agriculture happening because if you were to spray very heavily your vines with chemicals, you probably wouldn't have birds because you wouldn't have insects for them to eat and the environment would be toxic. So they'd probably be avoiding the place.
- Speaker #0
So that's exactly what happened. Yeah. And it's just, it was so nice for that feedback because it was toxic before. It was sprayed the crap out of every year with all these chemicals and pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and synthetic fertilizers. And the biggest shock I got is, when I saw, we took a photograph from a drone of the vineyard in winter. And, you know, we're surrounded here, as you can see, by a nature reserve. So, you know, dense forests. And when you look at the vineyard from above, you realize this was cut out of the forest to grow vines. And when there's nothing else growing because it's winter, it's like the moon's surface. You know, the ground was rock solid. Whenever the rains came, it just eroded a few more millimeters of topsoil. That's what made me think, my goodness, we've cut out a piece of nature to impose our will on that land to make wine, to make grapes for wine. How dare we? Or at least how dare we do this without actually being more respectful for nature? So the fact that we've been able to bring it back in through various techniques, it feels right, but I'm also convinced it makes better fruit, better wine. and for a better way of living down here on the vineyard.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah. So this topic of chemical use of pesticides and fungicides, more specifically, I read when I was doing research before this conversation, that I think the stats was that viticulture represents 3% of total EU agriculture. land, in terms of land surface. But it uses between 15 and 20% of total pesticide use. Which sounds huge, crazy, right? So it is a huge part of the usual process. There must be reasons for that. And I'm wondering how you managed to do without it. What were the methods that you've used and what worked and what didn't? And maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that.
- Speaker #0
Yes, well, it's the problem, as we talked about before, about fungal disease on vitis vinifera vines. But because we were already organic here, we'd already decided we shouldn't use any synthetics. So we are constrained to using permissible... products, which is basically copper sulfate mixes. We call it the Bordeaux mix. So we'll spray that against mildew. But it's suboptimal as well. I mean, the sulfur element works well, but with downy mildew and the use of copper, you know, copper is, by definition, it's killing fungus and fungi. And that's what we need in the soil. That mycorrhizal fungi network, which is the biggest. thing I learned about Regen at the beginning is what we need to preserve. And so even organic methods are not necessarily best for soil. And that's where Regen itself is carving its own path. We're trying to find, obviously, nature-based solutions for giving us the right disease-resistant crops. But actually, you know, building the resilience of the plant's own immune system. And so that's something that, again, I think it's very interesting when you see the context of viticulture and the way it's been taught over the last, I would say, couple of hundred years, but certainly the last 50 years or so. People are being taught at wine schools or agricultural colleges that the purpose of the soil is to hold the vine vertical. You go and buy everything else from the wholesaler. And that's been taught until fairly recently, I would say. So we still have this legacy mindset of we control the vineyard. Man controls the vineyard.
- Speaker #1
We kill everything in the ecosystem and in the soil, and we just add the nutrition that the plant needs to make sure it grows.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, exactly that. So you can buy everything you need. And it's really... It's... If you think about it, it's horrible. You know, every day you're out there killing everything that's not your vine, buying products that will enhance the life of your vine, buying these, you know, fertilizers and everything else. And it's just so wrong. So that lack of balance, I think, has led to a lot of the problems we have with disease. And so, you know, that's why the regenerative approach is far more practical. But, you know, we have to forgive our forefathers for not knowing more about soil because we've only learnt. so much about soil in the last 20 or 30 years. So not putting bad stuff in the organic way was, yeah, that's the best we knew at the time. But now we know about the soil microbiome. We now know the importance of keeping carbon in soil, about nurturing that life underground. It gives us a different perspective about what happens above ground.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. even get surprised sometimes that we've managed to keep going this way for so long, destroying soils. having massive levels of erosion, having soils that are very much depleted of nutrients, of microbiology, of topsoil even, and that we still manage to somehow by adding enough mechanization and enough chemicals to keep it going. Do you think that's something that can go on forever if we don't transition to more regen-minded farming practices? soon? Or is there a stop at some point to all of this?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, we're going to fall off a cliff edge at some point. There are various statistics about how many more harvests we have left before the soil is so depleted we can't grow anything anymore. Meanwhile, a lot of the external inputs that we're making from petrol-based products or we're mining from the land, they're getting more expensive and they're running out too. So this has got to stop. And a lot of farmers have realized this for years, that this kind of industrial and mechanized farming is proving to be very, very damaging. But we knew this 100 years ago in the States. We had the Dust Bowl, where we had all these, the tops are flying off and landing on the White House, and even they woke up to the fact this doesn't seem right. But... Yeah, we need to accelerate the adoption of farming for the future, and farming in this nature-positive way, because as damaging as we've been with our farming methods, Mother Nature is very forgiving. We don't deserve her forgiveness, frankly. When you think about all the species we've pushed to extinction over the last 50 or so years, why should she be so forgiving? But she is, and soil can rebuild itself. One of the books I read early on was from dirt. to soil by Gabe Brown. And it's amazing to think, you know, when you start to actually have a proactive mindset about how to work with nature, how to build your soil, and how much better it is for everything around the farm, in the sense of crop yield, disease resistance, finances as well. As far as I can see, there's nothing to not like about taking a regenerative approach to farming. That doesn't mean it's not difficult. It doesn't mean there's a lot of relearning to be done, because there is a lot of relearning. There's a transition time and cost as well, as you rethink and you re-evaluate what machinery and your methods of farming. But coming through the other end, it's super positive, and it's definitely the future of farming.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah. We've already drifted into these big questions about the future of farming and viticulture as a whole. But I want to just bring the conversation back a little bit on the farm and what you're doing here. So maybe you could describe... In a little bit more detail, some of the regenerative methods you've applied here on the farm and how they've gone so far.
- Speaker #0
Sure. So one of the first things we did was introduce cover cropping. But before we did that, we wanted to cut some of the horizontal root systems that I said earlier were very close to the surface. So we did a deep cutting of the root systems. But we wanted to make sure that the root systems were going deeper before we introduced cover crop. But now we have cover crops in every year. We rotate the cover crops. We always have mixed crops in there as well, depending what we're trying to achieve. So we're mixing them up every year and we're getting a better idea of what we should be planting. They're annuals rather than perennials, but this year we've tried a few perennials as well because we're obviously trying to do less. less work on the soil but that's the main thing um because we did get quite a lot of water erosion here and soil erosion here so and one of the hills behind us here at the farm um the previous owner said that every year the top soil will wash down to the bottom of the field so you need to get a jcb and dig it up and put it back at the top of the field that made me think that just doesn't sound right yeah you know that so um That's one of the things we've been doing. We've been working with biochar as well to accelerate the carbon in the soil. We've started doing vitiforistry here, which is a concept which I love. And a lot of amazing vineyards are doing this now, which is basically bringing trees into the vineyard to help break up the rhythm of the vines, bring nature into the vineyard. And there's some very interesting results on some of the work around vitiforistry.
- Speaker #1
Let me just take a really short break from this conversation to tell you about the official partner of this podcast, Soil Capital. Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils. It's a company that I personally really like. I'm a big fan of their work and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the podcast. If you're interested in learning more about Soil Capital, I will leave a link in the description of this episode. Let's get back to the conversation. I saw this morning, I was walking around there, I saw a whole line between different plots of young trees. I guess you planted them recently. Yes. And I saw some almonds, some plums, I think. Yeah, and trees like that. So a lot of different food trees.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, we have fruits and nuts. So yeah, you saw the almonds. We've got apple trees in there. We've got some cypress trees in there, which are very local to here as well. We've got plum trees, pomegranate, some rose bushes too. So it's just a kind of whole mix. It's kind of like a hedge. It's not just like a line of trees.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so with that kind of diversity, is the goal more just to really have a lot of diversity, a lot of different types of roots, different heights, and really add to the biodiversity of the land rather than have another productive crop that you harvest and that you also sell?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, in our case, it's about the former rather than the latter. It's about... breaking up the environment in different ways. It's about having different root structures. So that kind of soil architecture becomes different when you have roots that are going deeper down than the vine root. It's about creating shade. It's about bringing nature in, about bringing insects in. Hopefully it improves the water table as well, as you have those root structures going down deeper. It also provides shade. It's a very hot part of the world here. And, you know, if you were to do this more systematically, because we're trying to adapt a vineyard that's been here for 200 years, so we're having to manage it very differently than if we built it from scratch today. But there are all these benefits of vitiforestry. And it's interesting seeing, you know, in Bordeaux, it's happening in the Rhone, it's happening all over the world, and people are seeing different benefits. But it's basically breaking up that monoculture and creating a much more biodiverse plant system.
- Speaker #1
What are the...
- Speaker #0
potential downside of adding trees to your your system a good question i think um potentially if you're taking out vines to to replace them with trees you're losing some some production um There could be some arguments, and there always are arguments, when you have any other plant here apart from the vine, that it's creating competition for water in particular, and potentially nutrients as well. But the counter-arguments are even stronger, that actually they help create more water in the environment, they help create much more biodiversity underground as well, so actually it's helping with building your disease resilience. as well because you know monocultures don't exist anywhere in nature yeah and there are more more books now um uh that talk about the way that plants talk to each other through that underground network and of of root systems and fungi so it's um yeah i'm i'm convinced that it's it's it's the way forward yeah and it's it's it also helps add to the you know the sort of uh I guess the visual aspect of the vineyard as well, that it's not just kind of one thing going on there. It's actually much more mixed now.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah. I guess you still lack the data to really be able to demonstrate the pros and cons and that the pros outweigh the cons. Like you said, you're losing a little bit of space for production. You need investments in planting these trees and pruning them and doing all sorts of things. There might be some competition for nutrients and water with the vines next to it. But at the same time, there's all of these other potential amazing benefits that you just mentioned. And your bet is that actually these benefits will be far superior to the downsides that you're starting with.
- Speaker #0
I'm sure. I mean, we'll make mistakes, but I don't see that we're making any mistakes around that part of it. You know, the vitivoracy part, I think, is the arguments are very strong indeed. And but for sure, I mean, if it starts to get people thinking differently about having mixed mixed crops. So, and potentially having another income from the cover crops or from having trees in there producing fruit or nuts. You know, we have olive trees here anyway as well. So, you know, I think it's just a much more diverse ecosystem and that's got to be good.
- Speaker #1
Sure. Now I'm trying to think of how you could incentivize other farmers who farm more conventionally to apply some of these methods. staying on this VT forestry idea. I know that in other countries, like in Belgium, for example, there are government funds for farmers who include agroforestry systems on their farms that cover most of the cost of the tree and the cost that comes in at the beginning, which is a big barrier for some farmers to do that. Have you ever heard of anything like that in the wine world?
- Speaker #0
No, I wish I had, because I think we need support. to do this. We know that we need to change the way we farm. We've spoken about that. I don't know whether viticulture will ever be supported in a very strong way by governments because it's not an essential food. But I think as far as protecting ecosystems, everyone should be encouraged to farm in these ways. What's interesting though is regenerative farming isn't well defined anywhere. Certainly at a government level, regenerative agriculture, I don't think the EU's got a definition yet. But some of the practices of regenerative farming are being supported and sponsored by governments. So I think it'll come eventually that actually anybody that's farming regeneratively will be supported to transition. And eventually, hopefully, the whole of Europe will be farmed regeneratively. we'll see the benefits of it.
- Speaker #1
And we need pioneers such as yourself to lead the way, to make the experiments, to make the mistakes, to prove that this is beneficial for the farmer, it's beneficial for society, for biodiversity and ecosystems and maybe eventually convince policymakers and governments and other people to invest more in these practices.
- Speaker #0
Absolutely. And that's why we started the regenerative viticulture foundation or the RVF as we call it, as a way of sharing our learnings, but also sharing data points and sharing research. So regenerative farming, I guess is partly, I wouldn't say it's instinctive farming, but we've had that drilled out of us. We're so far removed from nature now, but it's scientifically backed. We want everything to have a purpose. not just to make it look prettier, but actually to have a purpose. And that's where we're seeing a lot of interesting research being done and some major universities really getting behind all the different elements of regenerative farming. So it's not just something that we feel is the right thing to be doing, and instinctively we're doing certain things. There's a lot of science backing up these decisions. And one of the most powerful tools we're going to develop this summer with our website is having a forum. Because if you want to buy a mulcher or a crusher or something to put into your vineyard to work in a regenerative way, then you want to know what are the best designs, what am I trying to achieve here, what are the best direct drill methods and what's the best brand to get and how do I get that in my region. If we can accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices and minimize the amount of mistakes people are making. then that's also a really important part of our role as a foundation.
- Speaker #1
When you're saying a forum, you mean an online platform where people can exchange experiences and information?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, exactly that.
- Speaker #1
Specifically in the viticulture world? Yeah. Right, that's a great idea. Is there a big community yet in this?
- Speaker #0
It's certainly a growing community. I mean, it's a free-to-access website and everything we do, we share in newsletters, we share on a regular basis. Um, it's growing. I mean, we've got a couple of thousand people on our mailing list. Um, I think we've got more than two and a half thousand on LinkedIn and so on. So it's certainly growing pretty rapidly, I would say. And there's a huge appetite out there for people to learn more about regenerative viticulture. Um, and especially now there's been some, um, some studies. There's been one trial in particular, um, which is the biggest regenerative viticulture trial in the world in California, in a wine region called Pazza Robles. And it's been done by Robert Hall Winery, and actually a friend of the foundation's. He's now a trustee of the foundation. Kane Thompson ran this. It's a four-year trial so far. But the evidence coming out of it, comparing what he's done with regenerative plots, regenerative block versus sustainable farm blocks, it's just phenomenal. So the good news is it produces better fruit and better wine, but also... The soil quality is so much healthier. The soil carbon is higher. The CO2 around the canopy in the summer is less than on the sustainable farmed plots, which means the plant is working more effectively. It's photosynthesizing, hard word to say, photosynthesizing more efficiently. It's putting the sugars into the soils more effectively. It's just an incredible trial. And So this is what we need people to look at and to see and to get confidence in. But actually, there's nothing to not like about this. And they're not betting the farm on it. They did a trial block. But within a year, they decided, wow, we've got to roll this out, the whole farm. Nothing to not like about it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So even yields were good. Input costs. were not dramatically increased. Disease resistance was stronger. So there's nothing to not like about it, really. It's an incredibly inspiring trial.
- Speaker #1
Okay, yeah. Yeah, you mentioned... quality and that's a big one when we come when it comes to wine it's a bit of a different types of of product than than most agricultural crops right because you you have a lot of added value that is related to the quality and so isn't there a massive opportunity there if you can really demonstrate by making amazing wine that using regenerative agriculture leads to better products which you can then sell more expensive absolutely because because you
- Speaker #0
wine is one of those, it's not quite unique, but it's pretty, it's close to being unique, I think, in the sense that the farmer is then fermenting those grapes and putting it into a bottle and putting it on the shelf. So you can actually taste where it comes from. You don't normally mix wine with anything else. It's not like a potato or carrots or beef that you put a sauce over. You can actually taste the difference. And... In wine we use this word terroir, which is a French word that means, you know, it's about the place. It's meant to mean the soil and the aspect and the microclimate and everything that's affecting that wine. And people say that you can really taste the terroir in my wine. It's very specific to where it comes from. But actually a lot of the terroirs... have very low soil organic matter. They're not actually living. They're close to death. And this is wrong as well. It's going back to the whole thing around the soil's purpose, holding the vine vertical. So I think it's... Regenerative farming and having healthy living soil and having a better output of fruit, more taste, more expression of location is a huge opportunity for us in the wine world. So it's really bringing back a true expression of sense of place into wine and I think that's really, really exciting.
- Speaker #1
I've noticed that there are a few animals running around the farm. I've noticed alpacas, goats, pigs. Can you maybe tell us a little bit more about that?
- Speaker #0
Yes. So actually, at the moment, they're more for fun, but a bit of a statement of intent. We plan to bring in sheep more often here. We've had sheep in here in the past, but they have to leave in the summer because it gets too hot. But also, they like to eat. the buds and they like to eat the leaves of the vines and all these vines as you can see are kind of waist height um in the classic uh trellis way of the vineyards in the south of france and so you have to you can only have sheep in here for during the winter period so um animals is something we want to integrate much more into the vineyard and i've just met an amazing man in california called kelly mulville who has been experimenting with sheep in vineyards And he's developed a trellising system whereby the vine is a sort of shoulder height, a head height, so you can have sheep in all year round. And so, in fact, behind you in the vineyard, we've got two people pruning away here, bent over double. It's back-breaking work pruning, especially at that height. So actually it's one of the benefits of having the vines at shoulder height, it makes pruning a bit easier. But we're planting some syrah down just behind where they're pruning this spring. and we're going to be trellising those up higher so we can have the sheep in all year round. And I'm hoping that we can have the whole vineyard transformed to that kind of trellising system over the years.
- Speaker #1
What's the idea behind it, having sheep on the vineyard? How do they work with the ecosystem? What's the benefit of having them?
- Speaker #0
So there are many benefits. I mean, one of the things that we are doing here is having to terminate the cover crop when the vine growth is important and the cover crop shouldn't take over all the minerals and nutrition in the soil and in particular water. So we're cutting or mulching or crimping our cover crops. But if you've got sheep in, they kind of do that for you. Not only that, but they are keeping the cover crop down, but then obviously they are pooping and urinating and putting those nutrients back in. So it's all part of that nutrient cycle. So it's nature's way of giving you these cover crops.
- Speaker #1
terminators if you like but actually they're they're doing much more than that yeah yeah okay um yeah they're really helping the whole ecosystem boosting the ecosystem by cycling those nutrients eating those cover crops yeah exactly exactly but it's a different you know it's you know it's
- Speaker #0
all part of this kind of called the regenerative paradigms if you are thinking in a much more holistic way then you've got to learn a lot more skill sets so rather than just learning how to look after a vine and keep everything else out, you're having to learn to bring things in. And to work with sheep is a very different skill set to working with vines. And so we have to acknowledge that and not try and do everything at one time. So that's why we're going to work with a small parcel initially and a very small flock of sheep. I haven't even thought of which sheep yet. And again, in California, I'm seeing there are some hair sheep rather than wool sheep. So, because one aspect of managing sheep is obviously shearing the wool off in the summer. But if actually you've got hair sheep, it drops the hair naturally and that goes into the ground. But it's just one less thing for the vineyard to have to worry about. So, yeah, animal husbandry is an aspect of... total farming that viticulture at the moment doesn't address. So we're having to bring in these new ideas gradually and not give everyone a nervous breakdown here.
- Speaker #1
It's one of the biggest issues with regenerative farming is the level of complexity raises drastically from a fairly binary simple system that fits neatly in an Excel sheet, right? Exactly. And into something really complex and something that changes every year and you cannot predict exactly what nature is going to do and biodiversity is going to do. And so it's so much more complex and adding animals to that adds even more complexity. I've spoken to some farmers who collaborate with professionals in animal husbandry who will have a flock of sheep, for example, and they just bring them in. And there's some kind of synergies between the two because they get free food, but the farmer doesn't have to worry about... owning the sheep or dealing with them is that something that you you see potentially happening
- Speaker #0
Yes, much more. Unless you've got the scale or the skills and the manpower to do all these things yourself, I think we need to build these much more community-based farming projects. So yeah, people are bringing sheep in. We're bringing bees in every year as well, so we work with a local beekeeper. But we don't have the skill set to look after bees as well. But they come in here and we buy the honey off the beekeeper and we sell it in our shop. So I think, yeah, we're going to be working in a much more community-based, which is what I love about this as well. You're not just regenerating your own farm, but you're potentially regenerating communities as well and bringing real thinking power back onto the farm. A lot of farmers have just been stuck in their air-conditioned tractor quite a few meters from the soil, just driving away and really removed from it. And we need to get feedback into the soil and to really be observational and see what cause and effect are happening by different farming techniques. But I love that aspect and leaning over the fence at the side of the farm, talking to the neighbor. So those local communities, farmer-to-farmer networks are so, so important. And I think it's really uplifting because farmers should be our heroes. We often blame them for things, for the cost of food or for climate change and methane or whatever. but without farmers we would all be dead. So I think it's really regenerating the goodwill in farming is kind of a great byproduct of this movement.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah. How has the local community reacted to you coming here and doing things differently? Because you're not only come from a business background, you come from the UK. And you come in here, buy this vineyard and change everything and do things differently than they've been doing for generations before. So it must not have been easy to get them on board.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's true. Well, it's actually true, but it hasn't been as much of an issue. I mean, I'm already used to the French thinking I'm mad anyway. You know, Brick coming here and trying to make wine in their sort of backyard. So I already have, I'm used to the raised eyebrows from my local French friends. And then I buy a vineyard and I say, yeah, we're doing it regeneratively. And they're like, oh, what are you doing now? But actually, they're really, really embracing it. And a lot of them are already doing it too. I'm not reinventing any wheel here. There are a lot of people who are farming this way. They may not be calling it regenerative farming. But it's just they have a sense of working with nature rather than against it. They've moved away from that, the old-fashioned monoculture mindset. They call it agroecology here, for example, or regeneratis rather than regenerative. But it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing. So I actually, when I knew that I wanted to get my growers, because effectively my vineyard here represents a fairly small part of my till production. I'm still working with hundreds of growers through the village cooperative system. So I wanted to get some of them to see what we're doing at the farm. And so last May we had a regenerative open day here at Domain Mirabeau, and it was actually run by my foundation, so it wasn't Mirabeau saying, this is what we should be doing, or this is what you should be doing. It's more about the foundation saying, this is regenerative farming, are you guys already aware of this, are you doing it? And if so, can we join forces and start to make more regenerative farm wines? So we had about 27, I think, growers sitting in our house here. We had some slides. We had some very good talkers, speakers, subject experts. But we also tried to paint the bigger picture of why the whole world needs to be farming this way. So we just did a morning of talks, then lunch, and then a voluntary vineyard walk afterwards. And I say that because I thought everyone would leave after the lunch. They all stayed. They all stayed to learn more. There's a massive appetite here and I think everywhere for farming in a way that's much more nature-friendly. And subsequently, we've actually certified seven of our growers, as well as our domain here, regenerative. So we've actually just launched a wine that is the first regenerative rosé to come out of Provence. When I say regenerative, I mean certified regenerative. So that's another big aspect of what's happening next.
- Speaker #1
What do we mean by certified regenerative?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so for a retailer anywhere in the world to... put a wine on the shelf and make a claim about it being farmed in a certain way, if it's organic or if it's biodynamic, then they are going to be looking for that producer to certify with one of the certifying bodies that actually that wine is demeter biodynamic or it's ecocere organic or whatever. And there are now quite a few different certifications for regenerative products. There are I'd say more than 10 certifications already available out there, and there might be more coming along as well. Because the words regenerative agriculture are not well defined anywhere, so these certification agencies are basically defining it. We've actually certified with four different agencies here at Domain Mirabeau. But it's a way of actually being able to put a badge and a label and saying, this is regenerative. the retailers the wine stores the grocers around the world who sell wine will start to say hey you know let's get more regenerative certified wines on onto our shelves yeah yeah a lot of people know about organic about uh even biodynamic regenerative is the new kid around the block right what
- Speaker #1
are the major differences between the three um yeah so regenerative
- Speaker #0
I like to say it takes the best from organic, it takes the best from biodynamic, and the best from sustainable farming practices. It's a very nature-positive way of farming, and it's much more focused on outcomes than it is on practices, whereas organic is much more focused on practices generally. So you're not allowed to do certain things. Whereas, you know, we are much more sort of open book on what you should be doing as far as getting the right outcomes. Outcomes as far as soil health goes, outcomes as far as nature restoration and biodiversity and so on. So it's a different mindset. I mean, there are a lot of organic farmers who are farming regeneratively anyway. But organic down here especially can still lead to a monoculture mindset. So instead of using herbicides, people are still ploughing the soil very heavily and calling it organic. But now we know that the damage that ploughing can do to the soil, we realize actually that's not necessarily the best solution. Using copper, huge amounts of copper in the soil, getting copper into the soil is not a good solution either. So finding nature-based solutions is what regenerative farming is all about.
- Speaker #1
Organic has many benefits, but organic is a set of practices. You need to do things a specific way to be called organic, right?
- Speaker #0
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
And with regenerative, that's not the case, which makes it really hard to define. And I guess people don't like that. We like to fit things neatly in boxes. But yeah, I like this idea of focusing more on the outcomes. But talking about these outcomes, maybe you could specify in a bit more detail what kind of outcomes and how do you measure them. How do you look to the long term with those outcomes?
- Speaker #0
Yes, so there are many outcomes that we should be measuring in a regenerative environment. For me, the most important one is one we call SOM, soil organic matter. Because the more organic matter you have in your soil, the healthier the soil is, the more disease-resistant the plants can be, and really, really importantly, the more water can be held in that soil. So a few percentage points increase in soil organic matter can lead to massive amounts more water you can store in the soil. So that's probably the most important measurement. There are other measurements like soil carbon, biodiversity, worm counts, water penetration, water ingress testing. So there are all sorts of different measurements you can do to see whether your soil is becoming healthier. to see whether it's becoming more absorbent as well, and really working the soil through nature rather than working the soil through machines. And somebody explained to me that we used to, before the kind of creation of industrial farming, we used to have solar-based farming. In other words, photosynthesis was the powerhouse behind everything you're doing. And now we've gone sort of towards hydrocarbon farming because we're using external inputs, not just as far as... Yeah. fertilizers go, but also as far as, you know, we're driving diesel-powered tractors around the place as well. And we need to go much more back towards that sort of solar-based input model and getting the energy from the sun rather than from hydrocarbons.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And so you've been measuring all of this and you're sort of monitoring it on a regular basis to see the improvements in soil organic matter and things like that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, we are, because measuring the outputs is obviously that key component. So yeah, we're measuring all those different elements. We're seeing the benefits already, but we also know we could be doing a lot more, especially to accelerate the soil organic matter. So that's why we've got a program now to get a lot more compost onto the soil. But also we're working with, in fact, an amazing compost company who is getting money from the local airport here, who've obviously got a massive carbon footprint, and they're buying carbon credits and investing those into that compost. So effectively, you're getting compost that's coming from local restaurants, or they're taking the... the food waste from local restaurants making the compost, and then the local airport is subsidizing the cost of compost coming onto our land. So again, it's working with the local ecosystem, broader than the natural ecosystem, of course, but it's working with the local ecosystem to actually make good what we're doing more generally.
- Speaker #1
Awesome. Could you describe... How do you imagine the perfect regenerative farm here, let's say in 10 years' time, when you've had more time to experiment, to improve? How do you imagine it?
- Speaker #0
It'll look quite different from how it looks today in this sense. In my mind's eye anyway, all the vines will be trellised high. Like I said earlier, we're looking to bring sheep in all year round. So it'll be a mixed farm. So we're going to have lots of animals around here. We're going to have lots of fruit trees. We're going to be growing vegetables as well. So it'll be a real mixed farm.
- Speaker #1
Just one second about that high trellising thing. So right now, because you have all of these thousands of vines around that are very, very low, how do you get them higher? Do you have to replant them or can you modify the existing vines to get them to grow higher?
- Speaker #0
You can modify them, but we're going to try and replant. So at any one stage, we've got some land that's lying fallow here that we are resting. before we are replanting. And so rather than trellising those at the classic kind of waist height, we're going to be trellising them all high. So I think rather than modifying, we're going to be doing it like that. Okay, yeah. But actually, whilst we're talking about fallow, that's something else here that typically a good farmer, if they are having to replace vines, because here we have obviously attrition of vines, so vines will die over time. You'll have a parcel with maybe 60% healthy vines and 40% mortality, so you're going to have to replace that vineyard. But A, we're hoping that actually with a healthy living soil you can have less vine mortality, but also when you do need to replace those vines. you won't need to let that land lie fallow for nearly as long if that soil is super healthy. So that has a huge impact on your balance sheet if your vines are lasting longer, and on your P&L as well, if your vines are actually staying in production much more than they would be if you're lying fallow. Because if you have to have your land fallow for five years, you then have three years before you can take any fruit off that once you plant the vines. So there's eight years of being out of production. So we think there are some really interesting cost-benefit arguments for healthy soil and you can get around some of those issues. And also we think the vine life will increase dramatically as well. So less disease, longer living vines instead of being maybe an average of 20 or 25 years, which I think is typical around here now. You could have vines lasting 50 years or even 100 years as they used to. So I think there are lots of different angles to look at. around this regenerative movement into the culture.
- Speaker #1
That's great, because if you can make a business case for regenerative being actually more interesting, that could really boost the adoption.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. Well, it has to. Ultimately, it has to make economic sense to farm like this. I know it has to make economic sense, and I believe it will. But also, wine is becoming less and less fashionable, sadly. So there are people, there are wine regions in the world who are having to take out vines and rethink what they're doing with that land. So I think it's going to put more pressure on the vineyards of the world to do the right thing, not just economically, but also environmentally.
- Speaker #1
Okay, I had no idea wine was becoming less fashionable. Do we see numbers of total production and sales dropping?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I was seeing... We're seeing sales dropping, I mean, since COVID, sales have come right off. I think that we were already heading towards overproduction. I think the young are not drinking as much as my generation. So there's that kind of macro trend. But we're also seeing different drinks coming out. Like in the States, we have hard seltzers, which are very popular. We're seeing a lot of pre-mixed cocktails. We're seeing a lot of... craft beers now and so on. We're seeing also, again, in the US, the cannabis movement. So people are taking cannabis or having a few cannabis gummies rather than drinking midweek. We're seeing the zero alcohol and low alcohol beers and wines coming out. We're also seeing this trend for these weight loss products, like a Zympic, GLP-1, I think they're called, where people are having their appetite suppressed but also suppressing their... their desire to have a glass of wine as well. So everything has happened at once. So yeah, wine is under pressure. I think it's a terrible shame because I think it's an amazing natural product. And I'm convinced that there will still be a lot of wine drinkers out there. But I think there is going to be a focus on if you're going to actually have your land used to farm grapes for wine, make sure it's farmed in the right way.
- Speaker #1
Is there an important message that you'd like to share that maybe something we haven't covered yet in this discussion?
- Speaker #0
I think the main message is start small. Start small, but please start. Get ready, listen to podcasts like yours, listen to other people who've been doing this for a long time. There's a lot of research out there. This will be taught at universities before too long, but right now there's a bit of a gap around education. So feel emboldened to do the research first. You might need to ask permission of the owner of the farm or of your parents or your family to convert one block to regen, but start slow. please start.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Yeah. The message is out there. Um, it's been a beautiful conversation in a beautiful place. I really loved it. So thank you so much for that. And, uh, we're going to close the conversation here, but, uh, I'm looking forward to see what the future brings to Maison Mihabo in this beautiful vineyard.
- Speaker #0
Well, thanks for visiting. And I think we should probably open a bottle of wine fairly soon.
- Speaker #1
That'd be great. Thank you.
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