The rest of France, and the growers who were biodynamic before anybody was watching.
In 1964 a man in Sancerre converted his whole farm to organic, when the word barely existed in French agriculture. In 1970 a family in Pfaffenheim did the same, and went biodynamic in 1981. They were not making a statement; there was no audience. They simply thought the other way was wrong. Half of what follows is a portrait of that stubbornness: schist in Faugères, marl in the Jura, sand in Châteauneuf where everyone else has stones, and, on the Montagne d'Alaric, Carignan vines that were a hundred and twenty years old before the fashion for Carignan arrived.
Eighteen Domaines
Sancerre above its vines. Gourdault, La France pittoresque, 1893.
