The Fizz #64: Silver Thread Winery co-owner Shannon Brock is focusing on bio-intensive farming in the Finger Lakes
In this issue, Shannon Brock and I speak about biological products to help keep their Finger Lakes vineyards healthy, how the region has changed, and where she finds her joy.
For the 64th issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Shannon Brock, co-owner and manager of Silver Thread Winery in The Finger Lakes. I had the pleasure of visiting Silver Thread when I was in the region a few months ago, and was excited by the dedication of their vineyard program and the passion of the winemaker and owners.
In this issue, Shannon and I speak about what bio-intensive viticulture means to Silver Thread, which products her and her husband, winemaker Paul Brock, use in the vineyards, and how they navigate the Finger Lakes—a tight-knit region with a lot of influence from nearby Cornell University. We speak about their vineyard location, how the region has changed, and Riesling in the global context of wines.
Margot: Did you grow up in wine?
Shannon Brock: Not at all. My first experience with wine was when I was about thirteen. My older sister went to William Smith College, here in the Finger Lakes. I'm from upstate New York, but not from the Finger Lakes. When we would come visit her, the only thing to do was go to wineries. That was in the late 1980s, so there were only about six to ten wineries around Seneca Lake. We’d be driving around the lakes and watching my parents wine taste thinking it was interesting. Then I went to Cornell and got the chance to go wine tasting a few times, and I took a wine appreciation class my senior year.
When I was old enough to drink myself, I worked as a server, which piqued my interest in food and wine pairing. I did Teach for America after college, which is a very stressful thing, and wine and cooking was sort of my escape from all of that. Before I was married to Paul, I would drag him along. He had an engineering background and the idea of making wine was interesting, so we started doing some home winemaking and that’s how it all started.
In our mid twenties one day, he said “I think I want to be a winemaker. I don't want an office job. I want to be doing something hands on”. It sounded like a great adventure. We quit our jobs, moved to New Zealand, and worked at a winery there. We ended up here in the Finger Lakes for Paul to get a master's degree from Cornell in enology and viticulture. Because I had this teaching background, I ended up working at the New York Wine and Culinary Center, now called New York Kitchen, teaching wine classes. They sponsored me to get my WSET certification, I did the level four and taught classes there for many years.
After we'd lived in the Finger Lakes for six years, we had the chance to buy Silver Thread. I always tell people we were, we were in the right place at the right time with the right preparation.
Margot: You went to Cornell for economics. Do you feel like that has helped you in the position that you're working today?
Shannon: Yeah, definitely. It was actually an applied economics degree in public policy. After I finished Teach for America, I moved to Washington DC to work at a policy think tank. I thought I wanted to get my PhD in economics, but then I found it very boring. Because I had done Teach for America, I wanted to do something impactful with my life.
There's something about the Finger Lakes wine industry that really drew us in. We visited Washington State and California—Paul actually got into UC Davis. We just felt that the Finger Lakes is very compelling maybe because it's challenging, maybe because it's kind of an underdog region. It feels like we can have an impact here and we can help write the story.
Margot: That’s awesome. Your website says Silver Thread focuses on biointensive viticulture. What does that mean?
Shannon: Biointensive is a type of farming where we're using biology in place of chemistry. Conventional medicine diagnoses the problem and you take something to fix it—there's a pharmaceutical answer for it. But there are a lot of side effects often that go along with those answers. The biological approach is a lot more holistic—instead of, you know, what do I need to kill? It's what do I need to keep alive and how can I create a whole system that is keeping the vines healthy, creating a good microbiome in the soil?
A lot of people will ask if it’s biodynamic. We say it's like biodynamics without the astrology. Biodynamics has a lot of mysticism that goes along with it. Paul is definitely trying to learn more about that, for our own education, but we're both pretty scientifically minded people, so some of the stuff that goes along with biodynamics is a bit hard for us to get excited about.
The philosophy in the vineyard is that we're trying to encourage a lot of good things to live and encourage the immune system of our vines to be healthy so that they can fight off disease.
Margot: And how do you do that?
Shannon: It starts with the soil and having a really healthy microbiome in the soil. Our vineyard is cover cropped, and we add a lot of compost. Every year we make our own compost. It's a mix of grape pressings and chicken manure and some wood chips. We're adding back to the soil and we're protecting what's there by not spraying it with herbicides that kill a lot of those good microbes.
That's helping the vines be healthy from the ground up. In the Finger Lakes, we have a lot of diseases that we get—particularly fungal diseases. There's a relatively new class of pesticides that are known as bio-pesticides. They are plant extracts and active live cultures, fermentation extracts, that you can spray on the vines, and some of them actually get absorbed into the plant.
An example of one of the plant extracts is Thyme Guard. If you've worked with thyme, you know that it actually is a pretty woody plant, so this extract actually gets absorbed into the vine and helps the vines strengthen their own cell walls. The skins of grapes, they're very fragile. It's almost like a paper bag around some sugary pulp. We've noticed since we've started using Thyme Guard that the skins of our grapes are actually a little bit thicker and more resistant to splitting during the late part of the season.
Another plant extract we use is called Regalia, that's extract of Japanese knotweed. There's one called Stargus and LifeGard, and those are both active live cultures that, when sprayed on, outcompetes some of the fungal pathogens or interrupts their life cycle. It's kind of like using good germs to fight bad germs.
Margot: Thank you for mentioning those specific products, that’s super helpful. The last time I was in the Finger Lakes, it felt like there were two camps of winemakers. There's the technology camp—what can we do to make the best most consistent wine possible? Then this other small camp of folks who are saying, well, let's be more ecologically minded. It felt to me like there was some friction between those two camps, but I’m not sure. I know that Silver Thread lies generally in that second camp. Do you feel supported by the other folks in your community, or do you feel like you're kind of out there?
Shannon: I would say both are true, if you can imagine that. That's a really interesting question and no one has ever asked me that before. We are a very small and tight knit community. Everyone knows everyone. There are definitely some people who really keep to themselves, but that's rare. The norm in the Finger Lakes is that we all believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and by working together, we're going to elevate the reputation of the region.
Paul and I were here for six years before we owned Silver Thread, so we knew everybody. I think people liked us, we weren't seen as outsiders. Sometimes when we get people that come to the Finger Lakes, like I'll use Paul Hobbs as an example. When it was first announced that Paul Hobbs is going to do this Finger Lakes project, among the people who've been here a long time, there's always a little bit of eye rolling. Like, oh okay, now he's going to come in and he's going to get all this attention and it's not fair. Just a little bit of skepticism about it, I guess. I never felt that though.
I've always felt like we are respected by the rest of the industry, and that people look at what we're doing and are interested and supportive of what we're trying to do. Paul has a group actually, a bio-intensive working group, and he's trying to get other vineyards together who are using likeminded methods, or are interested. Some of the larger, more conventional, technology driven places have joined the group and are interested in learning about it.
On one hand there's interest and people are seeing that the writing is on the wall. Everybody needs to be moving in this direction. The EU has banned glyphosate. I don't know that the US will, but I can see New York doing it. We need to be moving in this direction and I think everybody else knows that too. But there's also this reluctance—there's a lot of excuses as to why they can’t. What we're doing is hard. What all of our neighbors are doing is also hard. Even if you're following the Cornell Playbook—Cornell comes out with a manual every year, kind of like here's what you can use in your vineyard to get a healthy crop. Even doing that, it's still challenging.
We still have this crazy weather that we're dealing with. I think you're going to start to see more people moving in this direction. But another part of it too is—who are we selling the wines to? Who's buying the wines? Who's interested in the wines? There's a big shift going on as we speak with that too.
Margot: How do you mean?
Shannon: Folks like yourself who are very interested in growing practices, labor practices, winemaking practices. I mean, fifteen years ago, nobody was asking. Very few people were asking the types of questions that you're asking or noticing the things that you are noticing. It was all about—is the wine any good? There was this feeling out there that Finger Lakes wine wasn't good quality. We were always fighting that perception. The white men of the baby boomer generation, they're not necessarily interested.
You can't paint with a super broad brush, but for the most part, it was all about quality and points and how high is the alcohol and how ripe did the red grapes get and is the Riesling sweet, because it can’t be sweet, it absolutely has to be bone dry. To me it's very refreshing, because now we're starting to see the sea change with who the buyers are. It's so much more diverse now. There's women who are wine buyers, there are non-white wine buyers, there are people fascinated by hybrid varieties.
We used to have to pretend that we weren't growing hybrids. People would look at us and be like oh, well we can't possibly take you seriously if you're growing those grapes. To me, it’s quite refreshing to now have this new audience of trade and media people who are asking those questions and giving more of an opportunity to wineries like ours, because we’re concerned with the same things.
Margot: I love that. How do you see Finger Lakes wine in the global context today? How has that changed?
Shannon: I am always extremely grateful that our reputation far outsizes the volume of wine that we make. If you just look at it from a statistical standpoint, Chateau St. Michelle in Washington state makes more Riesling than all of the Riesling of all of the Finger Lakes wineries combined. Yet, you know, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Wine and Spirits, Robert Parker, they all are willing to rate our wines. They're all willing to do maybe a once a year little report about our region. It's really unbelievable if you think about it from that standpoint.
If I ever go to another wine region and I say I'm from the Finger Lakes, everybody knows what that is, and they all know that we make Riesling. Is everything all rosy and wonderful? No, we definitely have a lot of work to do, but just the attention that we have gotten for the Rieslings that we make has been very generous. I'm not suggesting it's not deserved or anything, but sometimes I just step back and go, wow. I am really lucky to be in this industry right now. People are so interested in what we're doing.
The man who planted Silver Thread back in the early eighties, he couldn't get a loan from a bank. Interstate shipping wasn't allowed at that time, so he basically just had to wait for people to come to his door. There weren't that many people coming to the Finger Lakes back then, so it's just tremendous how things have changed for us, in a good way. That's not to say there aren't challenges. It irritates me to go to some restaurants in our neck of the woods—they don't have any Finger Lakes wine by the glass. If you go to other regions of the world, that's the only wine they have, especially in wine country.
Margot: That is really frustrating. I'm curious about the history of the land that Silver Thread is on. What was going on before you all were there? What’s the climate like?
Shannon: The piece of land that we are on has been a vineyard since the 1880s. In the 1880s, all the way through the 1970s, it was a Catawba vineyard. They grew Catawba in those days for fresh fruit. There's actually a packing house on our road, a fruit packing house, where they would bring the grapes and put them in boxes or baskets and ship them out either through the Erie Canal by way of steamboat on Seneca Lake, or later by train.
They would go back through and any of the clusters that were damaged and not suitable for fresh fruit sales, they would pick those and send them over to Keuka Lake where all the wineries were located in the 18 and 1900s. Our vineyard, through most of its history, sold to Gold Seal Winery, which was one of the well known ones over on Keuka Lake, and we have a lot of history here. Some of the areas that are wooded now, you can still find posts, you can still see where there's terracing because they used all horse drawn equipment. We find old horseshoes from the work horses. It's sort of like we live in an archeological site in a way.
In 1935, there was this catastrophic flash flood, and back in those days they had to make terracing for the horse drawn equipment. They would till the land so they wouldn't have weeds and it would sculpt the landscape. This flash flood comes through and there was terrible erosion. It was one of those storms where it just rained huge amounts in a very short amount of time, and there was too much water for all of the ravines to hold. The water went downhill toward the lake.
So there was tremendous erosion at our vineyard and part of it was abandoned at that time, because so much soil had washed into the lake, you could see the roots of the vines. They were still attached to the trellis, but the vines were just devastated. When Richard Figiel bought it in the late seventies, the family that had been farming it for Catawba had gotten out of farming. The market for Catawba was not really good anymore, and in the meantime, the large vineyard up the hill that was outright owned by Gold Seal, and was also a Catawba vineyard, started putting in Riesling and Chardonnay because over many years they had come to realize that this area is one of the warmest sites in the Finger Lakes.
Year after year, the sweetest ripest Catawba fruit from any of the vineyard holdings or the farms they bought fruit from was always from right here. The man who was the winemaker at Gold Seal named Charles Fournier, is as important as Dr. Frank, but he has no descendants, so he just doesn't get discussed as much.
Fornier was a Frenchman who came over to work for Gold Seal and he convinced the ownership there to do a trial planting of Riesling and Chardonnay. Dr. Frank is credited with showing that it was possible to grow vitis vinifera in the Finger Lakes. His original vineyard over on Keuka Lake was somewhat of an experimental vineyard. He had very small plots of lots of different things. He was friends with Charles Fournier. They were here working in the Finger Lakes at the same time. Fournier deserves a lot of credit because this large vineyard up from us was the first significant commercial planting of vinifera in the Finger Lakes.
Dr. Frank proved it was possible, but Charles Fornier scaled it up and actually made it so that we could make significant amounts of wine from Riesling in Chardonnay. A few years later, Richard Figiel, who founded Silver Thread, bought this vineyard as an abandoned Catawba vineyard and also started replanting with Riesling and Chardonnay. Later he reclaimed one of those areas that had been abandoned from that big flood. We just put in another section this past year that had been abandoned—we're replanting now.
When we bought Silver Thread, one of the things that interested us the most about it was its location. Since it had been a vineyard for so long, it was pretty well known. There's a lot of weather history showing that when there had been extreme cold events, this vineyard had fared very well. That's definitely been true. There was a lot of winter damage last year. A lot of people had a very low crop this year from winter damage, and we didn't have any significant winter damage.
Margot: What's it like out there right now?
Shannon: It's unseasonably warm. We're actually having a lot of trouble in the winery because we do a lot of Riesling and arrested fermentations for residual sugar and that requires getting the wine cold. We have chilling, but the ambient temperature is so warm. It's been really challenging to get anything to stop.
Margot: How do you find climate change affecting your wine or your plans for the vineyard?
Shannon: First of all, it's very scary. It takes a lot of mental effort for me to talk myself out of worrying because I'm kind of a worrier by nature. Sometimes I'll hear climate stories about things going on. I guess in France, two years in a row now they've had a false spring and Oregon had a false spring. We almost had a false spring in 2012, which was the first year of us owning it. There was really warm weather in March and the vines started growing, but again, our location saved us. There were other vineyards in the Finger Lakes that started growing and had damage from a frost, but we were okay.
You hear about all these things happening and it's just really frightening because I think it's not a matter of if, but when we have a year where we just aren't going to have a crop. Grapes, their DNA doesn't like to work with wild swings in the weather. Ideally we want it to be cold right now. It's seventy degrees or in the sixties here today. We would rather have it be in the forties. We want a nice slow steady descent into winter. We want it to stay cold all winter. We want to have a nice slow and steady warm up during the spring, and we want to stay warm during the summer. It's hard because we have no control over it. We’re seeing a lot of swings in the weather that we can't do anything about.
Then rainfall is another big issue. Overall we're getting more rainfall during the growing season, but last year we hardly had any. We'll have like a drought year and then a monsoon year. It's really challenging. You can't do the same thing every year. You have to be very flexible and pay attention to what's going on. I mean, we have the rain gauge that we keep track of religiously to know how much rain we're getting. I will say that the cover cropping that we do, we find very helpful.
Last year, it was a drought summer for most of the summer. We finally got some rain in September, but July and August were very, very dry. Having the cover crop really helped retain moisture in the soil and kept the soil temperature low, lower than it would be if we had bare dirt. In these really rainy years, the cover crop helps soak up some of the water and helps prevent erosion from some of the heavy downpour rains that we get.
Margot: What cover crop are you using?
Shannon: We have native grasses growing between the rows, and we have what's called an under-vine cover crop actually growing under the trellis. We have a mix of low growing grasses. We deliberately planted a type of grass called fescue, which is what they use at golf courses for the rough. It has a thatching habit, so it kind of grows together into a thick mat that out-competes other weeds, but then it flops over on itself. It has a tufted appearance to it, so it never is growing too tall to where it's interfering with the vine, keeping it shaded or wet. It also has very shallow roots, so it's holding all the soil in place, but it's not interfering with the vine's ability to access water and nutrients underneath.
Since we established it, we've had some other low growing things infiltrate. We have a lot of wild strawberry that grow there too.
Margot: It sounds like that would be a really good grass for those who are erosion conscious. Is that something that's still a problem for you?
Shannon: Yeah. In the old days in the Finger Lakes, they used to till completely. Under the vines would be bare dirt and in between the rows would also be dirt. You don't see that anymore. I mean, pretty much everybody has got a between the rows cover crop. A big reason for that is to prevent erosion, because we're all on slopes. With these heavy downpour rains we're getting—back in 2018 we got a flash flood and there were several vineyards that had quite a bit soil from under the vines just disappear during that event.
The bio-pesticides that we're using, we actually find them to be more effective than conventional sprays in the wetter years. People assume that the organic methods are less effective—we've actually found that they're more effective. The whole philosophy of strengthening your plant so that it can fight off disease on its own seems to really work well.
Margot: Where do you find the joy in the work that you do?
Shannon: I really enjoy being part of something greater than myself. The Finger Lakes industry is doing a lot of important things that go way beyond the wine that we're making. Obviously I love wine and I'm fascinated by wine and I'm very proud of the wines that we're making. But I also am really proud of our industry for everything we do for the community in the Finger Lakes.
If the wine industry wasn't here, I don't know that I would want to live in in this area. There's not a whole lot happening. All the wineries working together have created something very special that brings people here. It's really the wineries that lead the way on a lot of really important local issues, like fighting for protection of water quality. We have a couple of mega-landfills in the area. The wineries are in lockstep trying to get them to close and not expand. There's a lot that we do to raise money for charitable organizations in the community. Now we've really expanded in the region as far as education and job training and really helping people to understand that the wine industry is a good employer and provider of jobs.
I've been a winery owner for over ten years now. I find myself getting more and more involved in leadership areas for the industry. I've really seen it grow and seen all the improvements to this area. When I first got here in 2005 and I was starting, there were very, very few female winemakers or women even in management positions other than tasting room manager. There were a lot of female tasting room managers, but there were all these older men that were in charge of everything.
People would always ask me how old I was. I still look back and I'm like, what was that about? Was that like a microaggression? Oh, who's this young girl? Like, what does she think she's doing? I was running this wine program at the culinary center and teaching classes and having this all New York wine list. I definitely didn't see it as an obstacle for me. It was just something I noticed.
Just looking around me now, it's totally different. There's so many female winemakers and there's female winery owners and winery managers. I've been on the board of The Finger Lakes Wine Alliance for six years. When I joined as a board member, there was only one other woman on the board of thirteen people, because you have to be an owner or an executive level person at a winery to be on this board. I became chair of the membership committee, and now our board is 50% women. It's just been really exciting to see that change happen.
Obviously we still have a lot of things we need to work on. I'm not saying that it's perfect, but it's just been exciting to see that change and to be part of that change.
Margot: That’s amazing—it sounds like you’re really making an impact in your region. I’m excited to see more of your wine championed!
You can support Shannon and Paul Brock by buying their wines on their website and following them on Instagram to stay up on their work. Read more about the winery here.
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