The Fizz #66: Johan Vineyards winemaker Morgan Beck and owner Mini Byers believe in the future of biodynamics
In this issue, we speak about biodynamics from a globalization lens, the framework and its benefits, and the unique terroir of the new Van Duzer Corridor AVA.
Morgan Beck is the winemaker and General Manager at Johan Vineyards in Rickreall, Oregon, which sits in the brand new Van Duzer Corridor AVA, established in 2019. In 2021, Mini Byers, who purchased Cowhorn Vineyards that same year, became the new owner of Johan. Today, these two women are working together to do more with regenerative agriculture in their vineyards, and bringing their communities along with them.
In this issue, we speak about why biodynamics is important to Morgan and Mini, how the Demeter certification is meant to be accessible to farmers, and how the framework is changing in an expanding wine world. We touch on the unique characters of the Van Duzer Corridor AVA, and how local growers are helping one another with biodynamic preparations.
Margot: Did you both grow up in wine? How did you get into this industry?
Mini Byers: I did grow up in wine. I was probably seven or eight when my family got into wine and my dad purchased his first vineyard that was about 45 minutes away. I was in maybe first grade at the time and we were spending every weekend and then some weekdays out there. There was nothing there—it was just a big plot of land. We planted the vineyard, we built everything from the ground up resulting in me almost not even graduating from first grade, second grade, or third grade because we just wanted to spend all of our time there and my parents felt it was way better education, I guess.
Watching something get built from the ground up left a really big imprint. My dad fell madly in love with the wine industry and it became our whole lives. I loved it. Then I went to college, took a brief hiatus from it thinking I was going to go do my own thing. I moved to New York. The concrete jungle was a little much, and I got right back into wine and here we are.
[Mini’s family has a history in investing wineries. Her father, Charles Banks, founded Terroir Capital, through which he invested in eleven wineries and co-owned Screaming Eagle and Mayacamas.]
Morgan Beck: I did not grow up in wine. Wine was not a huge part of my childhood. I found wine after college. I studied finance and international business and quickly ran away from that industry and got into the hospitality industry while working in the mountains in Colorado doing the ski bum life and working in restaurants. Restaurants opened the door to begin tasting wine with sommeliers and helping them organize wine cellars, asking questions about labels.
I bounced down to South America on what was meant to be a ski trip, but I got injured and ended up taking a job in a wine bar instead because I still wanted to learn the language. They put me in a wine school so I’d be able to do wine tastings for tourists coming to Argentina. This course was a really great foundation to a little bit more structure of wine knowledge. They had an enology and viticulture certificate program that I enrolled in, and I stayed to do a year long program down there.
That opened me up to this understanding of farming and plants and how they can translate into this beautiful beverage that I was falling in love with. I guess that's what really ties it into my upbringing is that my parents were both really into horticulture. My dad had a landscape design company, and my mom was a horticultural therapist, so we grew up with plants being a very central part of our lives. Lots of gardens and I spent a lot of time in the dirt as a kid.
When I discovered that there was this magical world where we could work with plants in nature and then make them into this beverage that is enjoyed at a table with family and friends—we can make art and grow plants! That’s what really sealed the deal for me. I finished that certificate program and took my first internship in California and fell in love the first week and haven't looked back.
Margot: I love that. How did your time in Argentina influence your winemaking practices today? What did you take away from that experience?
Morgan: The Argentina wine scene and specifically the stylistic approach to making wine down there is very different than here. It’s a very warm climate with big bodied varieties. I’m not a huge fan of the stylistic approach of say, a really full-bodied Malbec, personally. I think the main thing that I took away from Argentina and having the opportunity to meet with growers and winemakers down there was just an unbelievably warm culture.
I'd say the Argentine people in general live fully present. Every day is its own day. It doesn't really matter what happened yesterday or what's going to happen tomorrow, you are here with me today and we are having this conversation. It was a good introduction to what the wine community around the world really has to offer. There's wine everywhere and people are growing grapes and making wine in almost every country in the world, and yet the network feels very small and there's always an open door to have a conversation or to visit someone.
Stylistically, it was a very different experience than I had when I landed my first internship in Northern California. I had the opportunity to work with Pinot Noir and fell in love with Pinot Noir and have chased that around the globe from then on.
Margot: Where was that first internship for you?
Morgan: It was actually at a custom crush facility in Santa Rosa. It's now called Punchdown Cellars. Smaller producers making their wines there, and they didn't necessarily have an assistant winemaker on staff and a cellar master or anything. Interns were assigned specifically to work with between one and three winemakers. It honestly wasn't my top choice when applying to internships, but ultimately, I had no experience other than having this certificate.
I didn't have an official degree and I had never worked to harvest before, and this is the one I got and I'm so thankful for it. It allowed the opportunity to see a bunch of different winemakers’ approaches, many of them working with the same vineyards. So you'd see the same fruit treated in different ways. Native ferments and inoculated fermentations—all the different approaches in one facility.
Margot: I love that. You both work biodynamic vineyards. Can you tell me why biodynamic practice is exciting for you?
Morgan: I was lucky to be exposed to biodynamics that first internship as well. There was one biodynamic site and biodynamic specific brand that we were working with and it was clear to me that the fruit was different. It had more energy and more verve in the fermentor. I didn't know at the time if that was just the site or if it was truly the way it was farmed, but that kind of piqued my interest.
I went south to New Zealand and had the opportunity to work with Ted Lemon on his project Burn Cottage, and that was probably the most in-depth biodynamic experience that I had. It was beyond what you are doing to the vines, what products you're putting on the vines—organic products or conventional products. It was really this practice of listening to what the site and the vines needed at the time.
The concept of closing that loop and having the goal to bring all fertility inward and hopefully be able to nourish your property from within—that was a really great concept to me because as I started to understand terroir and this expression of place, there's this disconnect of bringing in outside things, rather than trying to nourish what we have here. How is that really bringing the true expression of this place into our winemaking facility and winemaking practices?
That’s when it translates into the cellar fully for us here at Johan. Our goal is to mimic exactly what we've done in the vineyard and bring that into the winery. We want to be just a guide through fermentation and not try to push a wine in any one direction, and allow that property to fully show itself. Biodynamic farming and biodynamic winemaking are very closely tied together for us, and I know for Cowhorn as well.
Mini: For us at both properties it can be summed up in that we all operate and feel that the best wine is made in the vineyard with the lowest intervention on the winemaking side. The biodynamic part, it's everything Morgan said. It forces you to look at the property as a whole, at the vineyard as a whole in its own ecosystem. By farming biodynamically, you're looking at the wellbeing of it as a whole. Everything from the soil to the vines, to the flowers, even the people and animals, which we both have.
From an approach standpoint, biodynamics really did a good job combining important practices of organics and regenerative agriculture. It brings those together in a way that forces us to really view it as a whole and provide what it needs. When you're not putting out artificial fertilizers or pesticides, and you're allowing the soil to regenerate and be improved on its own, it's going to encourage biodiversity, resilience.
It's really looking long term. It's not putting a bandaid on something. It's looking at root causes of things. When you're probed to do that on the vineyard front first, it results in something so beautiful in the winery. We are the stewards. We're just there to help this vintage be the best expression of a time and a place and a site.
Margot: I feel like biodynamics is a little bit of a controversial topic nowadays. I hear people asking is biodynamics still relevant, using a globalization lens? You have people shipping horns around the world and shipping different preparations that maybe aren't relevant for different climates and sites. When you consider what Steiner was thinking when he was writing this framework—he probably wasn't imagining such a globalized environment for biodynamics. How do you see the role that biodynamics plays evolve as more people around the world make wine, as the wine world expands?
Morgan: That's a good question and something that I've been pretty curious about, especially in the last few years. I feel like there have been a lot more certifications, more uses of the sustainability word, more marketing trends, greenwashing, all of these things. Couple that with the pandemic and not being able to get out and travel and see and talk to people as we were before, I've been really curious to understand—what does the Demeter symbol mean to people right now? How do they interpret that?
Mini: What was Steiner thinking? I think at the bare minimum, it was to provide a framework and an alternative back to what we were doing before the Industrial Revolution. At the time that he came out with this, it was a very different time than it is now, but at the core of it, it was to provide people with a framework for farming our land that is much more sustainable, and just better for our world, I think.
That framework has been adapted and almost commercialized. Some of it is lost and some of the core principles, such as a focus on staying local—biodynamic preparations should come from within a 20, 30 mile radius of your farm. For the individuals who are shipping across the world or bringing in these things, it is twofold. While they are following these basic foundational things that he's outlined, preparations and burying horns, they are shipping it from wherever. I think that there's a balance and I hop that Demeter continues to help anybody who's participating. Their organization represents over 7,000 farmers. I hope that they will continue to correctly message and share the program so that it isn't diluted and it isn't just another certification or another term or another greenwashing.
At its core, it is a framework that is helpful, and if you do follow it, you will see the results. No vineyard is the same, and no farm is exactly the same, and my plants might need something very different than what Morgan’s need, but I'm going to use this to guide those decisions.
Morgan: There are quite a few biodynamic growers where we are. A bunch of us got together and said we need to bring ourselves back to the core and see what biodynamics means to us. So one winter we got together and had a book club and read the agriculture courses fully, and we would talk about each lecture. One of the biggest takeaways for me and for the group in general was that Steiner was just on the edge of starting to understand some of these concepts, and he put them together and brought all these people together and said these are the things I'm thinking for farmers—what do you think about trying them on your farm?
He by no means meant for it to be a manual that would be prescribed and adapted by farmers around the world. By reviewing those lectures, I really felt that he was very much open to alternative plants for the preparations and really throwing it to the farmers to be able to adapt and figure out what would work best for them.
We have an Oregon biodynamic group here in the state, and our little North Valley sector as well. We get together and make preparations on each other's properties two times a year. Then we send them down to the main Oregon group and that group sells to other Oregon people who would like to purchase them. They've been doing that for a long time, but now we are contributing to that pot and we're able to have a more locally sourced preparation stash, rather than ordering from JPI on the East Coast.
We get together and we talk about the practicality of some of the things that he had implemented. Are some of these things that practical on 87 acres of vines? Here's the way that works for me. What do you guys think about it? It’s another network that we're able to connect on and take these baseline lectures that we're put together so long ago and interpret them in a new light.
I think biodynamics is just one piece of this whole approach to understanding your property and trying to farm the best grapes that we can. Now, though, there's so many buzzwords in farming that our biodynamic group is taking into account.
Margot: That is really interesting. I love the thought that folks in different areas may require different types of work in the vineyard, and that he approached it as a framework. Does it make sense that everyone with their different types of farming would go for that single certification?
Morgan: European producers actually have different standards than the United States for Demeter. They're pretty similar, but we actually all realized this. There was a Demeter conference that came together and brought producers from all over the world, and I was on a panel for certification in the winery, and I was sitting next to a French winemaker and she's like, wait, you can do that? And I was like, wait, you can do that?
There are different standards that I think are adapted to the different climates a little bit, but I think the big thing is that the Demeter standards are pretty achievable in any growing region. The winemaker side is a little different, but the farming is not super difficult to achieve.
Mini: People think that a requirement of Demeter is that you have to exactly do and utilize every single philosophy or theory that Steiner put forth, and that is not the case. Like, I'm not out here cutting a heart out, you know? That is not an everyday thing that is required to do in order to have the certification. Like Morgan is saying, the certification is made to be achievable. From there you can keep going in your journey around how far you want to take biodynamics. That's your decision. The certification provides you with a baseline of farming biodynamically—these are the five core things that you must do, for example. The next level of these biodynamic requirements is pretty achievable once you've done the organic side.
Morgan: It's the very basics of the philosophies and preparation applications that are really easy to do. Like Mini said, then you can build in and say, yeah I want all of the nutrition to come from only the animals we have on site. Or, I only want these plants to be the things that we spray in our vines.
Margot: Thanks for explaining that. Johan is in the Van Duzer Corridor, which is pretty new, set up in 2019. Were you part of the efforts to move that forward and what makes it a unique AVA?
Morgan: I was on the tail end of the meetings. It was a seven year process and a lot of that got thwarted with some of the political side of things during 2019. It was a really long process to get it approved. The actual beginnings of the meetings did start here at Johan, the first meeting with the growers in the area was right here in the cellar.
The previous wine grower, Dan Rinke, helped get people together and they wrote the whole petition, which is a really interesting read. It talks about—why are we different here? What is the soil? What is the wind, what is the elevation? That was written in 2012, I think. I was here at the tail end. All the growers were saying, okay, now we're about to be approved. What are we gonna do with it? Because we're a bunch of farmers and there's only six bonded wineries within the boundaries, and in comparison to, say Eola Amity Hills that has a bunch of wineries that are good at marketing—we were trying to figure out how to do that.
I think we're still trying to figure out how to explain what's really special about this region. The biggest thing in the Van Duzer Corridor is the source of the wind. That cooling wind as the entire Willamette Valley heats up, it creates a heat sink. The Van Duzer Corridor is the only east-west channel that brings cold air and cold wind in from the ocean. It comes in and it hits, you know, we're kind of right at the mouth. It races past us and hits the Eola-Amity Hills right across from us and then spreads out north/south through the valley.
That's that nice cooling factor that allows us to have that amazing diurnal shift and elongate our growing season a bit further. Our properties are right in the mouth, and we get these pretty crazy winds. On a hot summer afternoon, they start about 2:00 PM and they cool us down significantly. The wind can actually close the stomata of the grape leaf, and allow it to stop respiring. That also slows the ripening and creates some nice thick skins for our grapes.
Most AVAs have an elevation requirement, they have soils that are all similar. There are a lot of different factors that make all of these pockets of Oregon unique, but for us, we aren't super high off the ground. The bottom of our vineyard starts at 200 feet and we max out at 400. It's pretty low. It really is all about that wind.
Margot: Would you say that that cooling factor insulates you from climate change a little bit more than other AVAs in Oregon?
Morgan: I'd definitely say so. In the warmer seasons, our picking windows are about two weeks different. In cooler seasons though, it's almost like an insulating effect, so we time up more with the North Valley. If you don't have those really hot afternoons in the summer, that doesn't create that heat sink and cooling effect. So we have these more temperate growing seasons, where it's not super cold here in comparison to the north. It's a unique buffer for hot and cold.
In terms of the buffer against climate change, for sure. I feel so fortunate to be able to work with this site and that we are growing Pinot Noir with a number of different clones or selections and not needing to acidulate at full ripeness. I don't feel like that's necessarily the case across the board on all growing seasons at other sites. We're seeing warmer and warmer temperatures, which is shortening our growing season, creating more of a spike of ripening.
That leads to elevated pHs when they're coming into the winery that normally need to be acidulated and adjusted in order to make that a stable wine in the end. So we're able to work with these Dijon clones. Dijon clones are notorious for that pH spike at the end, and we’re able to not adjust them in cellar.
Margot: Would acidulating those wines fall into biodynamics?
Megan: So there are two different certifications for biodynamic wines. One is a certified biodynamic wine, which everything at Johann is. The other is a made from biodynamic grapes. So if you add acid, if you add sugar, if you add yeast, you get bumped to the “made with biodynamic grapes” category. The biodynamic wine is a true representation of the vineyard and the growing season, and that maybe can't be achieved every year. And if you have to alter that at all, then you can still have the certification and have your symbol, but you have to change what you have underneath it.
Margot: Gotcha. That makes sense. I feel like Johan Vineyards is known a little bit more for its eclectic grape varieties. You all grow lots of different stuff, which is really exciting. How do you manage the different needs of all the different varieties and which ones are you particularly excited about?
Morgan:, Yeah, we have a lot of grapes here. I think it's sixteen grape varieties growing. We were just re-counting because we have a couple of random things that aren't commercially grown. They're just a few vines of this, a few vines of that. This property started with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with a little bit of Pinot Gris. That was the original planting back in 2002. We started grafting in 2010 and brought in small amounts of different grapes, to now build us up to that many. I will say that Pinot Noir is still dominant on the site and we have a lot of diversity in the selections of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Pinot Noir is what brought me to Oregon and still., when you taste that perfect barrel of Pinot that has all of the stars aligned and everything worked perfectly, it is still the thing that takes my breath away the most. I do feel like we've kind of dialed in. We understand the Pinot from this site. We're always surprised. There's always something every year that's like, oh, wow, that's incredible. I learn and grow with Pinot still.
Then there are all of these other grapes that we're really still trying to figure out and it keeps us on our feet trying to understand how to farm them and make wine from them. Each time we have a new grape, we apply either the Pinot Noir or Chardonnay approach to both farming and winemaking and just do the absolute basic of what we know. Then from there we start to tweak and introduce whole cluster or edit some yields out or play with leaf pulling to encourage phenolic structure. There's a lot of different things we've started to tweak and I feel really fortunate I get to work with an incredible vineyard manager who also understands winemaking.
He just came on last April. We have a lot of goals and plans to change the farming to achieve different things that we want out of the wines. Just small things in the vineyard that we think will really help us get the style of that grape that we're looking to find.
I’m mainly excited about Blaufränkisch. I think that grape is perfectly suited for Oregon climate. It does really well in cooler vintages and we can still get it ripe, but it's beautiful and very balanced and in warmer vintages, it has absolute textbook chemistry. It's really low pHs, nice acidity, great structure in tannin. It is pretty dang easy. The yields are a little bit higher than Pinot. Economically, it makes great sense for farming and winemaking.
Margot: That’s awesome. Mini, you’re the new owner of Johan, since 2021. What got you excited about the vineyard, and where do you see your part in its growth?
Mini: Everything got me excited about the vineyard. I think that Johan is a really special place and I think that part of what makes it so special is the team. Morgan, she's been there for a very long time, and she really understands the property and the wines, the community and the place as a whole. When I learned that a property that shared the exact same philosophies that we have here at Cowhorn was looking for a new owner, I was reached out to and it just felt right. In meeting Morgan and meeting the team and seeing what they were doing and the commitment that they had, it just seemed like a perfect fit and a great way to connect these two regions.
The future will continue to show that we can make really high quality, wonderful wines with integrity and continue to grow the region. There's so much more than what people know, and I think that's starting to show.
Margot: I’m so excited to see your growth and I wish the best for your partnership! Thanks so much for taking the time with me.
You can support Morgan and Mini’s work by purchasing wines from Johan Vineyards. Check out the Cowhorn wines here. Follow Johan Vineyards and Cowhorn Wines on Instagram, and join their wine clubs.