The first cow horn I was shown in a cellar was in Austria, in Burgenland, standing in a bucket by the door as if someone had forgotten it there. The winemaker saw me looking and shrugged: it goes into the ground in October, it comes out in spring, we stir it and spray it. He did not offer a theory. That shrug is the honest starting point for biodynamics, and it is the one I reach for when a guest asks me, over a glass of Grüner Veltliner in the Wachau or Chenin in the Loire, whether any of this is real.
Where it comes from#
Biodynamics begins with eight lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in June 1924 at Koberwitz, then in German Silesia, now Kobierzyce in Poland. Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, not a farmer, and he was talking to landowners worried about tired soils and sick cattle after the first wave of artificial fertilisers. Vines were not the subject. He died the following spring, so the practical system was worked out afterwards by the farmers who had listened.
Two ideas from those lectures survive in every biodynamic vineyard. The first is that a farm should be treated as one organism: its own compost, its own animals where possible, as few inputs bought from outside as it can manage. The second is the set of nine preparations, numbered 500 to 508, applied to the soil, the plants and the compost heap.
The Demeter name has been on biodynamic products since 1928 and is still the main certification worldwide. Winegrowers in France set up their own body, Biodyvin, in 1995. A group of Austrian estates founded respekt-BIODYN in 2007 with a standard of its own. All three audit the farming; Demeter also sets rules for the cellar.
What a biodynamic vineyard actually does#
Strip away the vocabulary and most of the work looks like careful organic farming, because that is what it is. Certified organic practice is the floor: no synthetic fertilisers, no herbicides, no systemic fungicides or insecticides. Copper and sulfur remain the tools against mildew, and Demeter caps copper at 3 kilograms per hectare per year, below the EU organic limit of 4, averaged over seven years.
On top of that floor: compost made on the estate rather than fertiliser bought in; cover crops between the rows to feed the soil and hold it on a slope; sheep in the vineyard over winter where the grower can manage them; hedges and fruit trees to break up the monoculture. Ploughing is light or absent. Yields tend to be lower, partly by choice, partly because the vines are not being pushed.
None of this is exotic. It is what a thoughtful grower in Kakheti or the Langhe might do without ever saying the word biodynamic. The difference is that a certified estate has to do it every year and prove it.
The preparations, described plainly#
Preparation 500 is cow manure packed into cow horns, buried in the vineyard in autumn and dug up in spring. What comes out is dark, crumbly and smells of forest floor rather than of a barn. About 100 grams of it per hectare is stirred into warm water for an hour, first one way to make a vortex, then the other to break it, and sprayed on the soil in the late afternoon. Its stated purpose is soil life and root growth.
Preparation 501 is the mirror image: finely ground quartz, buried in a horn over summer, sprayed at a dose of a few grams per hectare on the leaves in the early morning. Growers use it to firm up the canopy and, they say, to help ripening in a grey year.
Preparations 502 to 507 are herbs added to the compost heap in tiny amounts: yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian. Preparation 508 is a tea of field horsetail, sprayed against fungal pressure. Every grower I know is more relaxed about 502 to 507 than about 500 and 501. The compost preparations are a ritual of the heap; the two field sprays are a ritual of the calendar.
The calendar and the moon#
The lunar side of biodynamics did not come from Steiner. It came from Maria Thun, a German grower who published the first of her sowing calendars in 1963. Her system divides the month into root, leaf, flower and fruit days according to the moon’s position against the constellations, and advises when to sow, prune, rack and bottle.
Some estates run the cellar by it. Many treat it as a suggestion. A few of the most serious biodynamic winemakers I know ignore it completely and are certified all the same, because certification is about the farm and the preparations, not about the calendar. When a wine is racked on a fruit day, that is a choice, not a rule.
What the research says#
The longest-running comparison is the DOK trial near Basel in Switzerland, started in 1978, which has farmed biodynamic, organic and conventional plots side by side for over forty years. The organic and biodynamic soils carry more microbial life and more earthworms, use far less energy and fertiliser, and yield about a fifth less. The differences between the biodynamic and the plain organic plots are small, though the biodynamic soil has tended to show the most microbial activity.
In California, a study on a Merlot vineyard ran organic and biodynamic blocks side by side for several years and found no significant differences in soil quality. The vines in the biodynamic blocks showed a slightly better balance between crop and growth in some years, and the authors did not claim to know why.
On the calendar, a New Zealand study published in 2017 had wine professionals taste the same Pinot Noirs blind on fruit days and on root days. They could not tell the days apart.
My reading: the farming works, and works well. The preparations may add something to the soil, but no trial has isolated it. The calendar has no support in the glass. That is not a dismissal. It is a description of a method whose best parts are the ones you can see with your own eyes.
Biodynamic, organic, natural: three different questions#
Guests often use the three words as if they were one. They answer different questions.
Organic answers how the vineyard is farmed: no synthetic inputs, checked by a certifier. Biodynamic answers the same question with a stricter list, adds the preparations and the idea of the farm as an organism, and in Demeter’s case also reaches into the cellar: a shorter list of permitted additives and processes, and total sulfites capped at 70 milligrams per litre for dry reds and 90 for whites, against 100 and 150 under EU organic rules and 150 and 200 for conventional wine.
Natural wine answers a third question, what happens in the cellar: wild yeasts, nothing added, little or no sulfur, no fining or filtering. It has no legal definition. A biodynamic estate can make a polished, filtered, classic wine, and many do; a natural winemaker may farm biodynamically without paying for the certificate. I have written about the cellar side separately in what natural wine actually is and about the numbers in sulfites in wine.
Who farms this way on my routes#
The estate that settles most arguments is Nikolaihof in Mautern, in Austria’s Wachau. The Saahs family has farmed biodynamically since 1971, one of the first wine estates anywhere to do so. The Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners are classical, long-lived and taste of stone, and the horns are simply part of the farm year. I tell that story at the table because it separates the method from the marketing.
In the Loire, Domaine Huet in Vouvray converted its Chenin Blanc vineyards to biodynamics between 1988 and 1990, when the practice was still rare in France. The wines were already famous; the farming changed underneath them, and the Huet cellar is where I take guests who want to taste that continuity.
For a younger version, Gut Oggau in Burgenland took over a run-down estate in Oggau in 2007, farms under Demeter certification, and makes wines that sit on the natural side of the cellar as well. The same word, biodynamic, covers all three, and the wines could not be more different.
In Georgia certification is rare, but several qvevri growers in Imereti and Kakheti farm on the same principles: their own compost, no herbicides, the estate as a whole. They say “as my grandfather did” rather than “Demeter”. Both are accurate.
On tour#
I do not sell biodynamics and I do not argue against it. When we stand in a certified vineyard I ask the grower three questions: what changed in the soil after the first five years, which preparations they still bother with, and whether they follow the calendar. The answers are always more interesting than the label, and they are usually delivered with a shrug.
The Austrian route from the Wachau to Burgenland visits certified and classic cellars in the same week; the Loire tour does the same with Chenin. Taste them side by side, decide for yourself, and keep the horns in perspective: they are a small part of a farm that is, above all, well looked after.
