Winemaker Eric Texier

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Texier mostly works vines and makes wines in the Rhone and has been on a mission to find answers. He has some experience with an elderly (now retired) vine acupuncturist. Eric also has worked biodynamically. So is it any surprise to me that his natural progression brought him to explore the low-intervention farming as pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka, the founder of what is called "natural farming?"

Of course Fukuoka grew rice, wheat, vegetable and non-grape fruit. He was in Japan and not France. These are huge differences. Yet, in this year after his death, he's bigger than ever. His name was whispered like the next big grape savior, something safe from the marketers, a force to deal with. Eric has done something about it other than talk. He has been using his Charnay vineyard (near J.P. Brun in Beaujolais) as guinea pig.

Tilling the land is not practiced in the Fukuoka way, yet still the vineyards need to be aerated. Cover crop is the answer. Eric reaching for a missing the word gave me the hint, "The Irish have it with four leaves."

"Clover!" I cried.

Yes.

A clover cover crop grows like a carpet and so thickly, no weeds can infiltrate. As the roots don't dig deep, there's no competition for water or nutrients.

His first fruit was born in the difficult year of 2008. He said it looks great.

But why Fukuoka? Why is this man, who wrote at least one extremely poetic book on farming, the current charmer of the vineyard set? Maybe because his is a natural reaction formation to the fussiness of Steiner. Maybe after having such a regimented orthodox way of dealing with the vineyard sitting and listening and watching and responding is the way to go? Set the vineyards free?

Ever the Talmudist, Eric has indeed been questioning the methods of biodynamic grape growing. Is the form too dogmatic? Religious? Does the practice overwork the earth? Are there too many treatments? Is there too much copper sprayed? And is the work intensive relationship with the soil an unhealthy co-dependent one?

In the beginning of the One Straw Revoltion

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every
action is a futile, meaningless effort." This may seem preposterous, but if
you put it into words, that is the only way to describe it.
This "thought" developed suddenly in my head when I was still quite
young. I did not know if this insight, that all human understanding and
effort are of no account, was valid or not, but if I examined these
thoughts and tried to banish them, I could come up with nothing within
myself to contradict them. Only the certain belief that this was so burned
within me.

It is February. The same questions that plagued me since I was eleven, are floating about. These are the one's I get no relief from, you know, the meaning of life and my place here and what is the best way to pass through to the other side? And enter Fukuoka. He had the same belief in the meaninglessness of it all but IT DIDN'T BOTHER HIM!!

How can it weigh me down and yet seemingly liberate the gardener/philosopher?

But there's one other question I hope to have answered soon, Steiner was a teetotaler, now, did Masanobu Fukuoka drink?