Episode 106: Wine-making that restores the land

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

There’s no getting around it my guest this week has an absolutely great job. He’s the president of a high-end winery, lives in Napa here in northern California and took the job he has now as part of an investment and a plan to transform the winery’s operations toward sustainable, truly regenerative growing practices 

And no I will never get over not being able to go do this interview in person and drink wine. I AM BUSY OKAY!? 

Let’s hear more, shall we? 

David Pearson

My name is David Pearson. I'm the president of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, and I'm speaking to you from Joseph Phelps Vineyards. I'm actually sitting in the office that Joseph Phelps himself built back in 1973 when he built this winery, when he just first founded the vineyards.

Molly Wood 

Amazing. And tell us, I mean, you have such a long career in the wine industry. Maybe not all of our listeners are familiar because they're not lucky enough to be in Northern California, but give us the rundown of how you ended up at Joseph Phelps, if you wouldn't mind.

David Pearson

Yeah, well, being of my chronological age, I have developed a bit of a long history, but I've spent my entire professional career in the wine business and I've loved all of it. I went to school at the University of California at Davis, which is one of the best, if not the best schools for training winemakers. Graduated in 1984 with a degree in fermentation science or enology and started my career as a winemaker. I worked a little bit in France and I ran a winery in the southern part of California.

I then moved into research. I worked in the research lab for six years studying sensory analysis, the way we smell, taste, perceive wines. Then got an MBA and moved into marketing and general management. did live for three years in the South of France, which maybe is a separate for a different podcast at a different time. was a movie made about it called Mondo Vino.

It is an interesting story, but lived in South of France, working on developing a vineyard in France. I've turned from that project, which did not succeed. Teaser for later story. And then ended up working as the CEO of Opus One Winery for about 16 years. I left Opus One in September of 2020 and was looking for.

something creative, something meaningful and something entrepreneurial that I can get involved with. Moet Hennessey purchased Joseph Phelps Vineyards in September of 2022. And they set their sights on bringing the resources to this winery, to these vineyards that were necessary to elevate the quality to the highest levels of quality possible. And then to share this wine, distribute this wine all around the world.

so that it'd be recognized as one of the leaders from Napa Valley. And I got involved here in July of 23. And what mattered most to me, frankly, is the vineyards and the way we grow our grapes. And there's a very specific new approach to vineyard management and agriculture in general that I wanted to implement and wanted to be involved with wherever I was. And what Hennessy supported that idea.

David Pearson 

And so I very enthusiastically got involved with Joseph Helps to manage the vineyards, change the way we manage our vineyards, and hopefully make some really good wines. And we're having a lot of fun doing it, which is the most important.

Molly Wood 

So we are here, dear listeners, to dig into that specific vineyard management part of this and the climate solutions that are built into that. And so I want to ask you, why did you want to do that? What was it that inspired you to connect wine with sustainability and climate action?

David Pearson

Yeah, so so the I was first exposed to it when I was traveling in France between my time when I was at Opus before I came to Joseph Phelps. In France they referred to this approach as agro ecology or agroforestry, and it's such a sort of a relatively new approach that there are people using different terms for it. Some people refer to polyculture or permaculture. We can talk through all of those things.

In the United States, it's called regenerative farming and regenerative farming is a term that people are hearing more and more about and we can talk about that as well. My own epiphany, my moment of epiphany when I was in the Ardèche region in the southeastern part of France, I met a grape grower as part of a cooperative structure in that region who had been conducting permaculture, which is keeping the ground covered.

permanently all year round. I've been doing this for about five or six years and what he was doing was he was growing what we call cover crops. Those grasses and plants that grow between the rows of vines through the course of winter and the traditional practice is is that when spring comes a tractor will come in and turn those weeds into the soil, leaving the soil bare through the spring and summer. Until the following fall when the seeds are planted again.

And the cycle continues and that's what we've done forever. That's how it's done. But this gentleman had seeded his cover crop, the grasses grew, and at the particular moment, he said to me, not too soon, not too late, he would go through the vaneer den and roll them flat, creating a kind of cover to the ground. He would roll them flat, leave them there through the course of the growing season, and the next year would seed on top of them. The new grasses would grow and he would roll that flat.

And he kept doing that over and over and over again. And when I met him, he'd been doing it for five or six years. He took me out into the vineyard and I actually had my iPhone video playing and I was watching attentively as he took his pitchfork and he turned up what he had done between the five or six years. And what I, what I saw was this, the sort of lasagna of decomposing organic material. The grasses slowly decomposing. And at the bottom of that,

David Pearson 

lasagna was new black soil. was like new earth was there. I thought, well, that's curious. And then I looked into the small hole he'd created by digging up the cover and the earth was full of worms and it was moist and it smelled good. And adjacently there was land that had been left bare that was functionally dirt. So the dirt was crumbly and dry and fell between your fingers, but the soil was clumping.

And I had a kind of epiphany. said, wait a second, this is different than the idea in which we farm and maintain our soils through the course of the year. And that was my first exposure to thinking differently about it. And subsequently, read a lot of books, met a lot of people and started to understand the precepts and the concepts of agroecology or regenerative farming. And I became convinced that this wasn't just sort of

doing things differently. This was a philosophically different approach to nature, which is a big statement. But to me, that's why it's so compelling. That's why it's so important.

Molly Wood 

So say more about that. is tempting, and I think we should, it is tempting to think about things in pros and cons. Like what is bad about the old way? What doesn't work? And maybe what doesn't work economically? And what is better about regenerative farming? And why do you think of it? Why is it a philosophy about nature? It's all of that, right? That was a lot of questions in one, I will acknowledge.

David Pearson

Yeah, it it. Well, I I think it's the the critical question. The way that I say this, if this is just another way to lose 10 pounds, if it's another diet program, it's going to be replaced by something else. And if it's just I used to do these 10 things, now I'm doing these 15 things. It can be beneficial. It can be trade off, but. It's not frankly that compelling like we should do less of this and more of that.

To me, what's deep and meaningful is that it does in fact ask us to change our relationship with nature. What I mean by that is that if we look at traditional agriculture, and I mean soy, wheat, rice, grapes, the way that we farm for millennia starts with the philosophy that we can manipulate and control nature to make it do what we want. So let's just talk about wheat or pick a crop.

We go to a place, we pull out all the trees, we pull out all the bushes, we pull out everything that's green and create a bare open parcel, and then we plant the crop that we When we do that, we've eliminated the natural ecosystem, the cycle in which plants grow naturally. So as we plant whatever we want to grow, we then have to feed it because we have to fertilize it. We never fertilize the forest. They do fine on their own without us. But when we farm this way,

We have to fertilize it. So we have benefited over the few decades with the green revolution with synthetic fertilizer. It steroids the plant. It makes them grow, but it's not the way nature intended the plants to grow. So we're feeding them in an artificial manner, which has implications. And then because we're wanting to grow our one crop and we don't want competition, we then don't like weeds.

Right? Nature abhors monocultures. It just fights against it. So sends in a plant, just happens, and we need to take it out. Either by hand or by roundup in many cases, different ways of doing it. So we're already doing that. And then then we have a little insect that flies into our crop, our area, and that insect can be carrying viruses. I mean, there are currently over 100 viruses that are menacing vines alone. So basically, the way we farm is to keep the weeds out.

David Pearson

try and keep the insects out and then grow as much crop as we can, pulling as much out as possible. That way of farming has been successful. We've done quite well at it with fertilizers and manipulating controlling. The suggestion is, though, that we're basically pushing nature out, making it do what it doesn't want to do naturally, and we're losing that battle globally.

There are more and more weeds which are roundup resistant. Again, nature sort of responding to the lack of diversity. There are more viruses coming all the time. The interesting thing when I have these conversations these days, post COVID, people feel and are very fluent with discussion of viruses and viruses mutating and like, yeah, I know about that. So viruses are an issue.

So the way that we're farming, whether it's organic or not, which is better than chemical farming, appears to be objectively not sustainable. We are losing that battle. So what agroecology, agroforestry, regenerative farming wants us to do is to step out of the process and bring back nature's full natural biodiversity, focusing on the soils first. So we bring back

Soils rich in microbes, rich in bacteria, soils rich in fungus, mushrooms, mycelium, which is the most fun thing to talk about.

Molly Wood

I cannot wait to talk about mycelium, it is an obsession.

David Pearson

Well, whether we're talking about mycelium or mushrooms themselves, it's all fun. But it's fundamentally part of the system. And back to the Ardèche and that lasagne of decomposing organic material, what turns decomposed organic material into soil is fungi, is mushrooms. That's the last link in the eco-cycle.

So the objective is to bring back the full diversity in the soils and on the surface of the soil. So no more monoculture, bring back multiple crops growing together in synergy. And once the ecosystem turns naturally on itself, you then integrate your farming into that cycle without disturbing it. And if you're able to do that, it's been demonstrated that crops can grow with higher quantity of produce, of higher quality.

more resistant to climate and viral pressures and live longer. It's just a winning across the board. But you have to make the full step of recreating the eco cycle or else it's just tinkering.

Molly Wood 

Right. And that sounds hard and time consuming. Like how big a deal is it to, and maybe it's not, how big a deal is it to do that? To sort of start creating your lasagna from scratch when you are also supposed to be producing wines.

David Pearson 

So it is hard and it's not hard. It is a different way of thinking, a different way of working, and it does require an investment in bringing trees, fruiting crops, managing your cover crop differently, training your vineyard crew to manage those crops.

There is an initial investment that is non-negligible. But at the other hand, it's a simple idea to bring in diversity and you learn as you go. And we're doing that now at Joseph Phelps. There's only a handful of wineries, frankly, at this point that have really committed to the full diversity, the breadth of...

I'm doing this and understanding the value that brings one of the closest to my own heart and best examples that I'm aware of is in Santa Mignon in Bordeaux. Chauvet Blanc has been doing this kind of farming from, gosh, I think it's up to 15 years now, and it's one of the best examples of the benefits that can come from this. you have to, I think it's the issue we're seeing.

is that people are interpreting regenerative farming in different ways, different levels of integration of execution. And it's starting to sound, it can sound a little bit like greenwashing. It's another new term that people barely understood the last one. And I've had people when I say we're doing regenerative farming, roll their eyes and go, yeah, you too. And it's a real, it's a real

danger to the appreciation and the value and the understanding and comprehension of why this is not just a different way to farm but a fundamentally different approach to how we interact with nature.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about the microbes that make you great wine how regenerative agriculture is also climate adaptation and one or two more book recommendations. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with David Pearson president of Joseph Phelps winery in Napa, California. 

Molly Wood 

Right. Given that concern, what are the questions that you should be asked? That someone who says we're engaging in regenerative farming should be asked so that you know if they are really doing it? mean, because it sounds like you're doing a true foundational rebuild of strategy at Joseph Phelps, which is, by the way, side note, remarkable that Moet and Hennessey said, yeah, we want to fund this and do this investment.

David Pearson 

It is. It is remarkable and notable and farsighted on their part. I believe I can say that. As I said, I gained my commitment and passion about this before I arrived. But when I arrived here, I found that Moet, had already an understanding of the importance of what could be called living soils. So shoveled blank and sent to me all that I referenced is owned by LVMH.

Molly Wood 

got it.

David Pearson 

the Moit, Tennessee company. they had, they had an example that they said, we've seen that before. So when they came into Napa and acquired Joseph Phelps, they came in with the intention of, as I said, doing what was necessary, bringing the resources to make this the very highest quality wine possible. And so it was a small step for them to say, right, we understand that this way of farming, you know,

will lead not only to healthy long lived vines, but self-servingly, this is sort of like self-informed enlightenment. Our intent, our goal is to make the very best wines possible. And we believe that this will produce grapes of the highest quality, highest complexity. And we can talk about that too. I love that topic in agriculture.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

David Pearson 

There's a very specific link to understand why this way of farming will produce foods that taste better.

Molly Wood 

Yes, that was 100 % my next question, which is, does it make better wine?

David Pearson 

Yeah, well, I mean, it's, it's right. All of those things. It's going to take a couple of years for us to demonstrate this. And so we refer back to this great book called has the title of what's your food ate? What's your food ate? Because food and roots, roots actually eat microbes. They,

Molly Wood 

And when will you know?

David Pearson 

are actually carnivores. They will eat the microbes. They will take from the microbes those elements they need, and they'll exude what they don't need. They'll spit out what they don't need. What they spit out feeds the bacteria. So that's the cycle that's going on that's different from if you're fertilizing with synthetic fertilizer. What's been demonstrated is that, let's just take carrots, for example, but this is tomatoes, everything is true this way. And this is in that lovely book I mentioned. Carrots that are grown

in living, microbe-rich soil, measurably in the laboratory, have a higher nutrient content, higher nutrient density, more nutritive, better for us. And conveniently, we are programmed to find higher nutrient foods as tasting better. So you've got this, if you taste a tomato, or you taste a carrot, or you taste something, you go,

wow, I've never tasted something that tastes that good before. Most people have had that experience. They go to a garden or they pick something right off the vine. When they taste that, bottom dollar, if you took that to a laboratory, you would have higher nutrient density. And that's an established, measured relationship. Now, the wide world, there's fewer examples that I've found where people have demonstrated the connectivity to that. But when we think

about how vines or the grapes on the vines go through maturity through the course of a season. And as it gets generally warmer, not getting hotter every year everywhere, but as the arc of global warming, to use that term, continues, and we are having warmer growing conditions, what we see is that, you know, the berries start in the beginning of the growing season as small little balls of pure acid.

And as they go through the season, the sugar, which is zero climbs and climbs and the acid declines until when you harvest, you want the sugar and acid to be in a point of balance that gives you the sugar and the acid you need. But there's a third variable, which in general terms is the phenolic maturity or the tannic maturity or the flavor maturity. That's the third variable that when it's also fully developed, the flavor, the tannins, the phenols are fully developed and you pick.

David Pearson 

When they're at full maturity and acid and sugar are at their balance, you make great wine. What happens in hot years, warmer years, is the acids decline faster and the sugars climb faster before the flavor maturity is fully ripe. So if you pick in hotter years when the acid and sugar are at the right place, but your tannins aren't fully mature, they'll be astringent and not pleasant.

Your only choice is to wait longer until those flavors ripen and your sugars keep climbing and you end up making wine of higher alcohol, which is why we get 15%, 16 % wines in warmer regions. You have to wait for the flavors. What we need to do is have the vines pan and phenol maturity accelerate to reach full ripeness quicker. That gets back to another demonstrated

measured observation is that when we're going plants, what really matters is the photosynthetic cycle, the carbon cycle. That's what we have to focus on. A lot of people talk about regenerative farming and say, well, we want to sequester the carbon in the earth to have the carbon come out of the air, down into the earth, which is not wrong, but it's missing the idea. we really want to focus on is that cycle because the plant will pull CO2 from the air.

create sugars, feed themselves, and then spit the octetor back out, how fast does that engine turn? What's been demonstrated is that plants grown in, we'll call it traditional farming techniques, that engine turns at about 25 to 35 % of its full potential. It's not running because it's not in its optimum conditions. Same plant growing in living, microbe-rich, fungi-rich soil,

65 to 75 percent of its potential. But actually, engine runs more efficiently. So the maturity can accelerate faster. So you have a vine that's better able to handle variations in temperature.

Molly Wood 

Interesting. This is so fascinating. And that was such a great explanation, by the way. Thank you. So then I wonder, as you and Moet Hennessy think about this change, certainly you said it is a sort of a literal sustainability play in that you feel that you may not be able to continue growing wine as you have before. And it also feels like a climate adaptation.

David Pearson 

Okay.

David Pearson 

That's it.

I think it's all of those things, know, in the circles of discussion where people are trying to sort of understand all of this. Even the word sustainability for some folks has sort of gotten out of favor because settling for sustainability isn't going to do it. That's why regenerating the soils and thinking about it differently is so important. Now I've lost track. What was your question?

Molly Wood 

Well, I want to talk more about the benefit, certainly, but from a survival perspective, right? It sounds like this is an approach that is an adaptation to warming temperatures or changing climates, and also a way to keep doing what you have been doing because of those changes.

David Pearson 

I think that that's absolutely right. you know, again, coming when I sit down with people, we have dinner together, we talk about this, I really don't like leading with the dark side. And people are tired of hearing about carbon footprints and global warming. They just, you can just feel them just turn off. And if they're turned off, then you're not going to connect about the thing anyway. This is why I don't even anymore lead with regenerative farming, because oftentimes people will just say, don't want to hear about it.

agroecology, they at least say, what is that? And then I talked about getting our hands into rich, dark soil and getting connected to the earth. And that people can do connect with, they do relate to. And it's about making the best wine, all these really positive things, doing good things. Then at certain times with certain people in certain places, yeah, actually, I think that we need to farm differently to

survive, which again starts to sound apocalyptic and people don't like to hear about it. One of my favorite, I give, I should get a.

Molly Wood 

You're in business, man. Your job is scenario planning.

David Pearson 

Well, it absolutely is. you know, we can, we have to cope with that. We have to address that. We have to embrace that. The question is how we share it with people. I say I shouldn't have gotten some commission from the creators of the movie Kiss the Ground because I reference it all the time. I tell people, ask them, have you seen this documentary? They go, no. I say, okay, go home this weekend, get a glass of wine, hopefully Joseph Phelps.

And watch and watch it and I bring it up now because when they opened that documentary, the one of the first things they say is with the shock value statement. They don't reference where the number comes from. They don't reference any source so people can quibble with it, which is fair enough, but they say. That we have 505050 harvests left. Now they made the film about 10 years ago, so. If that number.

is correct, if it were correct, and we're counting down, we'd be down to 40. And if we all really only had 40 harvests left, you would think we would be attentive to it. And so I think there's an urgency and a reality. I also heard from another researcher recently who said that, we've already depleted globally half of our topsoil by farming the way we're farming. When we deplete the second half,

will be functionally done. So as I understood this more deeply and as you know again Kiss the Ground does beautifully I would say at the end it's a very optimistic note to one of your earlier questions or comments. This isn't hard. It's just a matter of doing it. It's just a matter of moving toward diversity of planting, understanding how to bring nature back into our farming and then nature responds very quickly. That's the

That's the optimistic part of this is that you can see that it respond to diversity. The animals, the plants, the bacteria, the fungus will come back. We just need to let it happen.

Molly Wood 

So then let's talk about the benefits because certainly there's the, you I sort of feel like at some point economic and existential realities set in and they create change. And I don't care what the reason is if the change happens, but also then you end up, you know, the kind of goal of my storytelling is to communicate that what you end up with when you make that change is a better world and that regenerative farming has benefits beyond just survival.

David Pearson 

Well.

David Pearson 

I think that the vision that we have and that I believe we'll be able to share soon is we will be coal planting within our vineyards instead of having the monoculture of just vines and just fine planted. We will put in every third or fourth vine a cherry tree and an apricot tree.

And an apple tree and different fruits that will grow synergistically and the roots beneath will connect with the mycelium and create this living soil which will render all of the plants more healthy, better able to respond to climate change, actually bring more carbon into the soil because the photosynthetic cycle is turning more fast. But the most fun is we'll bring people out and we'll pick the apples together and we can have a cherry together and

I'm biased in saying it, but I think it's objectively true. We have a very talented chef that works here with us and he'll be cooking with these foods. So yeah, it's a really happy vision that everything wins. We just have to boot up and get into it. We have to understand the commitment and the philosophical change. There's another book.

I end up referencing a lot of books that I've read a lot. Well, the one that people should start with is the one straw revolution. That's written by a gentleman named Fokuoka, it's a Japanese gentleman who passed away. He was growing barley in Japan in the 1970s. And before anybody had come up with the term regenerative farming or agroecology, he created what he called the do nothing way of farming.

Molly Wood 

I'm writing them all down, by the way. They will be in the newsletter, listeners.

David Pearson 

But it was exact same idea. He said it took him a couple years to get the cycle right. But once he understood the cycle of nature as it went year on year, he found the time when he could take his barley seed and just throw it out into the field and then do nothing. And he let nature grow naturally. And the barley that he produced, he demonstrated that he could grow more barley of higher quality while leading a life of doing less work. And

He tried to share his success. He tried to share this. was before his time. He shared it with his neighbors and he writes in this book that the chemical industries in the tractor industries fought him back and convinced his neighbors that they needed him. And he has a chapter. This is a personal will be a personal kind of comment, but in the towards the end of the book, it's a small book. He has a chapter where he just tears into science. He says science.

disables us from understanding and seeing the whole. He said, the trick about this, the real philosophical jump, and I'm on this journey, is trying to understand really deeply how to see nature as interconnected whole. And he said, the minute you call something yellow, you've taken it out of the whole, out of the, and I thought, gosh, I can't even see colors. I mean, that to me is the philosophical journey that we're on.

I grew up, was trained as a scientist. I believe in science. I trust in its ability to help us, inform us, guide us. But now I'm trying to find a balanced understanding of what to do with science and how I feel, understand nature in a unity. That's not easy either. mean, to me, that's where we need to help each other, to understand this sense of connect.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Yeah.

David Pearson 

connectedness rather than just turning this, tweaking this, turning that on, turning that off. It's a level of respect for nature and a kind of humility that we have to have. I used to think I knew something about it. Now I feel like I know almost nothing, which is the fun part of rediscovering how it works in a different way.

Molly Wood

But won't it also, could it also inform other winemakers and even the agriculture industry at large? Because when you say you have the luxury of being able to take some vineyards out of production, that, like I would imagine that is the key barrier. Certainly whenever I've talked about agriculture in the past, farmers are, it's not a highly risk tolerant industry because if it doesn't work, that's your whole crop.

David Pearson

That's right. And the cycle of replanting, if that's what we're talking about, is a multi-year process. So not only the cost of replanting, but the downtime of production makes it not something you do casually and regularly. That said, viruses and disease pressures and temperature changes is forcing people to consider replanting anyway. But what you said earlier is with

with an enormous amount of humility, because I just think that's important in general, more so about humility, we would love to be able to have been be part of helping other people do this and learn from it. We don't want it to be, can't be something where the hurdle is so high, it's so complex, so expensive that nobody does it. We're fortunate to be owned by Moet Tennessee to have the resources to do work and studies that others won't do. And we did a

a nine month study on our vineyard property here that is extensive and not everyone would do that kind of study, but you don't have to do that study to engage in this kind of farming. So yeah, our hope and expectation is that indeed others will follow. And there are others who've been doing this before us. There people here in Napa, Gurgich Hills has been recognized as one that's been doing regenerative work for many years.

Cobbler's Creek has been doing it for many years. There's a lot of wineries like Fokuoka in Japan who've been farming in this fashion before the term regenerative was even on people's lips. So we're not the first to do it. We want to be part of this movement towards this way of farming.

Molly Wood

David Pearson is the executive chairman, the relatively new executive chairman at Joseph Phelps Vineyards. Thank you so much for the time today. I couldn't appreciate it more.

David Pearson 

Thank you, I appreciate the chance to speak with you about it and thank you very much.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

2033 by the way is when you can expect these wines to be on shelves but until then a living laboratory and all the apples and peaches you can eat. 

Ok enough about wine for today it’s happy hour 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. Together, we can get this done. See you next week.