Organic Wine

Mike Benziger leads one of the most prominent and one of the last in-tact families in the wine industry. Based in Sonoma, the 30-year old Benziger Family Winery is widely known for their pioneering exploration and practice of Biodynamic, organic and sustainable agriculture and grape growing. Though they did not start out this way, as time evolved, they began to embrace a different way of farming. The validation of this, is high scoring wines in the national press and medals at wine competitions.

It’s a common Silicon Valley dream. The analytical person who catches the wine bug early in life and can’t wait for the day when they can focus their passion away from algorithms and code and towards winemaking. Rick Moshin is living that Silicon Valley dream. A former mathematician, Moshin entered the wine business gradually, working weekends at first, then learning the ropes working with some of the finest winemakers in Sonoma. He bought his first lot of vines in 1989 and in 2005 celebrated his first crush along with the launch of his 30 year old dream, Moshin Vineyards and Winery. IntoWine recently caught up with Rick to discuss his evolution from mathematician to winemaker and hear first hand what is an inspiring story of persistence and passion.

The English language has no accurate translation for the French word terroir. The closest thing we have is terrain, a word designed strictly to denote the way a land lays, a word for describing surfaces. Terrain says something, but far from everything, about terroir. At its closest, terrain is perhaps to terroir what a page is to a book, though terroir as a concept is admittedly more slippery.

This article is Part II of a two part series by Céline Guillou. Part I, "Green Wine: What Does "Green" Mean? Does it Taste Better?", can be viewed here.

Organic Wine

For many years, the simple mention of “organic wine” inspired a less than enthusiastic reaction from wine consumers, who generally viewed purveyors of organic wine as “tree-huggers”.