Antoine Lepetit de la Bigne - Whats So Special About Biodynamic Wine?: Thirty-five Questions and Answers for Wine Lovers

One sentence of this introduction to biodynamic wine by Antoine Lepetit-de la Bigne remains imprinted in my mind because I believe it is essential to define the new relation of people with wine: In our post-industrial, overly-urbanised society, could wine be our last strong tie to the earth? Our civilisation, nobody will deny, tends to eradicate the old traditional relation of man with nature. Towns grow irrevocably, the countryside becomes a desert. As for agricultural products, they become more and more industrialised, technologically crafted, less and less the result of the ancestral marriage of human beings with the earth. Wine also can be technologically crafted and a lot of wines are made that way. The wine connoisseurs of our time feel deeply this loss of the old tradition, and this is why for them the quality of a wine is profoundly linked to its origin, to the earth it comes from. Is the wine I buy a good representation of the place it comes from? Has the vigneron, like a good midwife, been able to establish with their vineyards this living relationship that will allow their qualities and their character to be expressed at their potential best?

In their search for the best expression of a wines origin, vignerons inevitably come across the organic options, normal organic viticulture and biodynamics, since these methods aim at creating conditions where the terroir, that is, the soil and its environment, will emerge at their best.

Biodynamics, which deals essentially with what is not quantifiable life forces which science cannot measure, weigh or analyse represents a challenge in making itself understood by the public. Until recently it used to be mocked by scientists. A lot of rumours sprang up regarding dynamisation, the various preparations, cosmic influences This book is essential because, with simplicity and humility, it first answers those legitimate questions raised by a method that both fascinates and troubles the public, and second because it explains why the vignerons among them some of the most advanced of the industry find in biodynamics that link to the earth which is so essential for delivering the potential of terroirs which have been cared for by human hand for centuries. As with biodynamics now, so it was before our industrialised times; that is to say: Nature is an open book for those who cultivate the ground with their hands.

Who could be in a better place to write this book than Antoine Lepetit de la Bigne? The reasons are multiple: Antoine arrived in Burgundy a few years ago when he was very young, and my experience has shown me on many occasions how much, for a company or an industry, the arrival of new vision is important and enriching. Furthermore, having brilliantly achieved degree level in Science at the prestigious cole Polytechnique, Antoine successfully moved across to graduate in agronomical studies. From there, always guided by his questing and free spirit, he went into viticulture practice with a Domaine which is at the forefront of this biodynamics that science so often denigrates!

Antoine has absorbed all that science has taught him and he is now like many scientists who have spent their life studying methodically the vine and the wine and who, after these years of accumulated scientific knowledge, know that, in the making of a great wine, what you dont understand is more important than what you understand or can measure or analyse.

Intuition, observation, humility and, last but not least, rigour, become the key qualities of the vigneron. Through Antoines patient, careful and precise explanations, this book introduces us all, wine lovers, professionals, wine makers, sommeliers and others from the world of wine, to the fundamental lessons taught by biodynamics. The small voice of biodynamics has found its ambassador.

Aubert de Villaine, Domaine de la Romane-Conti