Cowin, on sulfites, moonlight and winebars.

Question: Is biodynamic wine as good as conventional wine?

Dana Cowin: If there is an issue with the biodynamic wines. It is ---- let’s step back. What is a biodynamic wine? There is a guy named Rudolf Steiner who founded the biodynamic wine movement, and he had very quircky ideas about making wine, but many of these practices have proved to improve the sort of the vineyards, the health of the vineyards and that’s what really we are talking about having healthy wines and healthy grapes. He was interested in harvesting in the moonlight. He was interested in cow horns filled with dung planted in the vineyard. So there are some quircky things that go along with biodynamic wine, but basically we talking about the health of the vineyard and if you have a healthy vineyard you should have a really great wine with organic its actually a tricky proposition because in terms of wine making what you are looking at usually is organic grapes, but there is an entire organic wine making process that sometimes wine makers will not carry through. So it’s the labeling a little dicey. I think what we'll see is wines made from organic grapes probably not the entire process. The wines that are green and that are not always reliable are the wines that are made without sulfites and so in France it was an enormous movement and there is wine bars that just have these great wines, green wines without sulfites. Those wines aren’t very stable because the sulfites help to stabilize the wine. So that I think is where you can get an amazing wine without sulfites but boy you have to be careful when you are making it.

Recorded on: 3/7/08