Winemaking requires managing a very long and labor-intensive production process. It’s already a challenging journey that demands meticulousness and expertise, from finding the right terroir, selecting suitable grape varieties, planting the vines, maintaining them, and harvesting them at the right time, to sorting, pressing, and correctly executing every subsequent phase of winemaking. When you add the rules of biodynamic viticulture to this process, winemaking evolves from challenging to exceptionally complex. So, what exactly is biodynamic wine?
WAYANA Wine Bar, as you know, is our wine house in Kadıköy. At WAYANA, where we exclusively serve Turkish wines, our Wine Menu features over 400 wines. Another distinctive feature of our menu, which includes wines from almost every producer in Turkey, is that all wines can be ordered by the glass. Ordering by the bottle is a choice for our guests, not a requirement.
The road to biodynamic wine is through biodynamic agriculture. In fact, everything starts in the vineyards. At the beginning of the 20th century, the basis of biodynamic agriculture, outlined by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian multi-faceted intellectual, is ecological and sustainable agriculture without using artificial fertilizers and pesticides. If we consider that he dealt with this subject in 1924, we immediately realize how far ahead of his time he was.
The path to biodynamic wine begins with biodynamic farming. In fact, everything starts in the vineyards. The essence of biodynamic farming, which was outlined by the versatile Austrian intellectual Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of the 20th century, is to practice ecological and sustainable farming without using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Considering that he addressed this topic in 1924, we can immediately see how ahead of his time he was.
Biodynamic farming views vineyards (and cultivated lands in general) as part of a living organism that is self-sustaining, providing its own fertilizer and animal feed, and considers plant and animal diseases as symptoms of issues within this living organism. It recommends aligning planting, maintenance, and harvest times with planetary and lunar movements and adopting practices that comply with biodynamic farming principles in the preparation of soil, fertilizers, and plants.
We know that there are those who adopt organic agriculture among Turkish winemakers. These producers, which we include in the WAYANA Wine Menu, include Organic Farming descriptions and symbols on their bottle labels. We do not have any wine producers in Turkey that adopt biodynamic viticulture yet. You'll be the first to know when it happens.
For further information about biodynamic wine-making
https://evrenkalkan.com.tr/biyodinamik-bagcilik/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_wine
A reading about biodynamic calendar
https://winefolly.com/lifestyle/biodynamic-calendar-fruit-day-wine-tasting/
