By Wayne Garcia

Shh! Don’t tell anybody, but that wine you’re serving might just be organic. Although the word is now associated with sustainable agriculture, healthy living, and better-tasting food, when it comes to wine, “organic” was once a designation to be shunned—interchangeable with words like “dirty,” “funky,” and “unstable.” These days, organic wines are quickly becoming if not the norm, then at least a serious and growing segment of the wine industry—and are typically anything but funky.

But as many wine lovers know, there’s organic…and then there’s “biodynamic,” a set of practices that take the concepts of healthy, sustainable farming and respect for the land to an entirely different plane.

Yet many guidelines of biodynamic agriculture are just too weird for even staunchly organic farmers I’ve talked to, including Edible San Francisco contributor Andy Griffin. Take the legendary and easy-to-mock practice known as Horn Manure, in which the farmer packs a hollow cow’s horn with the fresh manure of a lactating cow. The horn is then buried in a pit (this is done twice a year, during the descending moon phase), dug up six months later, the manure removed, and then stirred for an hour with rainwater. (Instructions include reversing direction every three minutes.) All this may sound slightly loony, but the composted manure is rich in nitrogen, and the resulting “tea” makes a terrific fertilizer easily absorbed by nutrient-deprived soils.

“The challenge is that people latch on to the voodoo when they should be focusing on the intent,” Rob Sinskey, one of the most vocal enthusiasts for biodynamics in American winemaking, told me during a recent visit to his Napa winery. Even Sinskey, however, calls himself a “practicing agnostic” when it comes to some of biodynamic’s more mystical aspects. “I’ve grappled with the perceptions of hippiedom. And while some of the things associated with biodynamic farming make scientific sense, my main reason for following Steiner’s philosophy is because I firmly believe that it makes better wines, ones that taste of the place they are from.”

The Steiner to whom he refers is Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, educator, and spiritual scientist who formulated the principles of biodynamic agriculture in 1924. (He also created the Waldorf method of education.) Steiner developed biodynamic agriculture at the request of Austrian farmers as a solution to a situation much like today’s—one in which industrialized farming had sacrificed quality and pest resistance for higher yield. But back in 1924, the science was pretty fuzzy: Steiner, a firm believer in “ethical individualism,” leaned heavily on religion and mysticism to explain his theories. “He spoke in a language his contemporaries understood,” Sinskey explains, though he admits in an essay he wrote on the subject for one of his winery’s brochures that Steiner today can sound “a little too New Age for comfort.”