Winemaker Nate Wall and Nomblot Tank Expert Phillip Taratko Discuss Using Concrete Winemaking Vessels at Troon Vineyard

Troon Vineyards director of agriculture Garett Long and biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy discuss farming by the Moon at Troon Vineyard.

The Rhne Rangers represent not a region or single grape variety but a shared vision. With a name brought to fame on an old Wine Spectator cover, a unique wine organization was born. The Annual Rhne Rangers Experience held in Paso Robles this February and every February is a testament to their our vision. This years event, the 19th, saw over eig...

Troon vineyard winemaker Nate Wall and assistant winemaker Hannah Thorning review harvest 2023 in our new podcast episode!

Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a persons soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achi...

Welcome to a special edition of the Troon Talk Podcast recorded during the National Biodynamic Conference in Westminster, Colorado, this November. Please excuse the quality of these recordings made during the conference in public places using Bluetooth microphones. However, I am sure you will find the content more than worthwhile.The first segment ...

In this episode of our Troon Talk Podcast, Biodynamic Consultant Andrew Beedy and Troons Director of Agriculture Garett Long discuss making the compost preparations. Every fall, our next-door neighbors at Noble Organic Dairy Farm deliver 400 tons of cow manure to us at Troon Vineyard ...

Winery tours have become increasingly boring over the last few decades. The rows of stainless steel tanks and stacks of beautiful new French Oak barrels became the norm. Of course, as the wineries became boring so did the wines. The wines increasingly became the product of the vessels and additives, not the vineyard where the grapes were grown. Mo...

It is no secret that agricultural workers are abused and exploited. This applies to the entire world, but that it happens so blatantly in wealthy countries like the United States is particularly shameful. From the beginning, this has been one of the major attractions to me about Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC).There are three pillars to be...

A great conversation on Troon Vineyard and regenerative agriculture on the ReGen Brands podcast! I had a great talking about biodynamics and Regenerative Organic Gold Certified farming!https://regen-brands.com/episode/38-craig-camp-troon-vineyard...

There are few better team-building activities than stuffing cow horns with fresh manure together at least on a Biodynamic farm. Sometimes you wonder if its the process or preparation that is making such a difference on your farm. I believe it is the combination of both that enlivens biodynamics. Intentionality is a vision that flows through the pr...

We always discuss farming and winemaking, but little is said about sales. Sales should not be ignored because to be green, you have to make a profit. With no margin, there is no mission. As crucial as our farming is, convincing other farmers that there is a method to all this madness is essential. A holistic farm has to combine regenerative agricul...

"We should be farming the soil, the mycorrhizal fungi, more than the vines. What they need is in the soil if we create the conditions that make that nutrition available to them. At first, I was focused on what the vines were lacking when I should have been focused on what the soil was lacking." said Michele Cotarella, an Italian winemaker and vitic...

Winemaking in the world is mostly risk-averse. This is understandable as most wine is produced as beverage alcohol, not as a product of nature. To produce a standard beverage alcohol product, your recipe must be reproducible. The goal is to make a product that is identical year after year. This approach is more in line with an assembly line than fa...

Introducing the Troon Talk Podcast series were we dig deep into Demeter Biodynamic Regenerative Organic Certified winegrowing and farming. Introducing the Troon Talk Podcast Series on Wine Camphttps://wine-camp-by-craig-camp.captivate.fm/episodesI am pleased to introduce our Troon Talk podcast series focusing on the teams work at Troon to creat...

Thanks to Trish Glose for interviewing me! I had a great time and it was fun to share a bit of my wine history.

Red Blotch Virus at Troon Vineyard Hail, fire, and frost are dramatic natural disasters faced by farmers. Winemakers worldwide have suffered cataclysmic devastation from these forces of nature more than in the past during these last years. However, some natural disasters are not drama...

Harvesting Vermentino at Troon Vineyard during the 2022 harvest. Biodynamic, Organic, and Natural: Three words you find in many headlines these days that are coupled with the word explained. If you dont farm, these concepts are hard to explain. With natural wines, the grapes, not the ...

Troon Vineyard Block 14 SyrahHigh 102.6F Low 43.9F Diurnal Shift 58.7FIn the afternoon, you swelter in the dry heat. At dinnertime, you need a jacket. The temperatures above were recorded by our weather station in block 14 this summer. This range between the days high and the nights low is called the diurnal shift. As you can see, weve got quite a ...

original artwork by JoAnn Stevens Napa has cabernet; the Willamette Valley has pinot noir. Its conventional marketing wisdom that a wine region has to have a signature variety to succeed in the market. This conventional wisdom is a climate change denier. Climate change, or as Jamie Goode so...

It was a pleasure to spend time with Amy talking about our wines, Biodynamics and Oregons Applegate Valley!

I spent a entertaining hour discussing biodynamics regenerative agriculture at Troon Vineyard and life in Oregons Applegate Valley with Adam Huss on his Organic Wine Podcast. “Today we take a trip to the country to meet Craig Camp, the General Manager of Troon Vineyard in the Applegate Valley AVA of Southwest Oregon. Troon is a certi...

Mycorrhizal Fungi - Illustration by Michael Rothman - https://www.rothmanillustration.com It was the early eighties, and I was yet again rereading several chapters of Edmund Penning-Rowsells tome The Wines of Bordeaux. I had just spent the day tasting in Graves and Sauternes from the tank a...

Troon Vineyard is now both Demeter Biodynamic and CCOF Organic Certified. Certainly, thats an accomplishment that I am more than proud of attaining in the minimum required three years. Yet, there are parts of both certifications that have always made me uncomfortable. The USDA Organic certification has been largely taken over by industrial organic ...

Troon Vineyard one of twelve Demeter Biodynamic Certified wineries and vineyard in Oregon It started in a grown over abandoned cow pasture three and a half years ago and ended with Champagne on the patio at Troon Vineyard last week. The start was picking the site for the compost piles. The ...

Troon Vineyard, Applegate Valley, Oregon Troon Vineyard is a story of rebirth, regeneration, and rediscovery, reads the lede in the Oregon Wine Press article Troon Renaissance in their July issue about the transformation of Troon Vineyard. The author, Barbara Barrielle, could not have bette...

One of our main goals in practicing biodynamics in our pursuit of regenerative agriculture is to minimize inputs from off the farm. So we are planting and using the components to make the biodynamic preparations from plants that we grow ourselves. ...

Winemaker Nate Wall and consultant Andrew Beedy make Biodynamic Barrel compost at Troon Vineyard In a time that seems far-far away these days, within a few months of each other, I attended two biodynamic conferences. One was the Biodynamic Wine Conference in San Francisco and the other was ...

It was fun! Browsing through my RSS feeds one morning I spotted an article about a type of wine called piquette. What was that? The article was about a piquette being produced by the biodynamic Wild Ark Farm in New Yorks Hudson Valley. This, I thought to myself, looks like fun. I forwarded the article to Troon Vineyards winemaker, Nate Wall, with a...

I cant forget when I first saw the results after we applied a new organic herbicide based on clove oil and molasses called Weed Slayer. Put very simply; it worked too well. It worked like Roundup but smelled like allspice.In the past, products that were approved to use on a certified organic farm never caused any worry about being too effective. Ma...

Planting marsanne vines at Troon Vineyard in Oregons Applegate Valley Just last week, the vineyard was buried in snow, and the vines were slumbering in the coldness of days with little sunshine. Today the sun was shining, and there was a hint of spring in the air as January released its fri...

Wine Refinery You see them standing in the wine department aisle at a large grocery store or major liquor store with bewildered faces facing a bewildering selection of labels. There is a kaleidoscope of bottles with bright colors, gold medals and cute labels. How in the world can they choos...

Ive seen some amazing wine cellars - dazzling collections of bottles. I too have a wine cellar, but its not filled with bottles - its filled with friends.My favorite wines are all from people that have meant something in my life. When I was younger I chased labels like everyone else, always seeking the latest and greatest. Now, decades later, I wan...

Cheers to Harvest 2019 Winemaker Nate Wall and assistant winemaker Cary Willeford passing out Champagne to celebrate the arrival of the first grapes of vintage 2019. ...

Adding pomace from the press to organic manure to build our compost piles at Troon Vineyard in Oregons Applegate Valley. Compost is the foundation of biodynamic, regenerative agriculture. Farmers often are not very good with marketing and marketers not very knowledgeable about farming. To far...

Troon winemakers Cary Willeford and Nate Wall apply BD 508 (horsetail) to new vines about to be planted at Troon Vineyard in Oregons Applegate Valley . Theres been a spate of articles lately focusing on the natural wine trend pulsing through wine world today. In almost every article there is ...

Finished Biodynamic preparation 500 Troon winemaker Nate Wall filling cow horns with fresh organic manure ...

Planting mourvdre at Troon Vineyard as dawn breaks over the Siskiyou Mountains It was before 6 a.m., but there were already a lot of holes. Dawn had not broken, but a dim light was just starting to flow over the mountains. Hundreds of holes had already been dug. Around thirty people moved the...

Troon assistant winemaker Cary Willeford applies Biodynamic Preparation 508 to newly arrived vines Standing there looking at the now real Troon Vineyard block 9, newly planted with mourvdre, was an emotional experience. So much planning, work and investment transformed from an idea into a v...

New vines arrived at Troon Vineyard yesterday from Inland Desert Nursery in Washington - mourvdre, grenache noir and marsanne all neatly packed into shipping boxes. Next week more classic southern French varieties will arrive and within the next ten days, well have planted over 14,000 vines to create ten new acres of vineyard.Stacked in their shipp...

Brassica and sweet peas bloom as part of the cover crop regenerating soils at Troon Vineyard Hey farmer farmerPut away that D.D.T. nowGive me spots on my applesBut leave me the birds and the beesPleaseDon't it always seem to goThat you don't know what you've got'Till it's goneThey paved pa...

Harvest 2018 at Troon Vineyard in Oregons Applegate Valley. Tired old canards. When will the media get on board with modern biodynamics? While the article Weighing Up the Value of Biodynamic Wine by Vicki Denig addresses valid concerns, once again the sources for the article are either misin...

Rudolf Steiner gave his agricultural lectures, the beginning of biodynamics, in 1924. There were eight lectures over thirteen days given to a group of over one hundred farmers. He died in 1925. During the last of the agricultural lectures he said, I am in entire agreement with the strict resolve which has been made by our farmer friends here presen...

Sriacha aiol... Sriracha, Aioli, Pesto: the holy trinity of corporate cuisine. Theyre on almost everything and I would not be shocked to see a Sriracha and Pesto Aioli on a sandwich these days. In most kitchens the main purpose of these sauces are to cover up less than interesting ingredient...

My iPad Pro 10.5 with a Brydge Keyboard Im trying to remember how long its been? Could it be thirty years? It's damn close. Over those decades I've never traveled anywhere without my laptop - until now. For the better part of the last two weeks I've just traveled with an iPad along with a sm...

Burying cow horns to make Biodynamic Preparation 500 at Troon Vineyard Its not their fault, but you see it every week. Fine wine writers printing misconceptions and flat-out wrong information on biodynamics - yes, fake news.Its not their fault, its ours. Those of us who farm wine grapes biod...

Agriculture is cyclical. Season flows into season. Vines flower then a hundred or so days later you harvest their fruit. Animals and farmers live their life cycles together on land that sustains them both. Nature wraps us in the cycle of life.In January we begin to think of pruning and worrying about frost. What happened last vintage is behind us a...

Mother Nature was very kind to us in 2018. Rain and cool weather are things you expect during harvest in Oregon, but not this year! All during harvest we were given warm, dry weather under beautiful blue skies. This perfect weather meant we could harvest each variety at the ideal moment. There was no pressure from the weather so our pace was almost...