The Oldest Farming in the World

On biodynamics, ancient wisdom, and why Rudolph Steiner didn’t invent anything

I remember the moment it clicked.

I was working on the sales team at Avery’s Wine Merchants in Bristol. For a dinner with colleagues, while everyone else reached for the serious bottles - Burgundy, Bordeaux, the usual roll call of prestige - I pulled something left field. Le Soula Blanc. A white from the Fenouillèdes in the Roussillon, made by Mark Walford and the legendary vigneron Gérard Gauby from old vines on high-altitude granite at the foot of the Pyrenees. Nobody at the table had heard of it. Nobody expected much.

It stopped the conversation.

Not because it was showy. The opposite. It had this quiet intensity - delicate, precise, deeply itself. It tasted like somewhere specific. Like it was trying to tell you something rather than impress you. Michel Roux Jr has called it one of his all-time favourite wines. It sat on the list at La Gavroche. Once you’ve tasted it, that makes complete sense. I started digging. The philosophy behind it was biodynamic, minimal intervention, a deep respect for what the land was already doing. The wine tasted the way it did because of how the land was farmed. That connection - between philosophy and flavour, between belief and the glass - was the thread I’ve been pulling ever since.

Most people, when they encounter biodynamics, think it starts with Rudolph Steiner. The Austrian philosopher who, in 1924, gave a series of lectures to farmers in Silesia about a different way of working the land. Treating the farm as a living organism. Working with lunar cycles. Using preparations made from plants, minerals, and animal matter to restore life to the soil. It sounds esoteric. It is, a little. But Steiner wasn’t inventing something new. He was remembering something very old.

Farming by the moon and stars is as ancient as farming itself. Pre-Christian, pre-Roman, rooted in the earliest agricultural civilisations. The Egyptians planted by lunar cycles. The Greeks understood that different celestial rhythms governed root days, flower days, fruit days, leaf days. Medieval European peasants knew which days to sow, which to harvest, which to leave the land alone. This wasn’t mysticism for its own sake - it was observation over millennia, passed down because it worked. The industrialisation of farming didn’t disprove any of it. It just stopped listening.

Steiner gave it a framework and a name. What biodynamic farmers are really doing is reconnecting with a way of understanding land that most of modern agriculture has written off as primitive. The irony is that the results - in soil health, in biodiversity, in the flavour of what’s grown - keep suggesting it wasn’t primitive at all.

I think about Pierre Gassmann at Rolly Gassmann in Rorschwihr, Alsace - a domaine whose roots go back to 1661. Standing in his cellar, talking about water memory. The idea that water carries an energetic imprint of where it has been, and that working it in a vortex activates something in it. It’s not abstract theory at Rolly Gassmann - they have a dynamising machine in the cellar for precisely this purpose. Pierre is biodynamic by deep conviction, not by certification or marketing. He farms 70 individual plots by hand, reads the moon, and releases his wines only when he believes they are ready. You can argue the science. Plenty do. But Pierre wasn’t asking me to take it on faith - he was pointing to the vines, the soils, the wines. The evidence was in the glass.

That’s ultimately what biodynamics asks of you. Not blind belief in ancient ritual. But a willingness to consider that the relationship between a farmer and their land might be more complex, more alive, more reciprocal than industrial agriculture has ever allowed for.

The oldest farming in the world understood this. Steiner articulated it for a generation that had started to forget. The best winemakers working biodynamically today are simply carrying it forward - one lunar cycle, one living soil, one glass at a time.