Mimi Casteel would like a conversation

Just don't get too comfortable with your regenerative farming

Mimi Casteel emerged in 2019 as a leading advocate of regenerative farming in vineyards, thanks to her appearance on Levi Dalton’s podcast, “I’ll Drink to That” and subsequent profiles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Today, regenerative is the new buzzword in a community struggling to adapt to the challenges of a changing climate. Several organizations offer regenerative certifications, and wineries that have adopted the practice are zealously proselytizing and often citing Casteel as an inspiration for change.

Earlier this year, I reached out to Casteel to seek her take on the popularity of regenerative practices in viticulture. The following conversation is edited for clarity and conciseness. We discussed why she isn’t pursuing regenerative certification and her view on how a focus on soil health and biodiversity can not only help the wine community adapt to climate change but also help deal with the current market downturn. She’s clearly pleased with the growing interest in changing viticulture and farming practices, but also concerned that “regenerative” may become a static trophy rather than an aspirational ideal.

Casteel grew up in the Eola-Amity Hills area of Oregon’s Willamette Valley at Bethel Heights Vineyard, founded by her family in 1977. After studying forest science and working several years for the Forest Service, including in fighting wildfires, she became convinced that mankind’s encroachment on nature was destroying vital habitats and inhibiting agricultural productivity. This led her to focus on the importance of soil health and biodiversity in vineyards and other farms. In 2016, she founded her own label, Hope Well Wine. And this year, upon the retirement of her father, Ted Casteel, Mimi returned to Bethel Heights as viticulturist. She also consults with other vineyards and farms.

Mimi Casteel (Source: BethelHeights.com)

Dave McIntyre: A main point of your initial critique was that the wine community needed to realize the impact it was having on the environment as a monoculture and not supporting soil health and habitat. Do you feel that is changing?

Mimi Casteel: I definitely feel it’s changing. When I take a minute and allow myself to stop focusing on how big the problems are and acknowledge how far we’ve come in a fairly short period of time, it really is changing. There are a number of wineries who are not just certified but are leading the way in showing how we can hold ourselves accountable and go beyond the minimum requirements for certification. Back in 2019, I definitely wondered if we had the drive to make a shift. It’s become a peer pressure model now, which is great.

Casteel mentioned various forces pushing the wine industry toward regenerative practices, including market demand and legislative initiatives such as California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will require vineyards to implement erosion control plans and monitor water usage. And of course, “the hard reality of the years we have experienced.”

DM: Oregon had fires in 2020. Did you make any wine that year?

MC: I tried to. I wanted to have a wine that I could talk about in the context of what fire means for a healthy ecosystem in the West. This is somewhat controversial to say, but the West was built by fire, and we haven’t managed that history very well the last couple hundred years. The wine industry is going to have to talk about fire for a while, and I wanted a conversation piece. But the wine smelled like a car fire, because everything burning in our immediate vicinity included a lot of houses, a lot of cars and plastics. It wasn’t going to be possible to make a wine I could stand behind.

DM: You mentioned market pressure helping to drive the movement to regen.

MC: The people who buy my wine aren’t necessarily representative of all the wine buyers in the world, but there’s a steep softening in the market right now that I think is opening the door for a conversation about what people really want in a bottle of wine. A lot of people are reassessing what healthy drinking looks like for them. I support that, it’s a healthy lifestyle choice for anyone. But wine is of the land, and that’s where the value is added. It shouldn’t be a mass marketed, empty beverage. Wine’s value comes in its relationship to a piece of land and the stewardship demanded by the land. In every market contraction, there’s an opportunity for those who want to double down on the meaning behind what they’re doing.

I’m doing this here, in this place, because I believe that what I want to make really can only be made right here. There’s something magical about the living system I’m a part of, and we can not only lose a little bit less of that each year, but actually grow it and improve upon it.

DM: Tell me about your consulting work with other farmers.

MC: I work with various farmers on creating an ecosystem-based farming methodology. I believe in creating peer-to-peer support groups to share experiences, because the expert-to-dummy type of teaching doesn’t stick. We want people to have a connection to their place and be able to discuss how they might create a higher level of health in their ecosystem. That type of support was lost in the Green Revolution, the post-war effort to feed to world, when farms got bigger, fence lines got father apart and people stopped working together. Then the only person you can talk to about what you’re seeing on your land is your chemical sales rep.

DM: Are you certified regenerative at Hope Well?

MC: I’m not, and that’s a very intentional choice on my part. We’ve been certified organic from the beginning, because I want people to know that certain chemicals are not found on my farm. But organic as a standard is not enough by any stretch. Certifications can hold people accountable, and there are good standards. The Regenerative Organic Alliance has a tiered system, for example, which encourages people to continue to improve, and they’re very thoughtful at developing the metrics. But the idea that we know what regenerative looks like, and that we can put a label on it, flies in the face of my concept of regenerative.

DM: How so?

MC: I don’t believe “regenerative” is something we will see in my lifetime. If we were to conceive of a system that is truly regenerative at every level, you would see more abundance. Not just soil health, but biodiversity above and below ground, a system that can support itself, connected with other landscapes. You can’t certify that at the scale of a farm.

When you and I first spoke in 2019, hardly anyone was talking about regenerative, but now everyone’s talking about it. We think we can define it, certify it, and charge a lot more for it. That’s where I really have some issues, because the classification of our food system keeps the people who need the healthiest food from having access to it. That’s the system I want to break, so participating in it presents some challenges for me existentially. I support the people who are doing it and developing the standards. We’re just asking different questions and looking at different things.

DM: It sounds as though your ideal of regenerative is a moving target, an aspiration we may never fully achieve, while a certification sets a benchmark level and creates the illusion of achieving a set standard.

MC: I would be uncomfortable certifying, putting a label that says regenerative on my wines, because I don't think I've achieved it yet. I think I'm doing a really good job, but I know I can still do more, and I want to continue to do more, and I don't feel comfortable using words I don't think are appropriate. I’m comfortable saying it’s my inspiration to be part of a regenerative system, but I’m not ready to say it’s a destination that I’ve achieved.

Now, I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but we just kind of fall back on things that make us comfortable, like, oh, there’s a certification for that. If we want to do better, we have to get really uncomfortable.

Mimi Casteel blogs occasionally in “Letters from the Edge,” on the Hope Well Wines website.

Some more reading about regenerative farming in wine: