Wine Term: Cloudy | WineSpeed

Cloudy

Descriptive term, not necessarily negative, for a wine that looks hazy rather than brilliantly clear. A wine can be slightly cloudy because it has not undergone FINING or filtration (see FILTER). Some wines, however, are cloudy as the result of faulty winemaking.

Biodynamic farming, a practice that views a vineyard as a regenerative and living organism, was first practiced in vineyards in California.

Answer: False.

The first well known winery to practice biodynamic farming was in France, in the Loire Valley. It's name: Coulée de Serrant. As developed by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, and later expanded on by his followers, biodymanics is a holistic system of living agriculture whereby the soil and plants growing in it are nurtured through natural forces. Biodynamics envisions soils and plants as living in a sort of middle world influenced from below by the forces of the earth, and influenced from above by the cosmos. So for example, vines are fertilized using compost created on the farm and are pruned according to the movement of the moon through the twelve houses of the zodiac—all in order to achieve ultimate harmony with the forces of Nature.

“We entered the wine industry when there were no wine magazines, no wine critics, no 100-point scale—all 23 of us vintners in the Napa Valley in the 1960s. What we learned, we learned from the vineyard itself. Back then, it seemed like less was better.”

— Janet Trefethen (Trefethen Family Vineyards is 50 years old this year)

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