My second interview on Organic Wine Podcast last December was a welcome opportunity to explore where I am going next on my Hope Well journey. Adam Huss never fails to ask the difficult and interesting questions. For instance, Is Wine Big Enough? Mimi Casteel Revisited – Is Wine Big Enough? December 6, 2021 Mimi Casteel started […]
Letters from the Edge
Silver Linings
Catalyst: an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action Most of you who follow Hope Well now know that 2020 was a catalyst. If you read Vendange 2020: the Hardest Lessons Yet, the events of 2020 were yet unfolding as I wrote that post, still eager to see what the harvest would yield, […]
The Nitty Gritty on No-Till
Dear friends, I had the great pleasure recently of diving into a nitty-gritty conversation about no-till agriculture with Jesse Frost on his No-Till Market Garden Podcast. This is a podcast by real farmers for real farmers and Jesse knows how to ask interesting questions about how regenerative no-till farming actually works on real farms. […]
No Time Left
Presented at the Acres USA Healthy Soils Summit August 26, 2021 Hi everyone, my name is Mimi, and my farm is in Oregon. I’m very honored to be a part of this day with you. I’d like to begin by sharing a story about where we are, as a way of beginning a conversation about […]
Hope Well Journey
There is no easy way to start a letter like this. For years you have been on this journey with me. We have traversed the hard-won successes and the setbacks of trying to reimagine agriculture at the family farm scale. When I left Bethel Heights, this farm, this place, was where I lived. It was […]
Seeking an Optimum and Never a Maximum – Slow Wine Manifesto
Last October I was honored to be invited to join several winemakers from around the world who participated by video in the introduction of the Slow Wine Manifesto in Italy on October 11, 2020. My part was nice and short, but it gave me the opportunity to appreciate one of the brilliantly stated key principals […]
The Regenerate Forum: Regenerative Methods in Viticulture
Dear Friends, Last year I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Andrew Keen on his new webcast, Regenerate Forum. Mr. Keen fears no controversy, having made a career of tackling the great political dilemmas of our time, and his experience makes this a fun spin on my usual topics: https://www.regenerateforum.org/interviews I highly recommend Mr. Keen’s […]
Outcasts
I have few more pungent olfactory memories than those from the late summers of my childhood. The grapes growing softer and sweeter, the smell of the grasses changing from green and sappy to spicy, sweet and dry, the crackling of insect noises in the fields and forests. But nothing could compare to the purple-black, heady […]