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Letters from the Edge

Tractor Time Podcast: Mimi Casteel on Regenerative Wine

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Dear Friends, 

A long time ago my dear friend Mark Sturges introduced me to the Acres Conference, and ever since it has been a yearly pilgrimage to connect with and be inspired by others working in holistic farming systems. I had the great honor of sitting down with the delightful host of the Acres podcast, Tractor Time, at the 2019 conference, and spending an hour talking about the mission and work at Hope Well, along with other spicy topics. For me this was a huge privilege, as this conference and the organization represent a major source of education and inspiration in my journey.

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Mimi Casteel overlooking her vineyard.

On this episode, we welcome Mimi Casteel, a wine maker in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. At Hope Well Vineyard, Casteel is blazing her own trail and fast becoming one of the leading voices in the regenerative agriculture movement. Mimi talks eloquently and brilliantly — not just about wine, but agriculture and land use in general. As you’ll hear, her beyond-organic farm is singular within the American wine world. It’s not your typical vineyard, with its neat and tidy rows. It’s a dynamic ecosystem that incorporates livestock, welcomes in wild animals, eschews industrial inputs and produces prized pinot noirs. And for this work, Mimi was recently named the Wine Person of the Year by Imbibe Magazine.

Mimi Casteel: Imbibe 75 2020 Wine Person of the Year

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Mimi Casteel, walking among the vines at Hope Well vineyard.

The attention and interest in regenerative agriculture over the last year has been nothing short of dizzying. I am grateful, and hopeful that the light that shines on the movement now will guide and protect the mission as we move into a new and critical decade. – Mimi Casteel

“Mimi Casteel is our Imbibe 75 2020 Wine Person of the Year.  Mimi Casteel makes wine—very good wine—under her Hope Well label. The wine is an enjoyable byproduct of a much larger experiment undertaken by Casteel. Using methods of regenerative agriculture, she aims to demonstrate that farming can be done in a way that not only improves the land, but even reverses the effects of climate change.” Read the article.

Who’s Really Trampling out the Vintage?

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Who’s Really Trampling out the Vintage?
Una nota de gracias

About a year back, when I was still working with my dear friends at Lingua Franca, I found myself navigating the darkest hour between their night harvest and my dawn harvest at Hope Well. Not enough time to go home and get a nap, too tired to try to even bother getting warm. I was sitting in my car drinking coffee from a thermos in the 7-11 parking lot, as I did not want to wake my family by going home. Some of the people from the night pick were mulling about the parking lot, eating the only warm, cheap food that can be had at that hour of the night / morning. Why on Earth wouldn’t they be already home in their beds, you ask?

Photo of vineyard worker picking grapes.


Because of course they were all going on to other jobs. Maybe their day job, maybe another pick in the daytime. We were all cold, sweaty, dirty and tired. I looked over to the car next to me and saw a woman sleeping with two little babies on her chest. Her hair indicated she was the abuelita, and the babies slept soundly, but she was clearly stirring. I watched her transition the babies to their mother, who had finished her snack and was taking her place in the car with the children while abuelita put on her gear and boarded the van to go with the pickers to the next job.

I watched them go as I tried to thaw my fingers on my thermos. I thought of abuelita and the three generations of her family working on farms across the valley. Mama was strapping her babies into their carseats and looking so tired that I tapped on her window and offered to follow her home. We delivered her babies to their older siblings. Mama quickly changed into the clothes she would wear while she cleaned houses the rest of the day.

Photo of vineyard worker at Hope Well


As dawn drew close I asked her to be careful that day, please sleep soon, please thank her family for the beautiful work they were doing, and left to meet my crew at Hope Well. It was an incredibly emotional drive, which helped keep me awake, but I still struggle to convey what was burning in my chest.

At the gates of Hope Well I was greeted by the shouts and smiles of my well-rested compadres.This group of remarkable people I’ve known for so long, the crew that has worked with my family through the decades, also works with me at Hope Well. The work I am able to do because they belong here means everything to the mission of this place.

Since I was a child, I have watched the same group of men and women work the vines, first at Bethel Heights, and now here as well, and how differently they work than any of the very talented crews of contract labor I have had the opportunity to work with in other vineyards.

The way I work is, to put it lightly, different. I am asking these people to take a journey with me and this place. To take that walk I cannot just ask them to go out and do a particular job. I need them to understand the reason everything looks so different here. I need them to understand that our work is always toward the goal of repairing a relationship with this land. I need them to see how everything fits together.

There is real levity in the vines here. We do serious work with great joy in our hearts. As I crossed the gate that morning, into the arms of my crew, I’ve never felt more grateful for the system that my family has fought to maintain, even as the world turns away from any permanent labor model, outsourcing every job that can be systematized, placing the responsibility and liability on someone else’s business. Bethel Heights formed an alliance with Temperance Hill more than twenty years ago to provide full-time work, benefits, and proper working conditions.

I bring this up, because that parking lot at the 7-11 was full of the very same talent and skill that was waiting for me back at Hope Well. They are all a part of an unstable economy, built on their backs, that won’t take responsibility for the most important component of the work we do; The human component.

We have marginalized the most important work being done in this country. We have painted labor in terms of drudgery, mindless, unskilled tasks that anyone with education or talent would be a fool to tarry with. I would be the last person to point the finger at labor contractors or even the businesses that hire them for starting this epidemic. At the heart of this is the systemic death of a type of working landscape that understands how beholden we are to that work, and how our society is failing as that uniting force is vilified, alienated, and persecuted.

To work the land in the growing of food and fiber for your country is, I submit, the very highest calling. To put your body and your mind to bringing the harvest to the first responders, the soldiers, the doctors and the lawyers, lauded all, cannot the people who feed and clothe them be justly honored? To be very clear, the work we do, the synergy between bodies moving through space, the way the naked and healthy environment inspires a free mind to think about the work of the hand, the tool, the effort, there is no cubicle or desk that offers the same promise.

The people in that early-morning parking lot, the people behind my gate, the people who have picked me up when I have fallen, and suffered every loss with me as viscerally as I, WE ARE YOU. We are building your children’s future. Those hands that we classify as ‘unskilled’ and the direction of their work could change the fate of our world. Can we please stand up and give the greatest thanks of this season to the backs that brought that bounty to your table? Right now, they are cutting and wrapping your Christmas tree.

They are WE. The contracted laborer has all the promise of José Luís on my crew, if given the chance and the confidence to BELONG to this place. Our land turns on their affection. Our futures are their futures.

A mi gente: José Luís, Victor, Chapo, Tito, Joaquín, Blanca, Catalína, Asunción, Jesús, Nicolasa, Francisco, Maria, Isabel, Cente, gracias muchísimas por todo, cada día, cada año. Y a todas las familias trabajando en las granjas, ranchos, escuelas, casas, hospitales, ustedes tienen mi
gratitud tambien.

Photo of vineyard crew at Hope Well vineyard.

Mimi interviewed by Levi Dalton on “I’ll Drink to That!”

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Levi Dalton

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The latest episode of Levi Dalton’s “I’ll Drink to That!” podcast was released this week, and it features owner and winegrower Mimi Casteel.  “Mimi sees a through line between viticulture as agriculture, and agriculture as an engagement with the natural world. How do you see that line? After listening to Mimi Casteel, your perspective might well change.”

An urgent conversation about the power of regenerative agriculture

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Last month I had the honor of participating in this public seminar with three of my intellectual heroes, sponsored by my far-sighted and generous New York distributor, Polaner Selections.  The entire seminar, including audience participation, was recorded and is here presented in its entirety.  Please join us! 
– Mimi Casteel

“Please join carbon farming ‘bioneers’ Mimi Casteel and François Chidaine, energy entrepreneur Russ Conser, and bestselling author David Wallace-Wells for a conversation about the healing powers of working lands and their role in our collective future. In this crucial moment in human history, facing the most devastating consequences of climate change, we invite you to join our panel of ‘bioneers’ in carbon farming as they introduce the concepts behind regenerative agriculture and its promises in the battle against climate change.”

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO (YOUTUBE)

An Earth Day Letter to my Friends, for my Friends

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My Comrades and Kin,

As we revel in the gifts of spring, watching the vineyards push first growth, I beg your attention for a moment of community around our shared love for this land, for this earth.

Many of you pledged your name to an agreement we have named The Oak Accord. The nature of this document aligns tightly with the grassroots spirit of how the first winegrowers built the foundations of the tradition of Oregon wine. A document outside of the law, The Accord is a covenant, our names as our words, our promise.

As stewards we pledged to protect and restore oak woodlands and savannah to establish a vision of vineyard management in which healthy, perpetual habitat coexists with, and is supported by, working lands.

For the Accord to live, we must focus on the fine detail of this agreement. Titles must be short and iconic. Our promise, and our great challenge, lies in the word habitat, which encompasses much more than avoiding harming oak.

These habitats, which include woodland, prairie, and everything in between, are the ecological frameworks, the rough-in of our terroir. How these habitats formed and the subtle differences between them are the visual signs of nuance in place. Oaks, alone, can only stand in stoic despair as these nuances are stripped away by our farming. Their lives will be shorter, lacking the layers of supporting characters, unable to connect and communicate. Regeneration of a system that has health, beauty and permanence requires participation at every biological level.

It would certainly be easier to take a single species approach to conservation. We do not have this luxury. We must not shrink from this challenge, if we care for the generations who will follow in our footprints, be they deep and lasting, or light and nurturing. We make this choice. Doing nothing is an action and a choice.

Between 2012 and 2017, Oregon lost 340,000 acres of farmland to other uses. In spite of farmland being abandoned to other uses,  habitat continues to fall in the name of more Oregon wine. Where land is taken down past its very bones, the boulders lining the low trenches, for more acres of grapes, is this just? In our hearts, do we believe this industry must expand unchecked at the exclusion of all else?

Name. Promise. Alone, these words are some of the most powerful in our language. Together, they should be sacrosanct. These pictures represent how we are, how we may, live our promises, by our very names.

Your wines can tell any story. Your roots can learn secrets untold and spin them out in vinous ecstasy. Oak, maple, madrone, rose, ocean spray, serviceberry, piggyback plant, strawberry. What lived where you live? How many layers supported how many layers?

So, what’s in a name? As a species (our own) that has stepped conspicuously ouside of its place in the food chain, what’s in a name may be meaning. Using one’s name is as powerful as learning a name. My life was permanently changed the first time I learned the name of a plant. Quercus, Acer, Arbutus, Rosa, Holodiscus, Amelanchier, Tellima, Fragaria. I had to learn them all. I had to learn the insects, the rotifers, the fungi.

Honor thy name. Go learn the names of those in your care.