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 […]
Letters from the Edge
Over the Moon: Contemporary Biodynamics & Beyond
Kelli White for GuildSomm March 15, 2019“Mimi’s personal flavor of biodynamics—now practiced at her own project, Hope Well Vineyard—is actually quite close to the original recipe, with certain key deviations. ‘There’s a whole new category of farmers who probably would have been categorized under organic, but now we call ourselves ‘regenerative agriculture.’ It is not […]
New Year’s – Letters from the Edge
Juxtaposed with the exuberance of spring, and the languidly long, warm, caramel colored summer nights that barely dip a toe in darkness before light brushes the mountains, and the frenetic energy and furious productivity of the harvest, winter can appear a hard stop. Amongst the seasons it is the metaphor for death, impenetrable, a mosaic […]
A Lively Conversation about Soil Health
August 24, 2018 Kelli White for GuildSomm interviews Mimi Casteel and a handful of other growers around the globe While I use several of the biodynamic preps, I diverge a little in philosophy particularly with respect to tillage, which I do not practice. I have a very strong philosophy about building soil that is not […]
Complexity is Stability
June, 2018. The vineyard is practically vibrating with the energy of spring. We are embarking on a very ambitious goal of adding 50 species to the existing cover on the vineyard floor. I hope to achieve a diversity of perennial and annual grass, flower and (even some vegetable) species to have close to 100 species […]
Invitation to join the Willamette Valley Oak Accord
Printer Friendly (PDF) Mimi Casteel, Invitation to join the Willamette Valley Oak Accord At the Annual Meeting of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, February 2017 Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about the movement we are now calling the Oak Accord. This movement sprung organically from conversations about the relationship between […]
On Stewardship
Printer Friendly (PDF) Mimi Casteel on Stewardship For the public announcement of the Willamette Valley Oak Accord, March, 2017 I spend a lot of time thinking about words and meaning. We underestimate the way our words, the rhetoric of our time, designs the present and the future, though we need only open a history book […]
Glyphosate, Chronic Use and Chronic Toxicity, a Global Pandemic and Matter of Immediate National Security
Printer Friendly (PDF) Glyphosate, Chronic Use and Chronic Toxicity, a Global Pandemic and Matter of Immediate National Security By Mimi Casteel, MS, Winegrower Hope Well Objectives: Present Glypohsate MOA, unique properties, and its basis for Chronic Toxicity Present current patterns of use and implications Present platform for awareness and change