The government corporation Wine Australia spreads unscientific nonsense on its website literally promoting the accuracy of astrology.
Take a look at this advice to grape growers and wine makers:
And there is advice for wine drinkers too.
How the Wine Australia document describes biodynamics: “Biodynamics originates from a series of lectures delivered by the Austrian scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924.
With biodynamic winemaking, the lunar cycle breaks down the production process into four periods: flower days, fruit days,
root days and leaf days.
“Biodynamic wine producers also employ nine biodynamic preparations (BD preps) in their farming practices and winemaking. They apply these preparations to enhance the soil and compost and to stimulate plant
life. They comprise manure, fermented herbs and minerals.”
If you have a sense of humour and a few hours to spare you will find the Steiner lectures on biodynamic farming at the Rudolph Steiner website. For a shorter introduction to the gobbledygook you can try the summary of the “Agriculture Course” provided by the Biodynamic Association. Personally I think the Steiner view on the importance of cow horns in agriculture deserves a wide audience. I have posted elsewhere on Glug Wines a section of his Lecture Number four delivered in June 1924 at a meeting with farmers in Koberwitz, a small village which was then in Germany but is now Poland.
This quote has to be a highlight:
“You see, by burying the horn with its filling of manure, we preserve in the horn the forces it was accustomed to exert within the cow itself, namely the property of raying back whatever is life-giving and astral. Through the fact that it is outwardly surrounded by the earth, all the radiations that tend to etherealise and astralise are poured into the inner hollow of the horn. And the manure inside the horn is inwardly quickened with these forces, which thus gather up and attract from the surrounding earth all that is ethereal and life-giving.“
It is a process that Wine Australia translates as:
