Watch an Interview With François Barmès Here
We always divide a Germany trip in two with a drive from the Saar into Alsace, before finishing in the Pfalz and Rheinhessen and coming home via Frankfurt. I like to schedule a full weekend in Wettolsheim with François Barmès and his wife Geneviève, if only to have enough time to absorb François’ incredible energy. No one anywhere works harder. Just tasting all the wines takes two days.
Barmès works his vineyards according to the strictest principles of biodynamic agriculture (he once showed me the mixing device in which he prepares herbal treatments for the vines, explaining that the alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motion of the paddles draws in the cosmic energy).
I’m not qualified to comment, or to say whether pest control by the release of predator insects (ladybugs) into the vineyard on the night of the new moon is more effective than at other times in the lunar cycle, but Biodynamie also requires the most labor intensive organic methods.
On my last visit, I drove for more than an hour up a winding forest road with François, to a small farm located near the summit of the Grand Ballon in the Hautes Voges mountains. I went with François to see his compost heap.
Every March he takes truckloads of pomace (the solid matter, including grape skins, pulp, and seeds that remain in the presses) from the previous vintage to the Ferme Auberge du Haag, where his friend Fernand Hoffner’s dairy cows graze in pristine mountain pastures. Raised entirely organically, without the benefit of antibiotics and growth hormones, they produce what François believes is the healthiest possible manure, which is mixed at the farm with his biodynamic pomace.
For eight months, the compost ferments in the clean mountain air. In November, François trucks back his share, which is enough to spread on one third of his vineyards. It’s the only fertilizer used at Domaine Barmès-Buecher, spread on each vineyard once every three years.
The whole procedure seems excessively labor intensive, bordering on obsessive, but it’s hard to argue with the results at Barmès-Buecher: very low yields of early-ripened, healthy fruit, and the most concentrated wines in Alsace. The old vines in François’ vineyards look like specimen plants. They exhale vitality, and you feel good walking among them. Even his soil looks and smells wholesome compared to his neighbors’, where pesticides and herbicides pollute the ground, and where the sterile earth is compacted by the frequent passage of the tractor.