Southbrook vineyards

Bill and Marilyn Redelmeier moved their farm and winery from Markham to Niagara-on-the-Lake in 2005, to a site found for them by winemaker Ann Sperling. Southbrook opened in 2008 and Sperling’s wines, led by the superb Poetica, have been winning awards ev

SOUTHBROOK WAS THE FIRST

biodynamic winery in Ontario and it is a fascinating example of the holistic agriculture Rudolf Steiner advocated. Half the property is a farm run by Juliet Orazietti and her husband, Martin Weber—a sort of idyllic Shangri-La for the pigs that live out in the forest and pasture and for the flock of 85 sheep that provide manure for the vineyards. Juliet’s mother, Ann Sperling, is the director of winemaking and viticulture at Southbrook and Canada’s greatest advocate of biodynamic wine-growing. She showed me the old stone barn where the barrel compost and the cow horns are kept, the miniature wetland bio-filter Southbrook has created to clean rainwater from the car park and the gardens where yarrow and chamomile grow—ingredients for some of the biodynamic preparations. How does a pinch of something affect an acre of land? “It’s like homeopathy,” explains Sperling. “Certain plants have the ability to concentrate certain elements or minerals. They also help connect with and stimulate the energetic forces of nature.”

More conventional science is taken equally seriously at Southbrook. Working with minimal sulphur levels in the winery means Sperling really has to understand the chemistry of her wines to maintain stability. The winery also participated in an international study that charted the optimum times to pick ripe grapes, during certain windows of aromatic intensity. “It was so interesting to discover that every single one of those windows coincided with a fruit or flower day on the biodynamic calendar,” says Sperling.