San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Meet the wine industry’s new energy healer, feeling the vibes among the vines
Practicing agricultural reiki, she channels connections to create balance and development
Reiki practitioner Virginia Samsel walks through a small California vineyard in silence, circulating her hands through the brisk winter air as if casting a spell.
Trying to keep an open mind, Stirm Wine Co. owner Ryan Stirm follows closely behind. Samsel is visiting his Watsonville winery to perform a reiki session — an energyhealing practice that utilizes light touch to help reduce stress, anxiety and pain, typically on humans. But this time, her patient is his vineyard.
“I’m checking to see how stuff feels and moves, the way things flow through the site,” Samsel says. “Using my hands, (I) can feel the rhythm of what’s happening, how fast it’s moving.”
She describes it as a form of agricultural reiki, the practice of channeling energy to build a better connection with a site in order to create balance and support its development. It’s neither standard nor scientifically proven, but biodynamics, an intensive organic farming method rooted in spirituality, and other alternative farming practices informed Samsel’s approach. She believes she’s one of the only people in the world applying it to vineyards.
She also fits into a growing counterculture within the natural wine movement. Alongside the zero-zero winemakers, who take natural winemaking to the extreme by adding absolutely nothing to their fermentations, and those making wine with crystals, Samsel is pushing the boundaries of the unconventional.
A former wine buyer, Samsel says reiki enables her to receive information from the vineyard that can pinpoint areas of stress, imbalance and pockets for further development. She receives this information in the form of feelings and emotions, though sometimes it’s more visual, taking on the shape of a vortex or wave “as a faint overlay.”
Based on her findings, she might suggest solutions: adding plants on the vineyard’s boundary to promote development and biodiversity or placing crystals to redirect energy. She’s a big proponent of spending more time with the land — without agenda — even if it means simply taking a nap among the vines.
Like a medium before a reading, Samsel goes into a vineyard blind; she doesn’t have any prior knowledge of the site. So when she mentions that the Watsonville vineyard’s main energy flow comes from the nearby mountains and meanders through the center of the vineyard, Stirm seems impressed, confirming that there’s an underground river there.
On the vineyard’s edge, Samsel detects a buildup of energy. She suggests Stirm create a buffer by putting in a fence and planting long, tuberous vegetables like potatoes to help aerate the soil and release the pressure. This would help reinforce that the “vineyard knows where it’s working,” she says, “and doesn’t send energy to places that aren’t a part of it,” like the adjacent parcel.
“It makes sense,” says Stirm, who notes that the soil is extremely dense in that area. “It stays wet for a long time (after it rains). You can’t get equipment in here without getting stuck.”
Stirm met Samsel, who comes from a family of farmers and gardeners, in 2016 at the Brumaire Natural Wine Festival at Oakland wine bar Ordinaire. While they share a similar ethos when it comes to natural farming and winemaking practices, vineyard reiki is far beyond Stirm’s comfort zone. Even biodynamic farming is a little too woowoo for him. “I feel like a lot of it is hocus-pocus,” he says at the start of the visit.
But when Samsel asked if she could come down from her home in Seattle to do a free exploratory session, he agreed. This is still a fairly new venture for Samsel, who has so far worked on vineyards in Virginia, Oregon, Italy and California. Communicating the intricacies and benefits of her practice is, understandably, difficult, and she wanted his input.
She developed her method out of the belief that farmers, especially in North America, have lost their spiritual and cosmic connection to the land, which was ingrained in Indigenous cultures. Farmers no longer “see themselves as part of the system,” she says, “but rather controlling the system,” with a focus on increasing output and homogenizing crops.
Samsel points to many drivers of this shift, including an absence of generational farming (multiple generations of a family working the same land, which is more common in Europe), the removal of native plants and people, and low silica soils that lack crystalline elements such as flint or quartz. (These are natural connections for cosmic energy, Samsel says.) The idea is that reiki can help fortify this deeper connection between farmers and the vineyard, she says, which in turn allows the site to reach its full potential.
At Stirm’s 2-acre vineyard, the Vermentino and Albariño vines are head trained — spread out and planted low to the ground, like small trees — instead of on trellises in perfectly linear rows. He farms organically and doesn’t till, so many weeds and shrubs grow wildly around them. The scene is a stark contrast from the site’s previous life as a commercial farm, growing berries, broccoli and other produce.
Stirm says that the vineyard is planted on “premium Watsonville farmland,” and for years, it was regularly fumigated and sprayed with chemicals. “It’s a place that’s been through the ringer of commercial agriculture,” he says, which makes it a model candidate for Samsel’s work.
With a new identity and purpose, Samsel says it’s possible that there are some residual impacts from the decades of conventional farming. “When something learns to work a certain way, you have to do a lot of work to shift that process,” she says.
After spending a few minutes in the lower right quadrant of Stirm’s vineyard, Samsel determines the energy is moving far too fast, unable to properly connect. She suggests he take large stones from the vineyard and place them in that area, with intention, to slow the energy down.
Stirm confirms that those vines have been struggling, especially following a bad frost last year, and are more neglected than the rest of the site. He says he’s open to considering some of her recommendations and, at the very least, spending more time in his vineyard beyond day-today work.
Samsel compliments the young vineyard on its “strong sense of self,” meaning it is focused, recognizes its boundaries and is poised to effectively communicate its needs. At the end of the session, she spends a few minutes painting a watercolor, a visual representation of the vineyard’s energy flow. She notes the main energy source, which flows over the underground riverbed, in yellow squiggles; uses purple to mark the density at the border; and paints a brown potato-like shape to mark a reservoir of energy where the soils are especially sandy.
Stirm asks for a copy, a sign that Samsel’s visit has softened his skepticism.