Biodynamic Winemaking: Horses, Geese, and Di Filippo

From my garden in Perugia this week I can see the first pale green along the vine rows on the slopes toward Cannara. It arrives every year at almost exactly this moment in March, that faint wash of color that is less a thing you see than a thing you sense, the way you sense a change in the air before the rain actually arrives. I have been watching this particular shift in the landscape for most of my adult life, but it began to mean something different to me after my first visit to the Di Filippo estate, when I stood at the edge of one of their parcels and watched a pair of draught horses moving through the rows with the slow, certain rhythm of animals that understand the work they have been given. There was a goose somewhere behind me in the cover between vines. I could hear it but not see it. I have been back many times since and I know the horses by sight now. They are not picturesque. They are working.

The question that comes up whenever biodynamic wine is mentioned at a serious table is whether the word means anything beyond its marketing uses. It is a fair question. The term circulates freely enough across back labels and wine lists, often stripped of its specific gravity, reduced to a gesture toward naturalness or a signal of certain price expectations. To understand what it actually means, you need to visit a place where it is lived rather than advertised. The Di Filippo estate in Cannara, in the Province of Perugia, is one of those places. The family founded it in 1971 on thirty hectares of rolling hills between Torgiano and Montefalco, with views toward Assisi that on clear mornings in late September carry the particular gold quality of Umbrian light. They achieved organic certification in 1994, one of the earliest in the region. They joined DIBIUM, the organic and biodynamic farming association, in 2008. And in 2009, Roberto Di Filippo brought in the horses.

Roberto is Emma Di Filippo's brother and the estate's philosophical heart. Italian wine journalists have taken to calling him l'enologo horse whisperer, which is affectionate and not quite wrong, though he would object to any framing that treats the horses as a personal eccentricity rather than a reasoned response to a practical problem. He describes himself first as a farmer, and the decision to remove tractors from five hectares of the estate was, as he has explained it to me on more than one visit, a decision about soil structure before it was a decision about anything else. A tractor, even a small vineyard tractor, compacts the ground with each pass. Repeated season after season, that compaction builds a hardpan layer that limits root depth, disrupts the fungal networks that connect vine roots to mineral nutrients, and impedes drainage in exactly the parcels where drainage matters most. The horses plough without that compaction. Their hooves exert a fraction of the ground pressure, and the soil in those parcels has, over fifteen years without a tractor, developed the open, friable character that you can feel when you push a stick into it. The forty percent reduction in energy consumption Roberto cites for those parcels is a real figure, confirmed by his collaboration with the University of Perugia, which turned what might have been a private conviction into a documented and reproducible result.

What the Geese Are Actually Doing

The geese are a harder story to tell because they invite the wrong kind of attention, the pastoral kind, the kind that turns a working animal into a decorative detail. At Di Filippo they are neither decorative nor incidental. They move through the vine canopy in the growing season grazing the cover between rows, which means that the vegetation management between vine passes is accomplished by animal appetite rather than by herbicide or mechanical cutting. Their manure goes back into the soil as a slow-release fertility that completes a biological circuit the tractors, by compacting and impoverishing the ground, had been interrupting. They also produce meat as a secondary product of the system. This last detail matters more than it might seem: it reflects an insistence on genuine closed-loop thinking rather than the selective ecological accounting that produces organic wine using inputs brought in from elsewhere.

There is a cultural resonance to this arrangement that I find myself returning to whenever I write about Di Filippo. The Italian countryside before the postwar industrialization of agriculture was not a wine monoculture. The mezzadria system that structured Umbrian farming for centuries produced estates that kept animals, grew grain, maintained olive trees, and made wine as one activity among several, each supporting the others through the kind of biological reciprocity that we now have to use words like biodynamic to describe. Di Filippo is not trying to recreate the sharecropping era. But the logic of their farm, the way the horses and geese and cover crops and vines participate in a single biological economy rather than a simplified production chain, belongs to the same understanding of land that made Umbrian agriculture resilient for so long. It is an old idea expressed with contemporary rigor.

What Biodynamic Actually Requires

Biodynamic farming has a specific origin: a series of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 at a farm in what is now Poland, proposing that the farm be understood as a self-sustaining organism responsive to the rhythms of the solar and lunar calendar. The Steiner framework includes preparations applied to soil and compost, planting and harvesting days correlated to the lunar cycle, and an emphasis on biodiversity as a structural condition of soil health. DIBIUM, which certifies Di Filippo, operates within this tradition while also drawing on the contemporary science of soil microbiology, mycorrhizal networks, and long-term tillage effects. The association audits its members and the certification carries real obligations, which is why its membership is not large. The research partnership Roberto built with the University of Perugia contributed field data on organic matter levels, compaction, and microbial diversity across parcels with different management histories, giving the estate's practices a scientific grounding that separates them from the more mystical or purely marketing-forward versions of biodynamic winemaking that appear elsewhere in Italy.

Does the lunar calendar actually affect vine growth? I am not the person to adjudicate that question, and I am not sure anyone is. What I can say is that when you visit a vineyard managed on biodynamic principles for fifteen years and compare its soil to a neighboring conventionally managed parcel, the differences are not abstract. The cover is more diverse. The earthworm count is higher. The roots of the vines go deeper. Whether Steiner's calendar is causally responsible for any of this, or whether the measurable improvements trace entirely to the absence of herbicides, the return of organic matter through animal activity, and the undisturbed fungal networks that tillage and compaction destroy, is a question I am happy to leave open. The soil at Di Filippo is alive in a way that I find easier to see than to explain.

Emma, Roberto, and the Shape of the Estate

Emma Di Filippo runs the estate with her sons Francesco and Filippo. She is the operational voice of the property, managing thirty hectares, a cellar, an export program, and the constant small decisions that keep a family wine estate coherent across generations. Roberto is the philosophical engine. In addition to his role at Di Filippo, he operates a second Cannara winery called Plani Arche with his wife Elena, and he was a co-founder of Sapata, an ethical winemaking enterprise near the Danube Delta in Romania, employing local workers and applying the same farming principles in a landscape about as different from Umbria as you can find within the orbit of Italian winemaking culture. These are not divergences from the Di Filippo project. They are extensions of a single conviction, held consistently across projects and geographies, that the relationship between a winemaker and a piece of land is most honestly expressed through farming practices that treat the land as a living system rather than a variable to be managed.

The estate produces 6,000 bottles per year of the flagship Montefalco Sagrantino DOCG and 10,000 of the Etnico, a more accessible Sagrantino with shorter maceration and twelve months in wood in place of the flagship's eighteen to twenty-four. The numbers are modest by design. The DOCG itself is not large: seventy commercial wineries farming roughly one thousand acres, a genuine expansion from the handful of producers who anchored the appellation when it received DOCG status in 1992, but still a denomination where individual estate production is measured in thousands of bottles rather than tens of thousands. Di Filippo makes its contribution to that number by hand, by horse, by geese, and by the accumulated knowledge of three decades farming the same piece of Umbrian clay.

Sagrantino and Its Tannins: A Monk's Logic

How did a grape this tannic survive into the modern era? Sagrantino contains more polyphenols than any of the twenty-five most widely studied grape varieties. It carries twice the tannin load of Cabernet Sauvignon or Nebbiolo. It has a skin so thick and a polyphenol density so high that its natural trajectory in the fermentation vat is toward a wine of almost impenetrable structure. The answer to the survival question is historical, and it is not about wine in the way we currently use the word. The earliest documented mention of Sagrantino is from 1598, when the jurist Bartolomeo Nuti cited sagrantino grapes in red wine production near Montefalco. The name derives almost certainly from either sagra, the feast, or sacrestia, the sacristy. For centuries, Sagrantino's tannins were not a problem to be managed but a feature to be relied upon: they preserved the liquid in a way that fragile varieties could not, making it the communion wine of choice for the monasteries and churches that dotted the Umbrian hills. The grape survived because of its tannins, not in spite of them.

For a working sommelier, the polyphenol density is a structural fact that shapes how the wine performs at the table. Sagrantino does not pair with delicate preparations. It pairs with fat, with protein, with the kind of dish that Umbrian cooking has always understood how to produce. Cinghiale in the old preparations, where the wild boar is braised slowly with red wine and juniper until the tannins of the meat and the tannins of the glass have something to say to each other rather than competing. A slow-roasted pork shoulder with wild fennel and rosemary, the kind of thing that comes out of an Umbrian kitchen on a cold Sunday and fills the house with a smell that anticipates the wine more accurately than any tasting note. Braised lamb with the dark herbal depth that Umbrian pastures contribute to their livestock. Aged Pecorino drizzled with dark chestnut honey, which is what I would pour it with tonight if I were opening a bottle, with the spring rain on the garden and the vine rows just beginning to show that first pale green on the slopes below. Biodynamic farming does not change Sagrantino's fundamental character. But a vineyard with living soil, undisturbed mycorrhizal networks, and fifteen years without a tractor does produce a more expressive version of that character, one in which the specific terroir of Cannara is audible in the glass rather than obscured by the generalizing effects of depleted soil.

The Broader Italian Biodynamic Conversation

Di Filippo is not alone in Italy's biodynamic landscape, though it is among the most committed estates in central Italy. Across the peninsula, a generation of producers has moved beyond organic certification toward the more demanding protocols of biodynamic farming, responding to a combination of philosophical conviction and the pragmatic observation that Italian vineyard soils had been accumulating damage under the conventional management that characterized the postwar modernization of Italian agriculture. The adoption curves differ by region: Trentino-Alto Adige and parts of Friuli have long biodynamic traditions linked to the German-speaking reform movements of the mid-twentieth century. Tuscany has high-profile practitioners who attract significant international attention. Umbria, with fewer certified estates but a long history of small-scale diversified farming, created the conditions in which biodynamic conversion made cultural as well as agronomic sense. The region's agricultural character, shaped for centuries by the mezzadria model of mixed farming, was already predisposed toward the kind of thinking the biodynamic system formalizes.

DIBIUM, the association to which Di Filippo belongs, audits its members and provides technical support and a network of producers who share research and farming experience. Its membership is small, which functions as a guarantee: producers who pursue DIBIUM certification are not using it primarily as a marketing signal but as a commitment to an audited set of practices. The University of Perugia collaboration that Roberto Di Filippo helped establish generated field data that benefits not only Di Filippo but the wider conversation about how biodynamic methods perform in central Italian conditions, on the clayey-calcareous soils of the Montefalco zone, under the summer heat that defines Umbrian viticulture. That collaboration is one of the things that separates this estate from operations that have adopted the language of biodynamic farming without the discipline.

What the Farm Puts in the Glass

Is there a direct line between a horse walking through a vineyard in Cannara and what you taste when you open a bottle of Di Filippo Sagrantino? The honest answer is that the line is long and indirect, running through soil biology and vine root depth and the composition of the canopy and the particular weather of the vintage and the decisions made in the cellar during maceration and aging. You cannot isolate any single element of the system and say: this is the taste of the horse, this is the flavor the geese contributed. What you can say, and what I believe after many visits to this estate and many glasses of this wine over many years, is that a vineyard managed as a living system for thirty years produces grapes that carry the character of that specific place more legibly than grapes produced from depleted and synthetically supplemented soil. The horses and geese are not picturesque additions to the Di Filippo story. They are part of the reason the wine tastes the way it does.

I think about this most in the first week of spring, when I can see the Umbrian hills from my garden turning green again and I know that in Cannara the vines are waking up in soil that has been undisturbed through the winter, soil in which the fungal networks survived intact through the cold, in which the worms are already at work in the cover that the geese and the horses and the long quiet months have kept healthy. The wine that will come from those vines will arrive in a bottle in four or five years, having spent its mandated thirty-three months in cellar and barrel, and someone will open it at a table and pour it next to a plate of braised cinghiale with olives and rosemary, and the conversation will stop for a moment in the way it does when a wine says something true about the place it came from. That is what Roberto Di Filippo is farming for. That is what the horses and the geese and the soil science and the partnership with Perugia are all in service of. I find it easier to taste than to explain.