I am still, like many, struggling with the word 'organic'. Branded to mainstream attention by major food retailers as a healthy, ethical, bourgeois choice, it seems to mean a spectacular confusion of manured tomatoes, happy chickens and celebrity chefs.

If you are finding that concept difficult to get your head around try 'biodynamics', invented by Rudolf Steiner, the phrase coined by his humble followers. It predates most of the organic movement and is wacky stuff.

What came first the organic chicken or the biodynamic egg?

So how is a bottle of wine going to educate me about this particular type of parentage? In short it is probably not. Studying an inanimate bottle is a hybrid game of charades and hide and seek. Lets see..organic is three syllables, biodynamic is five, already it is going to be a struggle. The English language is melting into 'text speak', so the long words and ever shorter attention spans are a really bad combination when it comes to getting a message across.

Where was I...oh yes what is this biothingamajig?

There was a news story very recently about how the moon cycles affect the taste of wine, and that pretty much sums up biodynamics. But do not laugh too much because major brands like Tesco and Marks and Spencer are said to be taking this biodynamic loony (sorry lunar) calendar seriously and only let their wine critics taste on the 'good' days. The calendar was produced by a German great grandmother called Maria Thun (or was it Thumb, related to Tom..you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?)

In all seriousness biodynamics has major benefits to the local environment as everything is pesticide free. Wines may well have interesting characteristics due to the rather eccentric 'organic' (here we go again, the 'o' word has slipped in when I do not really understand it) soil preparations like..

preparation 505 - 'Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal'

or

preparation 506 - 'Dandelion flowers fermented in cow mesentery'.

I suppose, through the eyes of a biodynamic wine producer, the vines seem like acupuncture needles in the back of a rather large elephant which has been regularly massaged with essential oils. Sceptics may say this creates either a placebo effect or genuinely better wine simply due to the extra care taken, rather than the hocus pocus.

Tenders of these challenging viticulutural eco-pockets are truly passionate about the land so I really do not care how weird and wonderful this all is, anything that environmentally friendly is good in my spell book.

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