The Legend of Mythopia

We had lived in cities, studied all sorts of things, chased galloping ideas, traveled the globe, and climbed mountains. Perhaps we lacked a touch of modesty. Books and observation are great teachers, but they cannot show us how to ground life in the tangible. We had so many easy solutions for the world in mind and couldn’t understand why no one was simply doing them. It was time for us to create something with our own hands, to grapple with the forces of nature. Not to invent new puzzles, but to craft something with true value, whether that meant growing food, building a house, or, as it happened, making wine.

Wine is one of the few agricultural products today whose value is defined primarily by its quality rather than its quantity. Unlike tomatoes, oranges, or flour, wine carries a story. Customers may know where it comes from, who made it, and how it was cultivated. Wine is, in a sense, alive. Each customer can judge for themselves how it tastes, how it makes them feel, and share their impressions with others.

We didn’t just want to grow in a landscape with high biodiversity; we wanted to show that agricultural products could improve because of the biodiversity. In today’s world, this is something that is almost only possible with wine.

Mythopia was born out of a desire to create something we essentially knew nothing about. Yet, we held on to the freedom to do things in ways radically different from those who were so much more knowledgeable.

We had neither land, nor know-how, nor inherited capital. But we also had nothing to lose. We started by renting 150 square meters on a steep terrace above the upper Rhône Valley. The harvest yielded an incredible 350 kilograms of grapes, thanks to over-fertilized soil from the previous owner and helicopter-applied pesticides. That was significantly more than we harvest today from over 1,000 square meters of extensively planted vineyards interspersed with trees, flowers, and shrubs.

To make the wine, we sought advice from professionals. While resisting the use of yeast, we added the recommended amount of sulfites after pressing and were shocked by its acrid smell. This was the first and only time I ever added sulfites to wine. It was 2004, and the beginner’s Pinot Noir was, of course, nothing special. We enjoyed it nonetheless, though we spared others tasting it.

The long version of this story will have to be told in a book. Let’s jump ahead a few years. Thanks to a low-interest loan, Mythopia expanded to over three hectares of steep hillside vineyards. Surrounded by forests and guided by our rewilding program, the vineyards became a thriving biotope that captivated nature enthusiasts, the media, and scientists alike.

One of these was Karl Schefer, head of the organic wine trader Delinat, who saw potential in our methods and strategies to be implemented on a larger scale across Europe. In 2009, we co-founded the Delinat Institute for Viticulture, Biodiversity, and Climate Farming. Through the institute, we established an advisory network for organic viticulture and began publishing the Ithaka Journal. We also developed the Charter for Winegrowing in High Biodiversity and the Delinat Guidelines, which were later recognized as the most advanced standard for organic farming.

What began as an inspired gamble to become winemakers had by then already turned into a kind of success story—though it had yet to prove that biodiversity enhancement could indeed lead to truly great wines.

Starting with the first harvest under the name of Mythopia in 2005, we vinified our wines entirely without additives: no selected yeasts, no lactic acid bacteria, no sulfites, no nothing. At the time, orange wine was not yet a trendy category, so we called our barrel-aged Fendant with months of skin contact golden wine. But despite the elegant name, we sold almost none of it until 2014. These were the pioneer years of natural wine, and we only managed to survive by securing our family income through other professional activities. The poor wine turnover, however, meant that both red and white wines stayed longer and longer in old oak barrels—saving us, at least, the cost of bottles and corks.

Thanks to the lack of success with our early wines, we learned that time is crucial for allowing natural wines to develop their true personality. Without the rejection we faced, particularly from local merchants and restaurants, we might never have realized that our natural wines need at least three to four years of micro-oxidation to build aromatic complexity and resilience against air and ambient microbiology.

The vineyards had meanwhile flourished spectacularly. The harvest quantities had dropped drastically compared to those of our conventional neighbors but maintained stable with very low intervention. And in the cellar, some truly remarkable wines had quietly aged unnoticed. It wasn’t until 2015 that Disobedience (Fendant) and Illusion (Pinot Noir) began to gain significant recognition across Europe and eventually attracted worldwide attention. Restaurants in Copenhagen, London, Tokyo, and New York marked the breakthrough, and the rise of social media in those years ensured that the wines became known beyond the natural wine niche.

That we would achieve such success with our wines after more than a decade was in no way foreseeable. We owe it, not least, to fortunate circumstances, and we could just as easily have failed. But over the years, and ultimately through the different terroirs where our winemaking activities unfolded, our core principles proved to be remarkably resilient:

• The vineyard is a garden where, alongside the vines, trees, bushes, vegetables, grasses, and flowers thrive.
• From February to November, something edible must always be available in the alpine vineyard. In southern climates, edibles should be available year-round.
• Plant protection treatments are minimized and carried out with biological methods that allow fruits and vegetables to be picked safely for direct consumption.
• Fertilization is done exclusively with organic substances such as compost, ferments, and green manure. We nourish the soil life, not the plant.
• The vineyard must assimilate and store more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits during its cultivation.
• The soil is covered with vegetation year-round. Only in the extremely hot and dry vineyards of southern regions may up to 50% of the cover crops be tilled during the main growing season.
• We cultivate microbial biodiversity in the vineyard, allowing it to thrive on the grape skins and stems. This biodiversity is carried into the cellar with the grapes, where it ferments the juice into wine.
• All wines are made solely from grapes and air, without any additives.
• While we hold a certain aversion to the excesses of administration and the paternalism of agricultural authorities, our vineyards are certified organic.

The Mythopia vineyard assumed the role of the research center for the Ithaka Institute for Carbon Strategies. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, methods and strategies have been developed for ecological and economically sustainable viniculture. In addition, the vineyard plays a major role in researching agricultural methods delivering positive impacts on the global carbon cycle.

In Mythopia, violins and crickets play, dozens of butterfly species fly, grasshoppers jump through meadows of flowers, and the air is filled with the scent of oregano, thyme, wormwood and mint. Only in vineyards that are cultivated in harmony with nature and have healthy soils can wines full of character and expression be produced. The terroir, i.e. the interplay of the wine grower with geology, climate, topography and soils, can only develop its full expression in vineyards with high biodiversity.

Pinot Noir, Johannisberg, Fendant, Johanniter, Cornalin, and Resi are cultivated in three different sites at altitudes between 700 and 900 meters. The wines are vinified completely naturally in the traditional stone cellar. Without technical intervention and oenological aids, the wines are bottled only after several years of storage in old oak barrels and are unfiltered.

Mythopia is a play on words combining ‘myth’ and ‘topos,’ i.e., the place (topos) where the word (mythos) is not only spoken but also lived and realized. The name is of course inspired by utopia, but in contrast to utopia, which is originally a non-place, Mythopia actually exists and utopia has at least been realized on a small scale. Mythopia is where people finally stop trying to force their ideals on the world and instead dream up and shape their ideals to fit reality.