Carbon-Neutral Pinot Noir Is No Myth at Mythopia

This article is adapted from Natural Trailblazers: 13 Ways to Climate-Friendly Wine, to be published on 21 October 2024 and currently available for pre-order. 

In the Swiss Alps, husband-and-wife Romaine and Hans-Peter Schmidt have created an island for humans and animals, insects and microbes to thrive in a sea of conventional vineyards. A combination of no-till, green manure, vitoforestry,  and biochar makes their legendary winery Mythopia carbon neutral in the vineyard.

I’m outside a bakery in Sion, with a view of the railway tracks and the snowy peaks on the horizon. It’s a surreal combination of nature and industry. A dark-haired woman walks across the car park in front of the Sion train station, clearly looking for someone, looking for me. That woman is Romaine Schmidt, the lesser-known part of the duo behind Mythopia. 

“I’m sorry Hans-Peter couldn’t be here,” Romaine smiles apologetically. “I prefer the focus to be on my husband. I like to stay in the background and pull the strings.” 

I have arranged my trip, traveling by train and bicycle through Europe to research my second book, Natural Trailblazers, to be able to meet Hans-Peter Schmidt, only to be told a week before coming that he would be away for “material testing.” I haven’t dared ask him what kind of material he is testing, but Romaine says with a laugh. “It has to do with snowboards and carbon. I can’t really explain. He is an avid alpine snowboarder. You have to be when you live here,” she says, jerking her head towards the summits on all sides. Hans-Peter is a man of many talents and interests. 

My Brompton foldable bicycle goes into the boot of Romaine’s car and we’re quickly climbing the mountainside to get to their vineyards outside Ayent, 15 minutes from the train station. When we reach the village, Romaine’s dog Sky leads us down a gravel road through the newly green spring forest and a few minutes later, I’m looking out over the magnificent Valais valley with its steep vineyards and dots of pink and white from blooming fruit trees. At about 850 meters and with the forest as the only neighbor, this is one of Mythopia’s three sites, 1.5 hectares where the couple farm 50-year-old Pinot Noir vines for their Blue Velvet bottling. Each parcel has its own cuvée.

“It’s difficult to get parcels next to each other; we have made a lot of exchanges with other families to be able to get contiguous vineyards. Here, the tradition is that everyone has a small parcel of vines, like my father,” Romaine, who grew up in the region, explains.

From the start, they were adamant they would farm organically. To do that, they needed as few neighbors as possible. Most of the other growers in these alpine vineyards work conventionally, and to stay clear of pesticides and herbicides sprayed from helicopters, Romaine and Hans-Peter have chosen sites at the edge of the forest, at the top of the hillside.

“We wanted to work in harmony with nature. It is so beautiful here that it was obvious for us to make it into a haven for insects and nature,” Romaine says, while calling for Sky to come closer as we start descending.

A Viticultural Experiment in Valais

Mythopia started as a viticultural experiment, to see if winemaking could be combined with extreme viticulture: vegetables between vine rows, no toxic influences. This was in 2005, before natural wine had become a big thing. The couple had just moved back to Romaine’s home region, the Valais, a region with vines climbing the mountainsides. They had never dreamt of making wine. But Hans-Peter was working for Delinat, an association that certifies, markets, and sells organic wine, and since they had ended up in a wine region with great potential, they decided to give it a try.

Romaine and Sky lead the way and I tread carefully down the stony, south-facing Blue Velvet plot, past gnarly vines and through heavily scented herbs. 

The couple is special, not focused on yield and what the vines can produce. What they strive for is balance. A vineyard garden, an ecosystem in balance. And a life in balance, too. This is why, from the beginning, they chose to be only part-time winegrowers. Romaine divides her time between the vineyards and working as a consultant in hospitals. Hans-Peter works as a researcher and climate consultant when not at Mythopia. Working part-time has reduced the risks they have taken in trying different approaches in their search to find ways agriculture can coexist with nature. 

“To us, winegrowing is one thing among others, a thing that has a lot of value, of course, but is not indispensable. It’s not the end of the world if we have a problem in the vineyard or with the wines.”

To create a living garden where not only vines but all life can prosper, they have decreased the number of vines per hectare, added plants and trees, never till and use no machines. While at first they sowed cover crops of vegetables between the rows, today, they have either natural green cover or sow alfalfa, a natural fertilizer, to avoid open soil. Instead of cutting the greenery, they prefer to stamp it down when it gets too tall. Gradually, they intervene less and less.

“We have quite a lot of disease here because we don’t treat much. The goal is not to avoid disease, it is to have the fewest possible treatments, the optimal treatment. A little disease is okay, but we need some grapes too. It’s a risk we take. We have to juggle a bit.”

We reach the lower end of the Blue Velvet vineyard and Romaine stops and cries out.  “Look at what the soil looks like when there’s no cover! And see what happens when you try to come here with machines. The nuisance of having neighbors.” The neighbor has passed here with a tractor and tried to change the topography of the terraced vineyard, to flatten it. An old stone wall has partly disintegrated, the soil is cracking and a big chunk will be washed away with the next heavy rainfall. 

Never Compromise on Grape Quality

“Of course, we agree on everything,” Romaine says with an ironic laugh when I ask her how she and Hans-Peter work together. “No,” she acquiesces. “But we do agree on one thing: that we don’t make any compromise when it comes to the wine. We only take the grapes we want. We don’t harvest the grapes that are not good, we leave them. That’s what people have a hard time understanding. It doesn’t matter that we get very little because we want quality.” 

Some years they hardly harvest anything. Four hundred liters was all they got in 2021. But one of the dilemmas of working part-time is that they need people to do vineyard work for them. To tell vineyard workers to avoid spraying against disease can be tricky.  

“It is difficult to get across that disease in the vineyard is not really important to us. People want grapes. In the beginning, you explain, but when people don’t understand, you negotiate, and sometimes we don’t get them to understand and we don’t get what we want,” Romaine laughs and guides me down to the road. 

We pass a vineyard that I instantly think must be theirs because it is so green, but it turns out to be that of a young couple. Mythopia is not all alone in doing their bit for nature. 

“They work well, they try to get the energy back. That’s great. Not produce as much as possible but get biodiversity,” says Romaine, content.  

While biodiversity itself is an important goal for Romaine and Hans-Peter, their research at Mythopia has shown that biodiversity has a direct impact on the quality of wine. “The fermentations are done by microorganisms that exist in the vineyard. We nurture the microbes that make the wine,” Romaine explains. It makes the wine stable without any additives. 

All their wines go through the same process: they macerate on the skins until spring before being gently pressed, then they rest for four years in old oak barrels. 

“We quickly realized that to feed the grapes we needed healthy soils. And the work in the vineyard is hard and intense and we didn’t want to mask the results of our vineyard work by adding anything. It was an inverse process.” 

An Island in an Ocean of Convention

A butterfly flutters past me. It is one of more than 60 different species Mythopia hosts, and one-third of all butterfly species found in Switzerland. 

“This is a small island in an ocean of neighbors that grow conventionally,” Romaine tells me as we reach a second vineyard site, closer to the valley floor. “It’s better for you to be here right now than during summer; it smells so strongly of pesticides then.”

They used to make wines here, in a small house, but the sharp smell of pesticides during summer drove them to get a winery in Ayent on top of the hill instead. We pass a flowering cherry tree and with the snowy alpine peaks in the background, it’s like something out of a fairytale. Their story, however, is far from being one.

The trees they have planted over the years have been threatened by animals and people alike. In the early days, there were people who thought the couple were doing silly things, introducing trees among the vines. Some of them took matters into their own hands.

“In the beginning, people cut down our trees. They didn’t want anything but vines. They didn’t understand and said, ‘You can’t have grass and trees in the vineyard,’” Romaine recalls. “Now, it’s been 20 years and people change as well.”

Like many other growers who want to limit machines and fossil fuels, Romaine and Hans-Peter have had animals in their vineyards during winter. Not anymore. 

“We used to have sheep here, but they ate all the trees. It was chaotic. I didn’t want to continue, because all our apple trees were destroyed. This is the first year we haven’t had them, I put my foot down.”

Biochar for Carbon Neutrality

We pass a large heap of dead wood from the pruning they have just finished.  “This is for the famous Kon-Tiki, to get biochar,” Romaine says. 

Here, on the steep slopes of Mythopia’s vineyards, Hans-Peter started the first field trials in Europe of biochar in 2007. The idea is to help agriculture absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it. Biochar is made through pyrolysis, by heating organic material without oxygen. Hans-Peter and his Ithaka Institute developed the Kon-Tiki, a deep-cone kiln that allows farmers to produce biochar from organic material like pruning wood from vines or fruit trees. The Kon-Tiki is now used worldwide to enhance crops, store water, provide nutrients — and mitigate climate change.

As we continue upwards towards their first vineyards on the slope, Romaine finds more pruning wood in-between the vines and chucks it to the side so it will end up in the Kon-Tiki.

“If you only use two hundred liters of fuel each year like we do, you can easily offset the CO₂ emissions by pyrolyzing the pruning wood from one hectare and applying the biochar in the vineyard,” Hans-Peter says when I reach him on the phone to discuss the process.

When Hans-Peter and Romaine make biochar and bury it in their vineyard, they can offset their CO₂ emissions from fuel as it stores carbon for centuries, probably thousands of years. Unlike all their work in the vineyard, which can be undone in the blink of an eye.

“If someone after us takes over the vineyard, cuts all the trees and tills the soil, the stored carbon will be released,” Hans-Peter explains. “Our work in the vineyard can only compensate for the global warming effect of our diesel emissions as long as our vineyard is managed as we do today.” 

Biochar is different. It slows down the normal carbon cycle and can help mitigate climate change that way. When a tree or plant dies, the CO₂ absorbed during its lifetime is released and re-enters the carbon cycle. But when organic matter is carbonized into biochar instead, the natural carbon cycle is interrupted. Up to half of the carbon absorbed during the lifetime of the plant is converted into stable carbon, and if you put the biochar in the soil, it will not return to the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Back in the vineyard, Romaine shows me a parcel planted with PIWIs. It is a vineyard they couldn’t save and had to replant. 

“We put biochar in the soil here three years ago, loaded with natural fertilizer,” Romaine says. “It’s difficult to get the vines to survive without irrigation, but the biochar helps.”

Nature Takes Over

We reach a hillside below the forest. It is the first vineyard Romaine and Hans-Peter bought, and like all the vineyards they have taken over, it used to be farmed conventionally. Their idea was to recuperate the old vines, not replant, but a month ago, they ripped out the vines and now a fledgling fruit orchard greets me. 

“Nature is about to take over again. It is so beautiful when nature does that,” Romaine says.

“We tried everything, for years, but we didn’t manage to salvage the vines. The people who had it before us used too much force. We had loads of discussions on whether to let the forest return or not. We landed in a compromise, to have fruit trees. This place is so beautiful, if we make wine here or not, is not important. The important thing is that the trees survive, that there are no more treatments, that we move towards nature.” 

We have almost reached the end. The very last vineyard is Vagabond, planted with Pinot Noir. While the other vineyards have trellises and stakes, these Pinots are head-trained, growing without support, at the forest edge. Green, green. So beautiful it almost hurts. 

“The vines do what they want, it’s something else,” Romaine says about the gobelet-shaped vines that have less canopy and fewer, more concentrated grapes than the trellised Pinots. “The idea is to get a bit of balance, so that it’s not too vigorous. I like it when it’s like this.” 

But Nature May Need Us

If climate had been the only thing that mattered, Mythopia would not exist. Vines are less efficient than trees in capturing carbon. But wine and winegrowing are part of our cultural heritage, which is important to Romaine and Hans-Peter. People are brought together by wine. That is why Mythopia exports to other countries, and still ships bottles to Ukraine, in the middle of a war, and to South Korea, even if it means their bottles carry a carbon footprint.

“Winegrowing is a particular part of agriculture,” Hans-Peter says on the phone. “Wine is a luxury product, and wine growing is a luxury activity. And it’s good that we can afford to have this luxury.”

When Romaine brings me to the tasting room in Ayent and I taste the three Mythopia Pinot Noirs from their three different sites side by side, I can only agree. Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Vagabond. It is hard even to understand that it is all Pinot Noir, vinified the same way, the same vintage. Even harder to get that they all come from plots very close to each other. Three personalities. My favorite is Vagabond, from the vineyard that stole my heart. It is round, voluptuous, with dark fruit from the woods, and pepper, almost like a Syrah. Tangy, salty and bright. Unlike any other Pinot I’ve had.  

Blue Velvet, from their warmest, south-facing parcel, is the most powerful of the three, where sun-kissed red and black cherries, herbs and savory broth-like flavors meet fine, chalky tannins making it linear and elegant. Lost Highway is a layered, earthy Pinot with light red berries and dusty tannins. Like a day in a summer forest, light shimmering through the treetops, raspberries and rose hips on bushes, mingling with the scent of the humid ground. Wonderful. 

After two decades at Mythopia, Hans-Peter and Romaine have succeeded with what they set out to do, to create a vineyard garden that is ecologically and economically sustainable. Hans-Peter is searching for new adventures and Mythopia has recently expanded to two of the hottest and driest places in Europe: Andalucía in Spain and Languedoc, France. They want to continue to experiment with how vines can be grown in extreme conditions and in harmony with nature. Like good researchers, they will test everything: shading from trees and solar panels, water retention during heavy rainfalls, Keyline terraces (a landscaping technique in permaculture to optimize natural water resources), biochar, mulching with horse manure, green cover, minimal pruning.

“We try all that makes sense and learn what makes the most sense or is best adapted to the region, climate, soil and social dynamics,” Hans-Peter comments.

At least for now, they will keep the original Mythopia vineyards in Switzerland. 

“Every year we’re thinking: do we go on or give up? Sometimes we say, it’s over. But it’s difficult to give up,” Romaine admits. “Peter wants to have new challenges; otherwise, he doesn’t understand the point in doing it. But I say, it’s a place, and maybe nature needs us here?”