Wine grapes are perhaps the highest-value, most quality-driven legally-grown agricultural crop in the world. As such, growers are usually quick to adopt the latest technical advances for protecting their vineyards. Winemakers have begun to realize, however, that the traditional agrochemicaly-based approach to farming has significant drawbacks, both in terms of quality and long-term economic viability. We spoke with a number of growers recently, and found that a quiet revolution is fermenting in the wine business today.

The romanticism of nature has a long and glorious history, as readers of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau can attest. It is often most acute among city dwellers, who perhaps hark back to an imagined bucolic past. Yet as anyone who has ever farmed quickly realizes, the concept of nature as a benign, nurturing force couldn't be further from the truth.

Plants compete in the wild for water, sunlight and nutrients, often in a struggle to the death. Those that do survive serve as a ready food source for insects and animals, who themselves try to avoid being eaten. Meanwhile, a robust variety of molds, fungi and other diseases permeate the ecosystem, waiting to find a host in a susceptible plant or animal.