Steve McIntyre
After brainstorming with Kris Beal, Executive Director of the Central Coast Vineyard Team and the SIP Certification program, we agreed that it would be good for me to get out into the vineyards with some of the SIP farmers. The goal is to start a raw conversation about SIP and the importance of this program. My plan is to meet with these people throughout the year to cover current topics, current activities in the vineyards, and the stories that make up the SIP program.
We hope to bring these stories to you through video interviews, photos, and written content and interviews. I recently headed up to Monterey and visited with Steve McIntyre of McIntyre Vineyards as well as Monterey Pacific (a vineyard management company). I spent an hour with him and truly hope to spend more time with him soon. He’s a wealth of knowledge and has an easy going, laid back way of describing things. You should also know that he was recently awarded the 2012 Grower of the Year by the California Association of Winegrape Growers, congratulations again to Steve!
There will be more to come from Steve but I thought about starting with the three questions below. Yet another goal of ours is to better educate people on what SIP (Sustainability in Practice) is and where better to learn than directly from the farmers and winemakers? Two of the questions below came from phrases that Steve used in describing SIP and I thought that would be a great place to start since it resonated with me. So here we go:
Matt: You mentioned your involvement with organic and biodynamic methods of farming in the past…what led you to SIP?
Steve: It seemed like a more common sense approach, a holistic process and continuum rather than a destination.
Matt: You mentioned “self correcting discipline” when discussing SIP, can you define this and elaborate a bit?
Steve: Science is a self correcting discipline…as we gather new evidence the body of evidence builds to either support a hypothesis or not. We once thought the earth was flat but then we discovered and proved it wasn’t so we “corrected” the old “truth”.
Matt: You also mentioned “peer review science” in relation to SIP, would you please describe that and elaborate as well?
Steve: Peer review is the process by which we develop and change what we call facts. Every objective well done science experiment has to be reproducible; another group of scientists under the same conditions would reach the same result or conclusion. Experiments, published as papers in scientific journals go thru the process of peer review. They are submitted to a review committee made up of “peers” where the work is scrutinized for errors, omission of other similar works and statistical relevance. The review committee sends back its comments to the submitting researcher and the paper is either accepted for publication or not. If it is not then the submitting researcher is given the reasons why and suggestions how to redo the work so that it might have a better chance of being published. This is how science moves forward, without this kind of process everything else is just antidotal evidence.
I look forward to my next visit with Steve. Be sure to check out this press release about the Grower of the Year award he received and here’s a link directly to some information about Steve on the McIntyre Vineyards website.
Let us know if you have any questions regarding SIP and the importance of sustainability!! Cheers!