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In September of 2008, Ladybird Organics was featured as the Grower of the Month by Destiny Produce.

The Organic Process - From Worms to Wine

Tallahassee Democrat 4/10/04

Cynthia Connolly owns a 50-acre organic farm just outside Monticello, where she has a vineyard, an orchard and a small chicken-and-egg operation. She's been working with red worms since starting out with one cup of them in 1992. Over the years, she has slowly built her stock up to more than a half-dozen large worm beds, providing enough droppings to fertilize her entire farm and still have leftovers to sell to local nurseries. Vermiculture, raising worms for commercial purposes, has grown in pockets around the country. The red worms serve two ends of the feeding cycle, as both food sources and waste disposers.
Most of the organic leftovers around her farm come from the vineyard. Each summer, Connolly grows muscadine grapes to bottle as wine, and the process leaves her with truckloads of pressed pulp. She takes them full cycle - vines producing grapes, grapes pressed to make wine, microbes breaking down the discarded skins, worms eating the microbes, their 'castings' fertilizing the vines, and the whole thing starting again.

I don't use any chemicals here, she said. The worms do everything.

Additional Resources

  • Muscadine Wine is Just Fine
    - a spring 2013 article by Adam Levy, known as the Alcohol Professor and the founder of the New York International Beverage Competitions

Links

 

Just Like Old Times: Wine Making at Monticello Vineyards & Winery

Apalachee Tortise August 2004
by Kitty Kerner

When you think about U.S.- made wine, Florida certainly isn’t the first state that comes to mind. But it was here that the first wine production of the New World actually took place. Just Like Old Time PDFFrench Huguenots tried to establish European bunch grapes in Florida in the 1560s, but soon they had to watch their entire grape harvest fall victim to Pierce Disease, a deadly bacterial infection. Florida’s climate with its heat and humidity proved too much for the traditional European grapevines (Vitis vinefera)....

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ATF Testing Wines for Pesticide Residue

Wednesday, November 6, 2002
by Lynn Alley

In the not-too-distant future, consumers are likely to have assurance, courtesy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, that their favorite wines are free of harmful levels of pesticide residues.

For the past two years, ATF lab scientist Jon Wong has been refining methods for detecting residues of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in wine. Wong has been routinely sampling imports, and this year, has added domestic wines to his testing program.

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