Hans-Peter Schmidt, Mythopia: Perfection Is an Excuse for Not Embracing Complexity

I know Hans-Peter as an outside-the-box thinker, unearthing ever inspiring perspectives on both farming and life in general; in our exchange, he delivers them with so much conciseness and humour that I can’t help but keep coming back to some of my favourite lines since.

Guess it works just like with the Mythopia wines – prompted by its layer after layer and evocative, often film-inspired names, you can’t get enough because there's something new to think about at each turn. These now-cult and elusive cuvées from his and his wife’s high-altitude steep and small vineyards above Sion, French Swiss Alps, spend so much time in barrel that Hans-Peter once joked that they can be used to stabilise other wines instead of sulfur). A beacon of biodiversity and stubborn vision, where it all started.

I like and admire how Hans-Peter elegantly moves between opposites – innovative, yet deeply rooted in nature; scientist with a touch of anarchy; patient, yet keen on starting so many new projects. I'm not saying these are mutually exclusive, I'm just fascinated by what is clearly not a black-or-white thinking. And it creates incredible stories: Mythopia Andalusia is a joint-project with a successful German entrepreneur in his eighties, who used to drink and collect classic Bordeaux, and now, together with HP and a local crew on his estate near Malaga, makes wines whose production is so far from that canon. And then there’s Hans-Peter’s latest endeavour, starting a domain in the windy shores of a saltwater lagoon in Languedoc, yet another intriguing move.

People like that are exactly the ones I want to sit down with and bomb with questions until they cry for help, which is kind of what happened here and I can't thank Hans-Peter enough for his candour, patience and playful yet insightful answers that I’d like to scribble on all the walls now. Hope you enjoy.

Words by Milan Nestarec & Lucie Kohoutová, photos courtesy of Mythopia / Patrick Rey for Mythopia / Lucie Kohoutová

Today's world is incredibly fast, you rightly mentioned on your website that the greatest luxuries today are time and trust. To me, it seems that your concept of time is different. You release wines after years; the Andalusia project is now 8 years old. As an impatient person myself, I can’t help but wonder how is it possible for you to wait so long and not share such exciting experiences with the world? Is this perseverance something you have always had, or did you have to learn it?

Many years ago, I was seeing a Chinese doctor for a minor health issue. He took my pulse on the left arm to compare it with the pulse on the right arm, asked this and that personal question, carefully needled the skin, and smiled. When I left, he said to me: Little by little, it will get better. With just this sentence, he taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. Time will solve nearly all problems. Not because you wait and do nothing, but because it takes time to find the solutions and come upon new ideas. Intervention, whether by medical or ecological remedies, rarely solves the problem, it just gives some time until you understand your error—or repeat it over and over.

I am impatient with things (and people) that could easily be accelerated, but I have learned to be more serene with things I can’t change. And I also became more detached from the wines once they went on their time travel in the barrels. When the grapes are put in the cellar, we can close the cellar door for the next couple of months and do something else. Let’s say I forget about the wines and rediscover them years later.

Your Andalusia story is incredible. It has everything. But I was most struck by the human dimension and the relationship between you and Rudolf Ballauf, the owner of the estate. You eventually taught Rudi to appreciate the beauty of natural wine. What is the most important thing that you learned from him?

Rudi is almost the same age as my father, and both share the same mental agility when discussing and thinking about the world. Both also suffer from imagining death as eternal inactivity. Rudi wants to make things happen and becomes more impatient with every passing year. While I could easily wait seven years before releasing the first wine, Rudi could not. He wanted to know if the wines were great or a failure. Like every young winemaker, he was eager to receive the client’s praise for his work. "Is the wine really good?" he always asked, afraid that his latest adventure might make a fool of him. If you become really wise as you grow older, you simply don’t dream enough.

Is your pursuit of adventure ultimately driven by these human connections, more than anything else?

When we began transforming the alpine vineyards into lush gardens, most people in the region saw our methods and dubious way of life as an assault on their convictions and a betrayal of traditions. During those years, human connections were more trouble than they were resources. It was only later, when I worked on food security projects in Nepal and Bangladesh, that my experience as a farmer became invaluable because I could instantly find common ground with any subsistence farmer in the world. In fact it was easier to establish a forest garden on Himalayan rice terraces with farmers whose language I did not speak than to seed legume cover crops between vine rows at home.

But when we moved to this small village in the South of France, I found the same open and honest exchange with local farmers and fishermen as I had experienced in faraway subtropical countries. The older I get, the more important “human connections” become. It has been a steady learning curve for me, and only now can I truly appreciate living side by side with other farmers. Things have changed a lot over these last 20 years. Whereas I was once seen as a threat to local traditions, locals now view me as a blessed messenger sent to preserve the last remnants of local viticulture… This makes it a lot easier.

I was wondering if I understood correctly that you recently moved to Southern France, to take care of your latest project there. How big is the estate and how old are the vines?

After a good decade of never taking holidays, with always more important things to do in the vineyards and the cellar, we gradually adapted the wine gardens and vinification to a low-intervention regime that allowed us to travel again and to take on other projects. After the harvest, the wines can be left on their own now for six or nine months. Outside, the vines have found a balance where they no longer need us that much. This leaves us the time to live more freely and in different places.

Having had the experience of developing the vineyard in Andalusia, we weren’t afraid to embark on a third project to learn how to make unique natural wines in extreme climates. In the South of France, at the northwest corner of the Mediterranean, we cultivate six hectares of Grenache noir and blanc, Mourvèdre, Carignan, Syrah, and Marselan. The vineyards are scattered around the village and the Étang de Bages. Each parcel is surrounded by the wild garrigue landscape and the salty waters of the lagoon. Over the last few years, all the other vineyards have been abandoned. Today, we are the last growers in an unbroken tradition stretching back more than two millennia.

The grapes from your first Occitan harvest are now in tanks, I suppose – are you peeking and tasting, or it’s sealed and waiting for the spring press? Any plans as to the further development or style of the wines or that’s entirely open still?

Yes, we use whole-bunch fermentation in steel tanks for at least six months. After pressing, the wines will age partly in used oak barrels and partly in clay amphoras for several years. We will taste their evolution once or twice a year to learn about the differences in evolution between the Alpine and Spanish wines.

You said in a video that being crazy is the spice of life. You seem to need a very spicy life, considering everything you do and are involved in. What challenges and new "spice" flavours lie ahead of you?

It’s good to have a reserve of ideas to rekindle the passion for doing and learning new things. I would love to go to a new country every year to identify vineyards with autochthonous, non-grafted plants, high biodiversity, zero treatments, and passionate growers who tell the story of their land. I would follow part of the season, harvest alongside the grower, and buy the grapes. Transport the grapes to a cool city outside the traditional winegrowing regions—places like Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, or London—and make a city wine there. Citizens could then occasionally pass by the cellar and bottle their own wine directly from the barrel.

Are you really planning to write a book? If yes, when?

I can write it while driving home with the freezer truck from Armenia, bringing the grapes to the Amsterdam cellar.

Today we know that the gut microbiome affects the psyche through serotonin. Is this the same with the soil microbiome, could we say that its quality is analogically affecting the "mood" of the wine?

You mean that conventional wines should be treated with antidepressants to heal their moods? I like your idea that wines could become happy if we orchestrate their root microbiome favorably. I’m not sure if that’s exactly how it works, but we have observed time and again that as the diversity of soil life increases, the complexity of the wines develops alongside it. I would say that complexity is a hallmark of natural wine, though simplicity may sometimes be more appreciated.

There are certain things you cannot achieve with natural wines made from grapes grown among flowers and trees. Yet, when we take a few bottles to share with friends during harvest and open them under the autumn sun—drinking straight from the bottle—the happiness of the wine seems to be transmitted through the act of drinking, and its complexity becomes beautifully simple.

I’m really interested to know what your take on plant diseases and their influence on wine is. Character never comes from comfort, it’s the survival of the fittest... Franz Strohmeier says that a certain degree of disease contributes to the character, taste, and perhaps stability of the wine. [Nate Ready from the Hiyu Wine Farm in Oregon mentions a similar idea in our interview.] Having worked in several regions with very different, even extreme conditions – high altitude, strong winds, heat and drought – what’s your experience or opinion? I’m not talking about defects that might be transferred to the taste due to infected grapes, rather about the “natural selection” aspect.

Franz once visited me at the end of the harvest. There was one vineyard left, severely damaged by mildew. I would have been too embarrassed to harvest it with sommeliers or other experts, who might gossip that at Mythopia, we have high-flying ideas but don’t know how to produce healthy grapes. Normally, when you help a grower during harvest, you expect a selection table where only the most beautiful and healthy grapes are allowed into the cellar. With Franz, it was different. We harvested everything that had survived the season. Many berries were dried out—a lot of skin, not much juice.

It’s not the water that makes the wine but the essential compounds, mostly found in the skin layers, and billions of microbes and yeasts. The latter are waiting on the skins for their chance to access the sugars under the skin once the berries open. The main difference between natural and conventional wine is the collaboration with microbial life. While in conventional wines, you want proper, clear skin of the berries so that nothing interferes with the added yeast and lactic bacteria, in natural wines, you search for a high diversity to avoid single species from staging a coup d’etat. High microbial biodiversity on the skins is like the insurance of democracy provided by a pluralistic society in wine. If you have this plurality, the wine will not become faulty, it will be complex, interesting, and sometimes, by chance, great.

I think that Franz’ theory is correct. It suggests that when vines struggle against fungal infections or other diseases, they produce chemical compounds as plant defenses that significantly influence the wine’s aromatic profile and stability. If vines are treated with pesticides, those compounds won’t be present in the wine. They may not always be beneficial, but in Franz’ and my experience, they add depth to the wine. How much of it and at what degree of damage depends on your experience, the overall quality of the majority of the grapes, and the spice of crazy you allow.

You mention that you have learned to curb your perfectionism. Is perfectionism something that ultimately limits the big picture, and can an excess of it be detrimental?

When you aspire, for example, to ferment only perfectly healthy grapes, you may overlook that some berries, enriched with plant defense compounds on their damaged skins, can enhance your wine. Perfection is sometimes an excuse for not embracing complexity. A perfectly straight line may look beautiful because it demonstrates your skill in driving the tractor to the horizon—but for nature, it’s pure horror, as there is no place for hiding out.

On the other hand, when you miss the right timing to plaquer (press down) the grasses and they grow into the vines, or when watering the young replanted vines a day or so too late, it is a mistake you regret. But these are mistakes, not a failure of perfection. Nature isn’t a system based on perfectionism; it thrives on adaptability to the unexpected.

Perfectionism is fun when skiing a perfect line on a big mountain face or crafting a mechanical Swiss watch, and there is a certain strive for perfection when pruning or harvesting, as if your hands have eyes that see through the leaves. Perfection is more like personal achievement. But overall, I would argue it’s more important to manage the vineyard ecosystem so it can respond robustly to the aléas of the annual climate and the inevitable mistakes of human intervention.

You commented on my recent Instagram post about accepting certain limits. That there are limits and limitations and it’s not so easy to distinguish between them. That is very true – how do you personally try to understand and discern which is which?

I am limited by my physical strength, mental capacities, and acquired knowledge. I can train and push those limits, but only to a certain extent. In this, I can only try to make the best of the situation that the gene lottery has equipped me with for life. You are deeply right here, Milan: perfection doesn’t come from overcoming these limits but from accepting them and finding smart ways around.

However, limitations are, I think, what others impose on you. For example, when they tell you how a wine must taste to be marketable and fit into the AOC system. Or when they tell you that it is not allowed to plant trees between vines or to leave the grasses to grow, or whatever crazy idea you come up with. These are the kinds of limitations we should overcome smartly, without wasting too much energy or getting caught in unfriendly fire.

There’s no need to be the rebel everyone knows, no need to be a martyr at the iron curtain—it just needs a touch of anarchism to preserve the freedom to do things that feel right and avoid getting stuck by limitations drawn by well-meaning ignorants.

What is your approach to compromise and processing one’s fuckups? Do you rather bury the whole project and the ideas if it can’t go as planned, or do you resort to compromise, adjusting the ideas?

Apparent failures often turned into great wines after ten to fifteen years. Waiting may thus be the solution. Apart from that, we have some barrels of vinegar stored in the soil far from the cellar, as well as one barrel of brandy from 2007. We were quite lucky not to fail too massively during the years when we didn’t fully know what we were doing. Wines that we deem not good enough to sell under our label, we keep for our own consumption. Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough of those recently.

We’re fortunate to have found people all over the world who love our wines just as they are. We’ve never been obliged to shape or influence the wines to fit market trends or consumer expectations. We wouldn’t even know how to do that. Over the years, we’ve developed our vinification methods, we try new things and tackle not to repeat our errors, but this does not feel like compromising. Tasting our wines after a long aging period feels more like discovery than confirmation that everything went according to plan.

Behind every successful man stands a strong woman – I’d love to learn more about your wife Romaine Schmidt, and how you guys influence each other.

Romaine is strong, that’s true, but she doesn’t stand behind a man unless it’s to better grip the reins. She runs the heroic alpine winegrowing on her own, and no one is faster at the end of a steep line. She prefers working on the land and is only sporadically seen in the cellar. We share the work and the pleasure of doing it.

Romaine’s family is deeply rooted in the Alpine region, with a farming tradition stretching back several centuries. However, they never made wine commercially—only for their own consumption, especially for the long winter nights. Winemaking wasn’t considered prestigious but was an essential part of their self-sustaining lifestyle. Those who made the best wine in the village were called Bonvin, which happens to be Romaine’s maiden name.

Here come a couple of nerdy vine-management questions, based on reading about your work and my own research and questions about our vineyards’ future. And until you write that book this is my perfect opportunity to ask so I have to take it [laughs]. How exactly does the "Petits laits" milk preparation work as a substitute for sulfur in vineyard protection?

It’s simple. We get whey from a local cheesemaker and add it at 10% to the plant protection spray liquid. It mixes well with all the usual organic plant defense elicitors and mildew treatments. It works best on sunny days. To my knowledge, the mechanisms aren’t yet fully understood, but it’s scientifically proven to be effective—not just on vines but also on tomatoes, potatoes, and other crops. If you don’t have whey, you can use milk; it has the same effect.

How exactly should winemakers work with biochar in the vineyard? Why do coffee plants benefit more from biochar substrates than vines?

Between 2007 and 2013, we conducted systematic biochar trials in viticulture. We observed effects on soil activity, and the grasses in the vine rows thrived particularly well. However, we didn’t find significant impacts on wine quality or quantity. The main reason is that, in dry climates, the most important vine roots grow several meters deep into the schist, granite, or other terroir. Even when we injected the biochar 50 cm deep into the root zone, this wasn’t the zone where we wanted wine quality to be determined.

On the contrary, if the upper root zone becomes too fertile, the roots remain close to the surface instead of growing deep down, where they gain their resilience. Industrial winegrowing systems with fertigation [portmanteau of "fertilization" and "irrigation," referring to the practice of applying fertilizers through the irrigation system, editor’s note] and bare soils, such as those in California, can benefit significantly from biochar due to its water and nutrient retention capacities. In these intensive setups, roots rarely grow deeper than 50 cm. In contrast, a robust vineyard with soil cover and high soil biodiversity doesn’t need biochar—it’s similar to cows living on large alpine pastures; they don’t require biochar to regulate their digestion.

What is your opinion on agro-photovoltaics and shading vines? Have you included anything like that in your Andalusia project?

We designed such a project with great enthusiasm ten years ago. However, we never received the government’s permit to install solar panels on agricultural land. Agro-photovoltaic makes a lot of sense—shading in extreme climates is beneficial, it protects against heavy rains, provides additional income, and replaces energy from fossil fuels. You won’t find many arguments against it. But, in truth, I don’t like it. I’d rather see trees, not solar panels, conquering the third dimension of a vineyard. My aspiration is to create vineyards that resemble nature conservation parks: chemical-free, fertilizer-free, with high biodiversity, balanced ecosystems, no high-flying techno structures. That’s my privileged Mythopia vision. But for most industrial vineyards, the practical advantages of solar panels outweigh the romantic aesthetics.

I am obsessed with non-pruned vineyards – we keep an important part of our vines unpruned, and the MIRA wines, made by my wife and me as our darling project, are entirely wild-grown. Do you have experience with this kind of vineyard management?

I absolutely love it and have often said that vines should be left free to grow. It was a long learning process for me to interfere less and less. All the vines ask for is to grow and grow. Pruning is like castrating a horse to tame it. Sometimes, you need tame and not wild horses, even if you love the vivacity and expression of a wild horse. I have often experimented with no pruning or minimal pruning and used trees to give vines something to grip as they climb. Vines are forest plants; they thrive in harsh competition, fighting for light, water, and nutrients. They rely on plants that invest energy in becoming strong and firm, and use them as a support to quickly climb to the sun.

The problem is that we’ve implanted vines into extreme regions—under full sun, in drought conditions, and in monocultures with no trees to give them support. Vines growing in the 40°C in Andalusia or on steep Alpine slopes are simply not in their natural environment, and we have to help them adapt and survive. If I left vines to grow without shade or water in Andalusia or the windy South of France, they would die after two or three years. Pruning is a way to keep the plant's juices closer to the roots, insulated and protected within the gnarled rootstock. I agree it’s unnatural, but it’s the only method I’ve found so far to protect them from overheating and mortal stress. Even minimal pruning kills most vines in hot climates.

However, in more temperate regions, the no-pruning method might create the best wines, with the most favorable ratio of skin to grape juice. It’s also the way to reduce or even eliminate pesticide treatments, as the small berries with thick skins are the most resistant. You just need plenty of good friends that help to harvest the thousand small grapes per plant.

You call your wines “heroic Alpine wine”, which I love. But if you had to describe your farming in only a few words, what’s the term you use?

Some of our Alpine vineyards are so steep that even pruning feels like climbing. Too steep for mechanical assistance. You need to be in excellent physical shape to work efficiently. Feeling like a hero while doing it helped keep motivation high. However, over the past ten years, we’ve increasingly reduced our interventions. We keep it more wild, accept lower yields, and adapt the workload to the reality that we are no longer young heroes. We’ve left the writing on the labels, though its meaning has evolved: If you are young and not a hero, you are not a born farmer; if you are old and still a hero, you will probably not enjoy your own wine until the end.

Related question, what is your position on biodynamics?

Biodynamics introduced a spiritual element into farming, which I appreciate, especially when compared to certified organic farming, which often resembles conventional farming just without chemicals. However, I’m not comfortable with its reliance on beliefs handed down from a spiritual leader who lacked farming experience. Spirituality should not exclude science and should be more rooted in the personal experience in nature than in religious doctrines.

The carbon footprint of winemaking is huge. Winemakers are traveling across the world to present their wines; famous, expensive wines are on the one hand increasingly grown sustainably, and trumpeted as such, but on the other hand, the wine travels in heavy bottles all around the world. Can these two opposites co-exist? Or what can we do about that? There’s a resurgence of long-distance trains in Europe, I have a winemaker friend who only takes one longer professional plane trip a year to minimize his carbon footprint… but is that enough?

When we developed a carbon footprint calculation program for the wine industry at the Ithaka Institute, it became clear that producing the glass for wine bottles accounts for the highest greenhouse gas emissions by far, followed by transporting wines and flying to wine fairs. All other emissions are practically negligible. Reducing the bottle weight by 50% cuts the entire carbon footprint of the wine product in half. We could also argue that the carbon footprint of glass production should be reduced and compensated by the glass manufacturers. This would leave us with the emissions from wine transport.

Instead of ceasing shipping altogether, I advocate for renewable shipping fuels, which must become a reality within the next five to ten years anyway – check our article on the carbon cycling economy). That leaves us traveling to fairs and meeting clients. If we reduce this scope to our continent and benefit from traveling overland to visit other growers, the carbon footprint could be brought down to a fair and manageable share.

What’s your view on greenwashing?

Like drinking wine with added sulfites.

Should winemakers sell emission permits from their vineyards?

No. Achieving emission-free or at least climate-neutral production is already a significant challenge. If you calculate carbon balances accurately, there wouldn’t be any carbon credits left to sell. Natural wine production is luxury and art and a defense of human dignity. It is inefficient by definition. You could feed eight people on the same surface area where you produce the wine for as many decent drinkers. You could also do carbon farming or set-up a solar park on this land. Instead, we grow wine with high biodiversity, allowing nature to thrive, but do not solve any other pressing problem of humanity.

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