"I did what everyone else was doing, I dumped a lot of chemicals on the vineyards," Joly said at his estate, gesturing towards the slumbering vineyards outside his study window.

Within a couple of years, however, he realized something was amiss. "I could see that I was killing the vines. The life was draining out of the soil," he said.

It was about that time that Joly stumbled across a book on biodynamic farming, a technique developed by early 20th-century Austrian philosopher, educator and scientist Rudolf Steiner, whose highly original life work was the reconciliation of spirit and matter.

Joly was immediately intrigued.

"There were a handful of us in France experimenting with biodynamic methods in the early 1980s, though we didn't get to know each other until later," he recalled.

Today Joly, in his mid-50s, is the patron saint of biodynamic winemaking. He has literally written the book on the subject ("Wine from sky to earth: growing and appreciating biodynamic wine," just released in a second edition), heads an association of 118 biodynamic wine makers in 12 countries, and lectures the world over.

He is even working with partners in Cuba to make biodynamically grown cigars.

From a distance, it is easy to dismiss Joly's approach as an esoteric exercise in ultra-organic farming.

The strange potions such as yarrow flowers fermented in a stag's bladder or ground quartz and rain water packed in cow's horn; the importance given to electromagnetic fields and cosmic energy; the spiritualist vocabulary -- all of these would seem to smack more of occult than a tried-and-true method for growing grapes and turning them into wine.

But encountering the man, his vineyard and above all the wines they produce seems to melt the reservations of even the most sceptical of critics.

"Whatever he is doing, he is doing something right," said Jamie Goode, a British wine writer and plant biologist who has taken a special interest in biodynamic methods.

From US critic Robert Parker to British wine czars Clive Coats and Steven Spurrier, the same words keep popping up when describing the liquid fruit of Joly's labor: intense, distinctive, individual, complex.

His vintages from the mid-1990s, just now reaching maturity, "may have been the greatest white wine produced in France. The originality of the perfumes is absolute," gushed one of France's top wine guides, Bettane and Desseauve.

There are other great domaines in France -- Leflaive, Leroy, Romanee Conti, to name three in Burgundy -- that also produce biodynamic wines.

Joly is pleased to receive such plaudits, but he insists that if his wines are unique it is not so much because of what he does, but more because of what he does not do.

"The sun and the soil are married through plants, creating the specific taste of a place," what the French call "terroir."

"But if you disturb that natural process -- with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, clones, artificial aromas -- you cut that link," he said.

Joly compares biodynamics to "fine-tuning a radio into the frequencies that generate life," a means of helping vines attain a perfect harmony between the nurturing energies of heaven and earth.

"It helps to think of it as an altered philosophy or worldview more than as an agricultural system," said Goode, whose training as a scientist clashes head on, he says, with many of Joly's precepts.

"Key to biodynamics is considering the farm in its entirety as a living organism," including the soil, which is thought to have a life of its own.

And so it might. Winemakers practicing standard methods who visit Joly's vineyards are astounded to see that his soil is bursting with microbial, insect and plant life whereas theirs has been rendered sterile through decades of conventional farming.

Perhaps one sign of Joly's growing stature is an evolution in the way he is perceived by the pillars of France's wine establishment.

Long dismissed as a congenial crank who happened to own an exceptional parcel of Chenin Blanc grapes, Joly was invited in 2003 by the organizers of Bordeaux's Vinexpo, by far the most important professional wine fair in the world, to organize a special biodynamic wine tasting.

It was a huge success, and one of the most talked about events at the fair.

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