Ep. 022 - Conscious Drinking: The Journey to Healthier Wine and Sustainable Agriculture with Jordan McCarter
Jun 28, 2023SHOW DESCRIPTION
What if you could enjoy your favourite wines without compromising your well-being? Join me as I sit down with special guest Jordan McCarter, founder and president of June Regenerative Agriculture, and uncover the secrets to cleaner, healthier alcohol consumption. Together, we dive into Jordan's inspiring journey of shedding over 80 pounds and adopting a more conscious lifestyle through intentional food and drink choices.
We'll also explore the world of regenerative agriculture and its role in creating a sustainable farming system that reduces emissions and produces nutrient-dense foods. Learn from Jordan's passion for wine, his quest for balance between health and indulgence, and his tips on connecting with local regenerative farmers. Don't miss this eye-opening conversation that will empower you to optimize your health through conscious drinking and support a more sustainable future.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Craig Spear:
Today we're continuing our Stop Overdrinking series with special guest Jordan MacArthur, who offers up unique insights into farming and the production of alcohol. His insights will definitely make you think twice about where you get your wine from. Welcome to Man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity. Hello and welcome to Man in the Arena. I'm your host, craig Spear. I'm a men's health and weight loss coach and I'm super excited today because I'm bringing in a special guest, jordan MacArthur, who is the founder of June Regenerative Agriculture. He's on a mission to rebuild the health of North American soils using natural and sustainable methods. Jordan is also a former client of mine and he has had an unbelievable transformation. He's lost more than 80 pounds and he's just living a way healthier life. I'm excited for you to learn more about Jordan's mission, his story to improve his health and, most importantly, how you can drink better wines that won't harm your health Without further ado. Jordan MacArthur from June Regenerative Agriculture Yeah, i'm so excited to have you on this podcast, jordan. We've been really focusing the last few episodes on the impact that alcohol has on people's health. When I heard about what you were working on and what you've stumbled upon, i just had to have you on the podcast because I think this information is so vital. I spoke about you in the introduction and just mentioned that you're the founder and the president of June Regenerative Agriculture. Let's just jump in there, tell us a little bit about what June Regenerative Agriculture is and we'll go from there.
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah for sure, craig. First of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. Very humbling call that we had to set this all up, so super cool and happy to be here. June is the Regenerative Farmland Fund. We're focused on financing the future of agriculture. We're going to do this by acquiring farmland and leasing it to the next generation of farmers. Regenerative Agriculture is a bit of a complex thing but, to put it simply as possible, it's a way of farming that works together with the cycles of nature rather than against them. There's a whole movement that's starting all throughout the world of the next generation of farmers looking at putting in more nutrient-dense foods and better quality foods, and they need financing support. That's why we started this business to give them the support that they need.
Craig Spear:
Wow, wow, that's amazing. What led you to get involved in this? How did you come across this?
Jordan McCarter:
I would say it started on a personal journey just looking for better quality foods and better quality wines and getting into what that really means. If we take wine, for example, and you can have something that's stunningly beautiful from France or Niagara on the lake or wherever, but you look behind the scenes and how those grapes are being raised and how the wines actually being made from those grapes, what you could find is there's lots of synthetic fertilizers in the farm and that vineyard. Those grapes are being sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and other things to help the harvest and the crop. Then, once those are actually harvested, they go into the winery and, depending on what type of wines be made, different chemical additions can be put into the process. Those are things like stabilizers, coloring agents, synthetic yeasts, commercial yeasts that would influence the fermentation to express a certain flavor profile, where they may not otherwise taste like that. Without those additions. That's an unnatural product. At that point, that's where I started going with my wine collecting and my own consumption is I want to collect and consume more high quality wines that are cleaner. When I say cleaner, it's just no additions in the vineyard and no additions in the winery, because that's really what makes you feel, quite frankly, like shit the next day is because it's those other chemicals that your liver and kidneys are having to process and triage rather than focusing on processing the alcohol.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, and that's the main reason why I wanted to bring you on, because we were talking about this a few weeks ago and you had stumbled across this I don't know if it was a document or a list of basically all the different chemicals that get added to a wine and you started to understand that it's not even the FDA that controls wine production, I guess, or the sale of wine in the US. So tell us a little bit about what you found and what that process looks like, I guess.
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah. So it's really interesting. It's after prohibition in the United States. The Treasury Department wanted to control the tax of alcohol production in the US, so they set up a subsidiary called the ATF the Alcohol, tobacco and Firearms all because they wanted to control the tax. So as farming evolved throughout the 40s and 50s and 60s, if you're raising grapes in Napa Valley or Washington State or Oregon, you are being sold these different additives in your farming business. Right, the salesman will show up and say, okay, this fertilizer is going to help you get more yield, or this pesticide is going to keep the bugs away, and what happens is that kind of transfers into the wine and you consume that and those chemicals have to go through the system in your body to kind of process them. So if the FDA ever did get involved in alcohol manufacturing in the US, they would have to recategorize probably 80 to 90% of the wine that's on the shelf as an adult beverage rather than wine, because it would be so far from what the definition of wine actually is.
Craig Spear:
That's crazy, and so just imagine the impact that that's having on people's health and their well-being. And so, as a passionate wine drinker yourself, how do you start to maneuver around this? Do you start to drink wines that are from other countries? Do you find certain companies that produce wine in a cleaner way? What is the process?
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah, that's very much the case, and it's not limited to just wine. That's what I understand the best, because it's something that I am passionate about. I've been collecting wine for 10 years, but for sure buying wines from, i'll say, the old world. It's not specific to the old world, but places like France and Italy and Spain and Greece. It's just they've made wine for so long. They never adopted a lot of these chemicals and a lot of these different techniques that were being sold to them. So you really have to get into the vineyard or the estate itself and you have to understand how they're farming, how they're raising the grapes And then, if they're doing that part right, hopefully they're transferring that into the winery and they're making very clean wines there. Because all you have to do is okay. It's not all you have to do. I want to give these winemakers more credit, but it's. You press the grapes and you start the fermentation process, and the less you do at that point, i think the better quality wine comes up the other end, because it's a natural process And there's indigenous yeasts on our skin, on the skin of the grapes. That's all you need during the fermentation process. You don't need these commercial yeasts that influence the fermentation to create a certain flavor. You can just do it with the indigenous yeasts on the grapes themselves and just managing that process. So it's definitely changed the way I've been buying wine, collecting wine and drinking wine. I recently enlisted the help of a business partner of mine for an experiment where we drank kind of traditional, normal wines that are readily available and that are kind of mass produced that have all those chemicals in them, right Yeah. That have all those chemicals in them Exactly. So these are chemicals that you can't even pronounce these words. You got to be a chemistry major to understand what this stuff is. So I asked myself look, i need your help to do this experiment. I want to drink these mass produced normal wines one night and see how we feel, and then the next night I want to drink very clean wines, natural wines, but with no chemicals, and see how we feel. So we had quite a few glasses of wine that night. I'm not going to lie, see. So I'll say that we did maybe seven glasses of wine of the clean wines, and we never got drunk. You know it was always just a nice buzz and you know we slept well. There was no red in the face, no congestion and there was no hangover the next day. So we got together again, did the normal wines. We each only had maybe four or five glasses of wine. So less wine, yeah, so less wine. But we were significantly intoxicated and I believe that's from the other chemicals that are giving you that intoxication rather than the alcohol And both of us were red in the face, both of us slept very poorly, waking up every couple of hours, and both of us were hungover, so we drank less wine. And this isn't necessarily a quality thing too, because they were all similarly priced. Let's say they're all $25 a bottle, like nothing was $100 or $5. They were all very similarly priced and if that's your mark of quality then there's an even playing field. So we drank less wines of the normal stuff, got drunker and hungover and just felt generally poor. You know, with the clean wines we drank more, never got intoxicated, just a nice kind of happy buzz, and we slept well and no hangover. So it was really interesting to see that experiment.
Craig Spear:
That's super fascinating, and I remember you saying how one of the reasons why a lot of these wine producers will add these chemicals is so that they can get a consistent flavor profile, so it's consistent year to year, yield to yield, and just so that they get people who keep coming back. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah, yeah for sure, and I really do think that's an amazing thing in its own way. I believe that, you know, viticulture is the pinnacle of agriculture. It is, i think, by far the highest value crop you can pull out of an acre of farmland. It's very difficult to do, but if you take it all the way through the process, you bottle it, you actually make the wine, you sell it. You know your margin can be incredible. Not so much in Ontario, because of the tax treatment here. It's disgusting. It's a whole nother podcast, I think, in its own right. With someone that's more of an expert on wine than I am. I'm, you know, maybe just a collector and, you know, passionate consumer. You know, i really think that we can just do better in the choices that we're making and how we're consuming. You know, and I think supporting the local winemaker is incredibly important. It helps the local economy. You know, our belief with June is that the future is local and that you know, the world is de-globalizing and there's no better time to get to know a farmer. You know, and it's much better for the environment if you're buying wine from a local producer rather than shipping one from France. You know There's almost a different. You know problems here. But yeah, i think you know that kind of pursuit of making a consistent product is incredible again in its own right. Because you know it's hard to do when you're not given the consistent raw materials on a year after year basis. You know it's a different weather every year. You know different yield every year, different rain, different heat, you know so you're not getting a consistent raw materials to make your wine. So you know you are having to make different kind of decisions in the winery to create a consistent product. And it's amazing that you know some places can produce the volume that they do and it all tastes same. You know that's again I think that's amazing in its own right, but I don't think that's wine. And just like Budweiser does it with their beer, you know It's amazing that they do however many billions of bottles of beer a year and they all taste the same. That's incredible. But the amount of chemicals that have to go into that process, i think is what makes that possible. and same thing with wine and same thing with your whiskey. You know there's a whiskey producer in the US that they just told all of their suppliers of grains that you need to be a regenerative operation in the next five years, because otherwise we won't buy from you because we're having to add so much. Yeah, during the process to make a consistent product, because you're getting such poor quality inputs, they have to add other things to get the flavor to be the same, to get the alcohol to be the same. You know, rather than just starting with better quality raw material, they're having to make all these dishes. So I think these clean wines, one of the beautiful things about them is they're different from year to year. Right, it has one collector. I think that's kind of interesting, you know, like if it's the same grape from the same region, you know, by the same producer. And 2014 was you know hot? 2015, was, you know, cooler, you know, yeah, you know what. I think that should taste different.
Craig Spear:
You know, i'm sure they're both gonna be good, but I'm okay if they're different, because that's a natural product, that's part of a wine is, yeah, should be yeah, and the way you've explained it kind of just it makes more sense, makes more common sense that better for the environment, it's better for local farmers, it's better for just a whole host of reasons and more specifically, you know This is a health and wellness podcast. That's right. Better for the consumer, ultimately in their bodies. And so, rather than adding these chemicals and these poisons essentially to the product, let's clean it up and have less of an impact on our bodies ultimately.
Jordan McCarter:
Well, that's right, you know, and if you're gonna drink wine, you know you don't necessarily want to have the hangover with it, right? So you know it would be great to have more wine be made in this way. You know, and I think it's a really beautiful thing when you know You take a trip down to Niagara on the lake or wherever you're from, and go to the local Winemaker and get to know them and talk about how they're farming and what they're doing in the vineyard and what they're doing in the winery. It's really cool if it's something you know you're into to go and do and then you know that's kind of helped. You know layer into our business where we're doing it on ranches with cattle and hogs and chickens. You know These animals are being managed kind of With the land together as one cohesive system and when that kind of care and thought is going into that production, you know these Products that are going to come out of the other end are just gonna be that much better for you And they're gonna be better for the environment because you know you're not using the same amount of inputs, whether it's, you know, diesel use on the ranch or different chemicals into the cattle feed, you know, gmo seeds with the chickens and what they're eating. So, again, you just start building this System that works within the larger natural system that the earth goes through every year. You know the planet goes through, you know these cycles, and it's the mineral cycle, it's the carbon cycle, it's the rain cycle and rather than trying to, you know, disrupt those cycles with how we think, we know how to farm those humans, well, why don't we just partner with those cycles and, you know, embrace those natural environments that Have come together over the last few billion years of evolution on this planet? you know there's all the R&D You need how the planets come to be today, and it's got it figured out over that time. So, you know, 40, 50,000 years ago, whenever we started domesticated animals and you know crops like this, we were arrogant. Back then too, we thought we knew better. And then look what we've done, you know, created, you know this climate challenge. That's, you know, just incredible. And you know agriculture is a way, i think, we can really make a difference and the future of farming, i think, can subtract from, you know, the legacy load of emissions that have been put out over the last 100 years.
Craig Spear:
So No, i think yeah, no, and you know, as a former client of mine, how much I speak about being intentional and having a purpose, and this is right. What you're speaking about is, you know, being more intentional with how we farm, with how we raise crops and Livestock and all those sort of things. So Maybe that's a good point to kind of pivot to what your journey has been. You know, yeah, speak very passionately about this process, about farming, about alcohol and the additives that go into that and how we can Improve all of that. Maybe you could speak a little bit, jordan, to kind of where you're at now, but also where you came from and some of your journey.
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah. So where I'm at today is probably the best shape of my life in a very long time. I'm happily engaged to the woman of my dreams and I'm building this company, june, that really has potential to change the world. And, craig, our work together, i think, was a big part of giving me to this point, because after an attempted basketball career, i ended up having seven knee surgeries from different injuries, blowing at ACLs and Patellar tendon tipped fib fractures, like it was a real mess. Almost every other season I was balling an EO And what happens then? you could get out of shape, which I did, and I had already started my career at that point, and things just kind of changed. So very fortunate to have been hooked up with you through another one of our mutual friends and clients. He introduced us and I think we discovered a lot by working together. I was able to significantly reduce the pain in my knees with every step that I take every day And I'm out there pounding the pavement, building this business and raising money. I'm always walking, moving around, and I'm on my feet a lot And if I'm not on my feet, i'm on a plane or driving and sitting in traffic. So I've got to not be in pain, and reducing that pain just really helped my life. Getting the weight off is definitely a big part of that. You're becoming more flexible through those routines that you gave me. Again, it's life changing really.
Craig Spear:
So you're very passionate about wine, right, and how is it that you're able to kind of manage the passion you have for drinking wine, tasting wine and maintaining your health at the same time, like, how do you balance that? What are some of the things that you've learned from the spear method, but also just on your own and managing all that?
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah, so I'm actually sitting at my wine club right now in Toronto. This place kind of acts as my office while I'm downtown in the city And it's an incredible place called Curitas. And between being a member here, being a client of yours and then just, i think, spending time studying wine, i've got to a point where I want to drink less wine but better wine. I'm not drinking wine to catch a buzz. I'm drinking wine because I understand it, i'm passionate about it, i love the taste, the different nuances and from the same grape in California versus Italy, and the comparing, contrasting of that thing. That's really where you get to. Once you get into it, you're going to drink a lot less, but you're going to drink much better quality. And that doesn't mean it's got to be expensive wine. It just means you got to look at how it's being created And if you're into it, if you're a collector, a wine drinker, spend the extra few minutes to research how that vineyard is being managed and then how the wine is actually being made with those grapes, because at the end of the day, i don't want to drink poison And it's tough to say it, but there's a lot of wine out there that's actually poisoned, and I'm sure that's the same as it is with beer and whiskey and the foods we eat. Too Like there's more and more every day, even different vegetables, and produce your protein. they're just not really that good for you anymore. So if you man, should stay out of the middle of the grocery store, just in the healthy sections fish counter, the meat counter, and buying fruits and vegetables, and then you realize how those things are being grown, it's like man, you don't really say the shit. you really got to get to know a farmer or grow it yourself, right? Because this industrialized commodity system that exists today is not there to make us healthier And it's not doing that. It's there to make money, which is fine, but make money the right way.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, and that's why I always preach even when it comes to the types of foods that we're eating as close to source, as much as possible as best you can find. When food is processed, it had all these different chemicals added to it and it's more concentrated, so it's going to have an even bigger impact on our overall system. So what you're speaking about is just another great example of you can enjoy finer things in life. You can enjoy alcohol, but be really careful as to what type of alcohol you're drinking, where it's coming from, and know your product ultimately, because it's not just the alcohol at the end of the day, it's everything else that's added to it. And I think a lot of people overlook that when it comes to alcohol, especially wine, because they think well, it's grapes and they don't really understand the full process. It's ultimately manufactured right, stuff that's added to it and it's a process, and the bigger the company, the bigger the facilities and the production chances are, the less close to source it is. So I really am so grateful for having you on today to talk about that and give people a different perspective to think about. I'm not a wine drinker I'm not a drinker at all, really but this has been so eye-opening And I hope people who are listening to this really think twice about the type of alcohol they're drinking, the impact it's having on them, where it's coming from, and that there are other options out there. So thank you so much, man, for coming on the show, for speaking about your passion and sharing this information with people. How can someone learn more about what you're doing with June and connect with you if they want to connect with you and learn even more?
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah, for sure. Please give my email and number to whoever could be interested. We're just launching the social media for June in our newsletter, so you can follow that story. I'm going to be sharing a little bit more.
Craig Spear:
Get a website. What's June's?
Jordan McCarter:
website. Yeah, we do. Yeah, juneregendcom. It's been a placeholder for now. We just launched this business, so we're still scaling it up and we've got the new website and development as we speak. So I think it's going to be an interesting thing over the next 10 years, 25 years, as the world de-globalizes, this is going to become more and more important to know a farmer So we can help connect you to farmers wherever you're from. There's a great organization called the Regenerative Farmers of America. They've got contacts that again can put you in touch with someone that's passionate about putting out more nutrient-dense, healthier foods that are good for us but also good for the environment, amazing.
Craig Spear:
Well, thank you so much, man. I cannot thank you enough for coming on and sharing all of this insight and information. It's been a pleasure.
Jordan McCarter:
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. Craig, Great to see you again and yeah, look forward to seeing you soon.
Craig Spear:
Thanks, man. If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to the Spearmethodcom and download my free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.
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