The biodynamic vineyards I visited export a few thousand bottles a year, if any, and the digits of their net sales numbers don’t usually exceed three or four zeros.

Unlike the giants of the wine world, these small, rough-hewed farms add no ingredients besides grapes and time to their wines (with the occasional exception of a pinch of sulfites to preserve the vintage). Where a company like Banfi or Antinori may get truckloads of grapes from all over the region delivered to a sprawling factory that also hosts tour buses, these biodynamic farms generally consist of a farmer, a tractor and maybe a few friends who come to help at harvest time. These farmers are the Davids.

What if the best way into the world of Italian wine was not on a tour bus, but walking through these tiny vineyards with these farmers as guides? It felt like unchartered territory, as if I was unpeeling the unknown side of Italian wine. And, as I would learn, it’s a world that only gets more fascinating the deeper in you go.

Officially, these wineries are not typically open to the public. Unofficially, such winemakers love nothing more than showing off their farms and vintages. For someone who is more traveler than tourist, these wineries provide the perfect entry into a part of Italy we don’t see very often, a part that has been untouched by throngs of tourists and Instagram clichés.

And, perhaps most fascinating of all, there is the deference to the occult.

“We bottle when the moon is descending,” Ms. Variara told me as we walked into her cellar. Each year Colombaia makes two red wines, a cloudy white and a tiny batch of sparkling pink and white wines. “You need the right moon because she’s alive. She knows she’s in a bottle.”

It took me a second to realize we were talking about the wine.

Far be it from me to say “she” isn’t alive. Biodynamic wines may seem like a quirk, a wine-industry outlier, but for the fact that the wine is fantastic.