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or more properly, a set and series of activities.
The first set of acitivites is the winemaking
itself, from studying and attending to the vineyard,
to imagining when to pick the grapes, to smelling
the fermentation begin . . . and on to bringing
the wine to bottle.
But also: the work of the winery. It too is
a joy, especially if peformed socially, collegially,
lovingly. With collaborators who are friends,
whom one admires, who teach us. This work can
be pure joy.
The making of the wine is, in this sense, .
But wine has the remarkable ability to preserve
within itself not only the character of a vineyard,
a growing season, a fermentation– but
it does so in a way that is portable. You can
put it in a bottle and give it to a friend,
or set it adrift in the vast sea of the market,
so that it finds itself eventually in the hands,
on the table, of a perfect stranger.
– those
that are separate and beyond the making of the
wine iteself. These are the activities that
the wine can inspire and engender in others
who drink it.
Beyond the essential bacchic activities that
almost any wine can inspire, I have three particular
ones in mind:
the wines should make one feel and think of
. Not
the complexity of arguments or syllogisms, but
this kind of complexity: imagine the flat asphalt
of a new mall's parking lot. Imagine the same
asphalt cracked and broken after years of weathering,
traffic, ground shifting underneath it. The
pointless complexity of these cracks can be
a feast for the eyes, even if it means nothing.
The wines should present a similar complexity
for their consumer to feast on.
The wines should make one sense . The wines
should be so distinctly wine and not fruit that
one can sense both the yeast and the bacteria,
on the one hand, and the passage of time, on
the other hand, that transformed the unspoiled
fruit into a new substance. The wines must capture
and preserve decay and age.
The wines should make you
that you are drinking them.
[written during the Summer of 2005] |
