The art of wine is a way of working with life. It is the art of life. You could say, it is the art of living, but then all art is that.

Wine Half Finished at Blue Mountain Vineyard

Oliver Ranch Road, Thanksgiving 2011

It would be a mistake to think of the berries above as fruit. Think of them instead as very precise records of sun and water that humans, with their extremely subtle senses of taste and smell, can’t read. These berries await the process of fermentation, in which the year they have recorded will be transformed by yeast into a form that humans can read. We call that form wine. Our bodies read it in a way parallel to the way in which these berries represent the wine to come: in a dance with culture. Change the taste, change the culture. That’s the way it is in the ancient traditions of horticulture that gave us wine and preceded the world of technicians who are now trying to transform the arts of wine-making and living into science.

Do you really want your ability to touch the earth to be controlled by chemists? Do you want to drink that with your citrus-herb crusted halibut with crispy polenta and corn miso sauce? Really?

What the Technicians Have Done to Orchard Culture

There are some people who make wine much like this, too

And Monday, let’s meet here again and talk about terroir and the elegant little thing that grape plants do with the sun.