In each chapter, I focus on a specific arena of our work, teasing out the complexities and philosophical dramas that an experienced winemaker confronts. These different threads are all part of one cloth. The Postmodern Winemaking movement seeks to reconnect with winemaking’s ancient aesthetic, much of which was inadvertently left behind in the technology revolution following World War II. I hope that what emerges is a new vision of the winemaker’s task and a clearer understanding of what wine really is.
Since the text is addressed to the practicing winemaker, the eavesdropping lay reader will encounter enological terminology that may be unfamiliar. Whenever possible, I have expanded my explanations to make technical winemaking concepts available to a broader audience without derailing the discussion’s logical flow. The reader who feels left behind despite these efforts is directed to the appendixes, which include a brief summary of winemaking basics and a glossary short enough that it can be read from beginning to end in one sitting (I recommend the online version). Your best move, when these fail, is to seek out a real production winemaker and quiz her over a glass of her best.
Because even for professionals the principles presented here compose an unfamiliar picture, I have found it useful to repeat certain notions in the text to facilitate a global view. I hope I have struck a tolerable balance between excessive redundancy and leaving too few breadcrumbs.
WHAT IS POSTMODERN WINEMAKING?
How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge?
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
In the past few years I have been employing the term postmodern to refer to the paradigm shift in winemaking that I have observed and in some ways instigated. In my experience, postmodernism is not well understood in its general sense; instead, it gains meaning mostly through its diverse manifestations. Consequently, colleagues often wonder what connection could possibly exist between this new winemaking school of thought and other expressions with which they are familiar such as postmodern painting, architecture, theater, film, music, and philosophy.
Since postmodernism is by its very nature polymorphous, such confusion is to be expected. For readers wishing to gain a working understanding of the movement as a whole, I recommend A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz, a concise map of postmodernism’s origins, principles, mind-set, and diverse embodiments.
All winemaking is a fundamentally postmodern sort of endeavor, touching inevitably on many key postmodern notions: the manifestation of Nature both in wine’s production and its appreciation, a broad diversity of localized style goals, the primary importance of collaborative groups, and the relativity of truth. Fine wine is a theater in which deconstruction occurs naturally and modern scientific practices are inadequate to guide extraordinary work. One cannot avoid becoming immersed in environmental concerns in the growing of wine grapes. A winery is a team, and an appellation is a tribe. Truth worth knowing is largely local rather than universal, for wines vary widely from place to place in the characteristics that are expected and extolled—a great sherry is a terrible Riesling.
Wine is formless, assuming the shape of its container, but it interacts with its containers, both the barrel and the glass, in complex ways. Its message is pure experience conveyed without language. Just as any theatrical performance is unique and ephemeral, the qualities of any particular wine are neither universal in appeal nor fixed in time. Defining and quantifying wine quality has proven extraordinarily elusive, and its complex chemistry has yet to be thoroughly characterized and rationalized.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Here I will provide a basic grounding in postmodern thinking and then spotlight, one by one, a variety of postmodern principles that have guided my wine production consulting work and compelled in this book its ever-shifting focus on assorted topics.
ORIGINS AND PRINCIPLES
From its roots in the experimental music, theater, painting, and architecture of the late 1960s counterculture, postmodernism has come to pervade all walks of life and fields of endeavor. Its sundry and sometimes contradictory manifestations derive in part from its origins as a rejection of modernism, which caused it to range out from that central dogma in various directions.
At its core, postmodernism questions the modernist optimism that fueled the Enlightenment, when Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power and Descartes proposed his idealized vision of the rational skeptic, essentially today’s trained scientist. Armed with generalized laws such as Newton’s mechanics, this dispassionate and unbiased hero is charged with shaping an ever better world by uncovering Nature’s secrets and exercising dominion over her. Four hundred years later, we are beginning to sense that this plan is not working out so well for us.
In our lifetimes, a cavalcade of technological missteps—nuclear proliferation; destruction of the ozone layer; the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima; failures of the works of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; wholesale global species extinctions; and the continuing erosion of the right to privacy all come to mind—have led emerging generations to lose faith in the infallibility of science to competently coordinate technological central planning. Postmoderns seek instead to move beyond rationalism as the sole determiner of what is true, beautiful, sustainable, and good. More room is allowed for intuitive leaps, the wisdom of myth, and the workings of natural forces that we neither control nor fully grasp. If the inner city is the symbol of modern power over nature, the virgin forest symbolizes postmodern cooperation with Nature, including respect for her power to manifest complex, balanced ecologies that are robust, sustainable, and aesthetically appealing with scant help from humankind.
One problem with Descartes’s vision of the ideal rationalist is that pitfalls inevitably await any human ego steeped in decades of training and study. I worked so hard; surely I must know something! In principle, we should be able to count on Descartes’s ideal skeptic to be as skeptically rigorous inwardly as outwardly. He must also be unswayed in his evaluations by considerations of endowment funding, tenure, or personal exigency and immune to loyalties and enmities.
He must, in short, know himself. But this is seldom the case. Such training happens over in the humanities, way across campus.
Modern confidence in rationality is vulnerable to an additional pitfall. In the sciences, it’s a thin line between the rationalistic axiom that all understanding is, in principle, accessible to the human mind and the conclusion that what is inaccessible is unreal or even fraudulent. Otherwise rational and dispassionate winemaker colleagues have devoted endless hours to websites such as biodynamicsisahoax.com—a phenomenon explored in chapter 21, “Science and Biodynamics.” My argument in that chapter is that no outside observer is in a position to take a solid stance on biodynamic winegrowing, either pro or con, and I make no such attempt myself. I have much bigger fish to fry.
Postmoderns question that human ingenuity can, or even ought to, be dominant in guiding our lives and works down a path of inevitable progress. In contrast to a faith in the boundless resilience of our home planet, which led moderns to hang portraits of belching smokestacks in their corporate boardrooms, postmoderns see the Earth as fragile and vulnerable, with the extinction of the human species very much in play. The postmodern vineyardist, more specifically, is a steward of Nature rather than her master, seeking to foster a balanced ecology of unfathomable complexity rather than a simple monoculture that may be easy to manage but is vulnerable to opportunistic pathology and disappointing in terroir expression.
What’s done is done. Postmodern winemakers are generally not Luddites seeking to turn back the clock. Winemaking typically takes place in very tough circumstances, and we prefer to keep our technical options open. By and large, we seek to work within the conditions of modernity, incorporating what is useful while moving beyond the hubris of the modern mind-set. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians, postmodernism believes all things and hopes all things. Few