Is Love The Most Important Tool For Making Great Wine?

For the past couple days I’ve been hugging vines, and now that I’ve started I don’t think I’m going to stop. I have to thank Hanna Carrick, who I work with, for encouraging this. The vines here at Paicines Ranch are as tall as me and taller, so they’re the perfect height for hugging. We’ve been training and leaf pulling, and I’m not hugging every vine. But every few vines, before I start to work with it, I hug it.

When Hanna suggested this I was immediately open to try it. I mean I have hugged a few trees.

The first vine was easy. But the second and the third vine started feeling awkward. It was a public display of affection in a work environment. It felt too intimate, which made me a bit embarrassed. I was thinking, “Am I going to be a vine hugger? Is this me now?”

But I kept hugging that day, and I kept hugging today.

It’s not a brief, perfunctory hug that I give either. I wrap my arms around them and hold them to my heart. I close my eyes and lay my straw hat-covered head against the leafy cordons. I don’t let go until I feel that feeling you get from a good long hug.

“They need it,” Hanna said, and I agreed.

The vines have been under constant attack for months by one of the most adorable armies you can imagine, a vole army. Say what you will about the destructiveness of gophers and voles, they are so friggin cute I wish I could adopt them all… and you probably wish I could too if you have them in your vineyard. Alas, the voles have girdled many vines - some young vines are already dead - and so we must discourage them with extreme prejudice. 

While the vines have been dealing with this stress, the weather has been beastly. We left the vineyard when it was 101 degrees Fahrenheit at noon today, but it got up to 105. This has been going on for a couple weeks now. As Olivia Rodrigo would say, “It’s brutal out here.” If any vines ever needed a hug, these vines do.

When I’ve hugged trees in the past it has been a little different than hugging these vines. I’ve had the honor of hugging the largest tree in the world, here in Sequoia National Park, and several of its siblings. I’ve hugged some breath-taking coastal redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains... trees older than me by orders of magnitude measured in millennia. Hugging these trees felt like an expression of my utmost respect and admiration, of gratitude of course, but of star-struck, awe-filled wonder.

Hugging these vines on the other hand felt like hugging a dear friend when you or they are weary and weighed down by the burdens of life: thankfulness and compassion and deeply felt care and commiseration, leaning on each other and letting go, resting and acknowledging.

In his book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, the late Stephen Harrod Beuhner discussed what we’ve discovered about the minds of plants. And if that phrase itself - “the mind of plants” - makes you stiffen, you better buckle up and read Beuhner’s book. As it turns out, we have a nearly identical neural network to plants. Our minds function in almost exactly the same way. The major difference is that our neural network can grow no larger than the limits of our body, while the neural networks of plants can keep growing.

Not too far from where I am right now vines live that have been growing their neural networks since the 1800s. That seems really special to me, like something I should respect and learn from.

When people would assert to Buehner that humans are the most intelligent of lifeforms, he would joke, “How many humans have you met? Do you not watch the news?” His point wasn’t necessarily to belittle human intelligence as much as to combat human exceptionalism.

Human exceptionalism is a pernicious and deeply held belief that is embedded in our language and culture here in the US and elsewhere, and I can’t help but think that some of the awkwardness of hugging a tree or a vine for the first time comes from this.  Yet this is a very new belief, and, despite its overwhelming dominance in our culture, it is merely a belief. And like many of the beliefs that underpin our culture, it is being revealed more and more to be out of touch with the ecological realities of the world.

A much older human belief, the oldest worldview actually, is that the earth and everything on it is alive and aware and sentient and capable of communication, and that the human is just one of the kin that sit in the circle of life. Transitioning to this perspective may be a lifetime process of decolonizing the self and maybe even learning, or creating, new language for the way we farm.

If you want to challenge your human exceptionalism, check out Beuhner’s book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, and if you haven’t read Thus Spoke The Plant, by Monica Gagliano, I want to tease you with some ideas from it.

We all know that trees and plants communicate in the soil via the wood wide web of mycorrhizal networks, and we know that they communicate through the air using biochemical compounds. But in Thus Spoke The Plant, Gagliano describes her study that shows that plants can still communicate when completely isolated from each other, sealed in separate boxes, and have no way of transmitting chemical signals. Gagliano astonished the scientific world with an experiment in which she gave the sacred corn plant, maize, the opportunity to demonstrate its voice… and it did.

Here’s a passage from Thus Spoke The Plant:

“In the midst of the rich symphony of nature, plants appear utterly silent. Because we are designed to believe our own perceptions, our human experience of their silence is so obvious and undeniable that we forget to question whether plants truly are as voiceless as we perceive them. Admittedly, without offering some proof of the plant voice – assuming we agreed on the definition of voice – we may rightly deem the question itself to be nonsense. However, to forget to ask the question, in effect, dismisses any chance of the proof to emerge. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what colonial ideologies of domination and manipulation have succeeded at; by scorning traditional knowledge as unsubstantiated and fanciful and erasing our ancestral memories that spoke of other possibilities, humanity has found itself locked inside the experimental box of a restraining sociocultural view.”

She’s talking about so much more than plants, of course. She continues:

“Like the plants in my experimental boxes, we are besieged by a barrier of emptiness designed to block any possibility of communication. From this viewpoint, of course, plants do not speak! The good news is that by simply asking the questions regarding vegetal speech, we are free to move away from the self-righteous slumber we have numbed our mind with. By merely asking the question about plant voice, we set ourselves free from the preconceived notion that construes plants as inevitably voiceless, and we open ourselves to observing plants as they actually behave and to discovering the reality we share. That’s right, because voice is an inter-subjective affair. Voice exists in the place of relation, the space between the self and the other, and it is what we bring to our encounters with plants that defines the quality of our communicative rendezvous – those we allow to speak (or those we silence).”

What questions are we overlooking, or refusing to ask, in our wine cultures, and what do those unasked questions keep us enslaved to? Is it possible that hugging a vine is like asking the question of whether and how a plant communicates? Is a hug powerful enough to set ourselves free from our pathologically dissociated reductionism? Based on the way I started feeling as I hugged the vines, I think it’s at least a start.

As I was recently speaking with Kelly in the vineyard here at Paicines Ranch – and I should say that’s Kelly Mulville and the vineyard here is his brainchild and baby – he was talking about how we’ve noticed some soil health indicators in the vineyard that we don’t see in the rangeland around the vineyard. Kelly mentioned that there, of course, may be a lot of practical reasons for why this is happening. He planted cover crops and added compost when he first planted a section of the vineyard in 2017. We irrigate the vineyard, we grow plants here that we don’t grow in other parts of the ranch, namely thousands of grapevines, and these actions have many cascading results.

But maybe there’s more to it than just the practices, Kelly suggested. Or maybe there is a different way of seeing those practices. Maybe we are beginning to see the cumulative effect of a concentration of positive human intention. We invest a lot of human time and energy here towards good ends. We shower the vines with hands-on expressions of desire for their greatest health and vitality. Maybe the plants, maybe the whole ecosystem, he said, responds to what we might call love.

Now, I think we know at this point that everything we see and think of as the world of forms around us is actually all various manifestations of cosmic, or electromagnetic energy. Our world is a vast quantum entanglement of unpredictable, unreducible complexity. Another way of looking at it is that the physical is merely a façade over the metaphysical. Those practical things we do in the vineyard are inescapably spiritual. Our actions express our intentions and motivations and feelings in large and nuanced ways.

So I am beginning a journey of exploring the question of whether our intentions and motivations in farming have measurable outcomes on ecosystem health, and even on productivity? In other words: does farming with love make better wine? My theory is that it does, or could.

And therefore, love is a really important and necessary part of the best farming. Love for the land, the plants, the human and non-human community that engages with the farm. Not love of the money they can make for you. Not love of the status they can confer to your ego. But love of them in themselves as beautiful, interconnected, diverse expressions of the underlying stuff that we all grow from.

So much of what we do in vineyards and orchards can feel like work, like a means to a necessary end, even like obligations. Of course we want good things for our plants, but in the day-to-day of pruning, canopy management, pest management, etc, the actions we take can feel mechanical, clinical even, and unfeeling.

But it’s important to remind yourself that we are not just fruit producers. We are plant raisers. We are ecosystem builders.... we are, if you will, passionate lovers of green, non-human entities.

There’s the old story about the two masons working together laying bricks who were asked what they were doing. The first one was working quickly but making mistakes and swearing a lot. He said, “I’m building a wall.” The other was working a bit more slowly, but her craftswomanship was immaculate. She said, “I’m building the most beautiful cathedral in the world.” They worked side by side.

The way our mindset and perspective changes us and the way we act in the world can be profound, and if that’s all that we get out of a perspective shift on our farm practices… well great. But what if that perspective shift is applied to other living creatures and not just bricks? What if our intentions impacted the things that we grow as well as ourselves? Is it possible that love may be the most important tool we have to improve our farming?

A recent study in Australia discovered that when researchers lightly touched the plants in the study it caused the plants to change the expression of thousands of genes - a dramatic physiological cascade that started within minutes of the stimulus and stopped within half an hour. That is, the plants sensed and responded to touch.

If I haven’t lost you yet, then I hope you won’t think me too crazy for suggesting we all consider doing a little more vine and tree hugging. We might find that our wine starts tasting better than ever.