The Obvious Truths About Wine That Nobody Sees

Self-knowledge is hard to come by. In the first month of my freshman year in college, after one of my first rhetoric classes, a girl from my class walked out with me after class and let me know two things about myself:

“You’re pretentious,” she said. Then she laughed because she could tell I didn’t even know what the word meant. “Also, your nose is crooked.”

How, at the ripe old age of 18, had I never known these two facts about myself?

Maybe I could forgive my youth for some naiveté about my glaring pretentiousness. But had I never looked in a mirror?

I went back to my dorm room and got out a dictionary and a mirror. Based on a pretty emotionally painful self-assessment over the next few minutes, I realized that girl had been right on both points!

I quickly went to work to undo the pretentiousness – and I hope, by now, I have mostly eradicated it – but the nose is still there, crooking slightly to the right.

It’s pretty amazing the way my mind had formed an image of myself that was so strong that I literally couldn’t see through that mental picture to the reality staring back at me in the mirror my whole life. But now I can’t un-see it. I’ve created a new mental image that, hopefully, is more closely aligned with reality.

I often wonder, though, what I’m still not seeing. The pretentiousness may be gone, but what has replaced it?

(That’s a mostly rhetorical question, Wendy.)

Our wine journey has been a similar process of discovery of uncomfortable, yet undeniable, truths.

By starting to grow a few vines in our front yard (and veggies in our back yard) we began to learn how disconnected we were from where our wine (and food) came from and what it takes to grow it.

From a romantic vision of beautiful landscapes with rolling hills of vineyards and quaint tasting rooms and cool cellars, to an understanding that these are often facades for harmful and exploitive farming and labor practices that diminish the quality of everyone’s lives except for a very few for a very short time.

Even more, we began to see how little our ideas about grapes aligned with the living reality of them. My idea of a “vineyard” meant orderly rows of vines trained to maximize the extraction of grapes, something like a “grape mine.”

Gradually, we began to realize that a vineyard is like an iceberg. The rows of vines are just the small obvious part of a massive ecosystem, much of which is below the surface, that extends to include an entire climate and the human culture that interacts with it.

We literally see the world differently now. We’re in a process of continually losing our innocence, and ignorance. This has made us much more thoughtful about every aspect of the things we drink and eat.

Yet again I wonder what things we take for granted now that we’ll look back on with shock and dismay at our ignorance someday. Maybe how often and how carelessly we hop in a car or a plane and burn “the last hours of ancient sunlight?” Maybe how carelessly we flip on a light switch or turn on a tap to get water? We’ll see… probably sooner than we expect.

Now, before you begin to think that the point I’m trying to make is about human folly, let me get back to that first semester of my freshman year in college.

The reason I became aware of my pretentiousness and crooked nose was because I spoke up in class. I wanted to engage with the subject matter and my peers. Maybe I wanted to show off (an ongoing weakness, I’ll admit), but behind that was a desire to connect.

That desire to connect allowed me to overcome any fear I might have had of speaking up about the things I cared about, of putting myself out there to be judged, of looking stupid, of failing socially.

And all of those fears came true. I was judged, accurately, to be pretentious, and I was told so. Oh, and I was essentially made fun of because of my looks.

But you know what? I learned truths I never could have learned otherwise. On the day that I was humiliated, my world also grew larger.

Someone once said that we need each other because we can’t see our own backs. I think we also need each other because sometimes we can’t even see our own fronts… at least not accurately.

The desire to connect to a larger version of the world is why we planted those first zucchinis and tomatoes and grapevines too.

We’ve failed repeatedly at gardening and viticulture. Four years after planting the first front yard vineyard I had to rip out every single vine. Because I didn’t know what I was doing, and the vines told me that very clearly by becoming so diseased that they wouldn’t even grow that forth year.

It was heartbreaking, and took three years to re-establish a healthy new vineyard. But I began to understand what it takes to care for a vineyard.

Mycorrhizal fungi are vital to the health of grapevines (and nearly all plants). Their job, their whole reason for being, is essentially to make connections. They connect to the roots of the grapevine then extend out into the soil far from the root and connect with bacteria that provide nutrients and water. The grapevine uses as much as 30% of its energy to feed the mycorrhizae sugary, carbon-based treats (that the vine absorbs from our over-carbon-ated air). The fungi in turn feed some of these treats to bacteria in the soil in exchange for nutrients and water, which it gives back to the vine. These connections extend the reach of the vine’s roots exponentially, thereby increasing its ability to survive and thrive.

Above the soil, the vine is also giving out sugary, carbon-based treats (which it builds with the nutrients it bartered for in the soil) to us, in the form of grapes. Its ability to connect with us humans, through our fondness for sweet things – “the botany of desire” as Michael Pollan called it -  extends the reach of the vines to as far as we humans are willing to go to get the things the vine needs.

We’ve built irrigation systems that begin hundreds of miles away in the mountains to bring water to our vines. We’ve mined nutrients from far away locations to bring fertilizer to our vines. We send the bottles of the fermented sugary, carbon-based treats to the other side of the world, and in exchange we receive energy in the form of money from people who will never even set foot in the country where the vine lives, and some of that money energy is used to sustain and care for that vine.

I’m in awe of the grapevines’ ability to connect with other species in such meaningful ways in order to get what it needs to survive and thrive. Seen properly, the stationary, rooted grapevine is able to cultivate connections that reach around the entire earth.

Also I can’t help but feel a little used. I mean I thought I was farming them, not the other way around!

The reality probably is that nobody is farming anybody… we are all just conduits for connecting to each other. And by “we” I mean every aspect and form of life on earth, not just humans.

This idea - that we are conduits rather than objects - can be seen biologically as well as philosophically, and it can revolutionize us if we understand it.

While researching for an episode of the Organic Wine Podcast, I zoomed in on the island in northern Vermont where my guest had set up her winery and was planting vines. I found a state park on the map and zoomed in further, and photos of the park popped up. One of those photos was of a sign in the park – part of a self-guided science tour of the park – and here’s what that sign said:

“What is an individual?
Identity is a process, not an object. All Earth life is connected through a common ancestry. Each ‘individual’ (each organism) – cow, beetle, daisy, human, vine – is actually a consortium of transformed and still living other beings.” (I added the word “vine” for effect.)

The desire for connection is why we started Centralas, and why – since that rhetoric class in college – I’ve tried to learn how to write… so that I could better say these things to you now.

Because I believe that the hardest self-knowledge to come by is the truth that there really is no self. There are only the connections we are part of, and we can’t understand or define ourselves apart from those connections.