The walls of Burgundy’s vineyards match
the pyramids for mass, but not elevation. Giza memorializes God-Kings where
the shallow blockwork of the Côte d’Or recoils
from the burden of the sublime. The Cistercians could find no way out of God’s
maze and left us a labyrinthine vineyard puzzle as a keepsake.
Instrumental science eventually got the
world out from under God’s feet. Only at the end of the 17th Century was curiosity no longer considered a sin, but “the mark of a finite being
with infinite pretension” (Blumenberg). Copernicus’s heliocentric universe was
big, measurable and predictable.
The medieval world had drawn a sharp
distinction between God’s infallibility and human frailty and capriciousness.
In the post-Enlightenment world human culpability persists, though the contrast
is made with a secularized nature that can’t perjure itself rather than a God
whose perfection was taken for granted. Commenting on William Buckland’s cross-examination
of history by geology, John Forrester concludes: “Rocks don’t lie!” Buckland
provides sound reasons to doubt the veracity of our storytelling, whilst Forrester
inadvertently sloganizes terroir for us.
The Enlightenment cleared a new space for
mankind in the world, but inherited misgivings about human frailties continued
to undermine self-affirmation. In Burgundy, Cistercian submissiveness was displaced
from God to nature. The magnitudes of influence remained unchanged even if they
were articulated through an amalgam of aspect, climate and geology rather than
the actions of a transcendental deity. Human agency was limited to spectating a
non-human creation. Burgundy producers
who feel pressured to play down the impact of their daily exertions toe a
deeply scored line.
There isn’t a conspiracy at work here;
rather, within Burgundy the limits of knowledge are set by a past that discouraged
curiosity and downplayed human expressivity beyond the elaboration of the
divine. If, today, we follow our (E)nlightened instincts and use science to disentangle
the individual threads of terroir from one another, we find our investigations
quickly jam against a knot. In the same way that the Cistercians had imagined
God’s creation to be irreducible, so terroir is presented as causative,
immanent and totalizing. Roland Barthes wrote that faced with the world we vacillate
between two possibilities: we can analyze and measure what is before us, or we can
admit its obduracy and poeticize the “otherness” that deep-down alienates us
from things. Coupling the aesthetic with
the analytic isn’t straightforward when romanticism and theory share the same
object.
Terroir is depicted as a window on the
world, yet the more we polish the smeary glass pane in front of us, the more
sharply our reflection is returned. Writing about fashion, Jean Duvignaud
observes that in societies where nakedness was customary the introduction of
clothing eroticized women: “Nudity is only attractive when culture creates it”,
he concludes. The desire to be side-by-side with nature, to experience things stripped
bare – “as they really are” - is a persistent theme among wine critics. When I planted
my vineyard I chastened myself with hand-hoeing, biodynamics and geological
maps. Ten years later, and I now accept my time is best spent removing leaves
and manipulating shoots. Back in 2005, the rock-strewn soil we planted looked
like a stretch of wilderness, but through the repetition of tasks and my own inventiveness
and toil, I now see industry and production where once I’d imagined Eden. That
it even occurred to me that biodynamics might ultimately decide the success (or
failure) of my start-up only illustrates the extent to which I was held captive
by a seductive version of creationism.
Of course, it’s possible to imagine a
time, a few centuries from now, when everything in the vineyard will be done
through force of habit: the wisdom of past vintages will concertina into routines; production
decisions will become second nature, so much so that the only nature that gets
mentioned will be that of sun, rain and rock. The endless experimentation,
failed trials and tweaks for posterity will all be forgotten as my heirs direct
curious listeners toward a hidden world of geological strata that provides them
with the blueprint for their activities.
Alternatively, these farmers of the
future might look back at our time with bemusement, just as we now look back upon
the complacent astronomers of the Middles Ages who saw measurement and skepticism
as sinful. Religious dogmatism sustained
the cramped dimensions of the Ptolemaic Universe, and future generations of
wine drinkers might diagnose a similar malaise amongst predecessors who thought
wine quality and the expression of environmental causes approximated to the
same thing. They might well point out to one another that the evidence for a
wider sphere of influence was with us all the time. From their perspective, every
family, village and region develops its own culture of production through time,
and this helps explain the inter-regional differences between Champagne and Sherry,
as well as the intra-vineyard disparities between Coche-Dury and Lafon at the
point where geological and climatic explanations fail. For them, our faith in
environmental predestination was just nostalgia; we couldn’t quite free ourselves
from inherited magnitudes of influence - medieval sentiments - that with the
benefit of their hindsight seemed to stifle our accounts of our activities more
than it inhibited the activities themselves.
This last point feeds into the error I
made when planting my vineyard: that of taking terroir too literally, and trying
to force old imaginings into an earnest work schedule.
Feuerbach drew a useful distinction
between knowledge and curiosity. Curiosity operates with few constraints, hence
Blumenberg’s allusion to our being “finite beings with infinite pretensions”. The Enlightenment led to an outburst of
curiosity and conjecture, as though rationality needs the impetus of imagination
to properly reset its boundaries. Human intellect doesn’t like a void, and curiosity
fills empty space with its own hybridized speculations forged out of old and
new beliefs. Curiosity got the better of me when I splashed out on a hoe and
geological maps in the same day, but it might also explain how Jancis Robinson
can neglect the immanence of human activity to millennia of production and
extol wine as “Geography in a glass.”
My hope is that my bemused farmers of the
future will both acknowledge the debt they owe their forebears - all the
know-how and expertise that the past has shaped and gifted them - and better understand
the relationship between vine physiology and the environment. Having rid themselves
of the residues of medieval prejudice they will talk openly and confidently
about their own creativity and contributions, and how these entangle productively and aesthetically with nature; their words will match-up with
their deeds. They will look back at early 21st Century wrangles
about terroir and natural wines as being well-intentioned, but mistaken. They
won’t argue about whether Coche or Lafon captures Meursault in the highest vinous
resolution because they realize nature doesn’t offer us any means of deciding
between the two. The reason why we felt there was a decision to be made was
because we never properly broke with the Cistercian suspicion that we were trusted
observers and flawed creators.
From my perspective, our understanding of
the evolution of wine style, at both regional and domain level, is enriched if
we yoke the environment and man together. Just as biology has taught us that
the egg came before the chicken, so, analogously, primitive production necessarily
preceded any discussions of geology and climate. If we believe we can peel back
centuries of doing and making and reverse the order of events so as to expose
some kind of primordial purity, we are, to use Duvignaud’s insight, confusing “nakedness”
with “nudity”. I’m happy to accept
natural wines on my terms, but not the rhetoric that’s served up with them.
Wittgenstein warned us against becoming
“bewitched” by language. On our chilly Island, there is a long history of wine criticism
and a very short history of wine production. My hunch is that with little to
counterbalance our curiosity, we’ve all too readily taken Burgundian producers
at their word and failed to recognize the fact that when we’ve asked How things are? we’ve instinctively been
told how things were; - their answers
are infused with medievalisms. Attributing everything to terroir, or saying you do nothing are just ways of
clambering back under God’s feet.
Ultimately, if what producers do matters more
than what they say, then no damage has been done; the wines will speak for them
in their absence. Notwithstanding this, at a recent natural wine dinner the French
importer told me that most of the early adopters in France didn’t have wine
backgrounds, but were drawn into changing careers by rhetoric. Like me, they’d
idealized terroir and then become seduced by their own creation. I lost faith
when I realized that behind the hard work there was only more hard work. There
was no unveiling of essence; though, unarguably, recognising my earlier ideas as trompe l’oeil must count as some sort of revelation.
As wine critics we have a duty to be self-critical. Not only should we expose the anachronisms of others, but we must be wary
of projecting our own ill-founded prejudices onto our loosely jointed industry.
If I don’t see any difference between replacing indigenous varieties with Cabernet and unravelling Champagne blends into climats, it’s because I see vine roots
extending into the cultural soil of Aÿ and Jerez, and not just reaching into the static chalk strata
below. Rocks don’t lie, but neither do they tell the truth.
