On Luxury, Part II
We’ll call it a thought experiment: a bottle of wine should be free, and it should also cost at least a hundred dollars. Both of these things are true.
It helps to think about wine in the context of art, or better, forms of art that aren’t wine. Just appreciating wine can be intimidating in the same way that interpreting a performance piece can be—allegedly apprehendable only by those who have either spent a lot of time with a lot of art (or wine), who have been afforded the opportunity to study its history and forms, had access to mentorship, are gifted with some innate understanding, or some combination of the above. At the same time, making things is healing,[1] pleasure is a right, and at a base and uncynical level, everyone can and should make wine (or art) for themselves.
If making your own wine sounds like an absurd, radical thought, it is and it isn’t. It’s worth expanding the definition of winemaking a bit to make space for this idea, but really not much further beyond the bounds of tradition, and with ready examples in the work of more than a handful of producers. The term ‘co-ferment’ has become an especially accommodating one, often describing the blending and co-fermentation of apples and grapes, with room for a myriad of other fruits. Then there’s ‘apple wine,’ the term used by Fable Farm and others to describe what people typically call cider, but which extends the reach of what the word ‘wine’ includes. In Fable’s case, wine can also mean pears, berries and the many grape hybrids found in their native Vermont that are not classified as the more recognizable (and recognized) vitis vinifera.
In their Oakland kitchen, Christopher Renfro and Jannea Tschirch fill carboys with small amounts of many different grape varietals, watermelon, pear and apples, sometimes in combination with each other, and just one or two glass jugs at a time. This distinction of scale is worth noting. When I say that everyone can and should make wine, I don’t mean that everyone can or should run out and make the many, many different investments, financial and otherwise, that becoming a commercial winemaker requires—and ‘can’ is really the word to focus on. The very material and largely systemic, generational barriers to making wine beyond what’s possible in a kitchen are significant, and make up the targets of the The Two-Eighty Project, the non-profit headed by Renfro and Tschirch[2]. So again, scale is worth noting.
We can use Renfro and Tschirch’s work as an object lesson: for personal proportions, a carboy at home is enough, filled with juice that’s close at hand. In California, you might be lucky enough to have a rogue vine in your backyard or find yourself a few degrees from someone who grows. And if not grapes, maybe you’re somewhere where apples drop, otherwise wasted, or maybe it’s a couple flats of summer’s plums. There are, of course, a depressing number of places with leafless trees, and maybe that’s the fulcrum on which the contradiction of this thought experiment teeters, where something that should be plucked easily, freely, becomes something we should also absolutely put a substantial price on.
Wine at its simplest (and best) is just fruit, time and labor, but to work well, the fruit has to be grown in living, nutrient-rich soil, cultivated such that it won’t need packaged yeast or any other crutch to encourage healthy fermentation. The knowledge and effort that it takes to do this is enormous and, as a result, pretty costly. In many wine-growing areas of California, it’s not uncommon to pay $3,000 per ton of grapes[3], and while that’s prohibitively expensive for many, it’s an entirely necessary price to cover the land and labor costs involved. Stewarding someone else’s vineyard is another option, but that too takes time, energy and know-how, or at least the space to learn as you go, especially if the soil is poor or the vines long-abandoned. It’s not as though there are countless sites to play around with either—some winemakers have decided to move, in part because of California’s famously high land prices and cost of living, to places like Washington and New York. It’s not like they’re finding much in the way of well-farmed wine grapes there either, but they have found apples.
And that’s just the question of sourcing (though arguably the most important question). The components of wine should be simple, but, as with most simple things, that only makes it harder to do well. If your goal is to make wine without additives or bacterial issues, there is a learning curve. Beyond that, from harvest to release, winemaking takes a minimum of several months (in the case of nouveau), but more likely at least six to eight months before the bottle meets a stranger[4]. This means space to keep it, attention to pay it and, again, not only the knowledge of when and how to bottle it, but, if you want to share it beyond your home and friends, the means to license and distribute it. This is all to say that there is a big difference, in cost if not in value, between wine made at home and most wine found on a wine shop’s shelf, the difference between what should unequivocally be free and also, without question, be priced like the luxury it’s proven to be. If the fulcrum is a shortage of good fruit and good soil to grow it in, it’s this distinction, between value and cost, that makes this contradiction swing.
[1] Not to mention empowering. It’s easy to romanticize the connection between oneself and the Land, or likely more accurately, the connection between the village resident of a place like Pinell de Brai and the Land, and one of the reasons for that is the sense of self-sufficiency and empowerment in a scenario as simple as the cask of wine tucked in a root cellar, made right there from a neighbor’s grapes. That this is romantic at all, or a luxury, says a lot.
[2] Renfro is a community organizer teaching from Alemany Farm, a 3.5-acre piece of public land perched above the 280 freeway. He cultivates a vineyard there and uses the space to facilitate agricultural education for Black, brown, queer and trans people, with a particular focus on the community living in the public housing projects directly next door. To learn more and support, visit @thetwoeightyproject on IG.
[3] ...and a ton of grapes makes under 100 cases of wine, a pretty small amount for most commercial winemakers. The price can also inflate considerably depending on the often-arbitrary privileges that certain areas in the state are afforded, not unlike areas of Burgundy or Piedmonte, but that’s another conversation.
[4] Keeping in mind also that before starting that clock, there was almost a year of farming that particular fruit.