What Do We Want From Wine?

“I want to thank you for what you said. I’ve felt excluded from wine, and I didn’t understand why. And what you said helped me to see why I felt that way, and now I feel like I can do something about it.”

A young woman said this to me after my presentation on the panel titled “Beyond Vinifera,” at the Oregon Wine Symposium last week. Before I spoke, two scientists from Cornell University spoke about grape breeding and the sensory evaluation of new grapes, so I saw my role as bringing a big picture philosophical perspective. Why were we talking about hybrid grapes in the first place, and why was it important to wine, especially in Oregon?

I don’t live or work in Oregon, though an Oregon Pinot Noir I drank in college was the first wine that ever sparked curiosity in me to find out more about what it was and where it came from. I’ve traveled to Oregon for wine and other reasons many times now, and I spent the week before the Symposium visiting with and talking to several producers to ask questions, listen, and try to understand their perspectives.

First, it is undeniable, in my opinion, that some producers in Oregon make some of the most delicious expressions of Pinot Noir in the world. Oregon also has the highest percentage of organic, biodynamic, and regenerative vineyards in the US, as well as the most vineyards with other sustainability certifications like Salmon Safe or Deep Roots Coalition membership. Many winegrowers in Oregon care deeply about producing wine in a way that doesn’t degrade the health of the earth. They should be proud of this and of the wines they produce… and I think they are proud, in the best way.

In trying to understand how to talk to Oregonians about hybrids, then, I had to understand that this wine culture they have built over the last 40+ years is like an intergenerational family. Sometime, decades ago, some strangers met and had kids and built a home on a piece of land. Since then their kids have had kids, and an entire community has grown up around their home. The younger generations don’t see the two strangers who made the unprecedented decision to put down roots together… they see their grandparents. They see their family, their tribe. The novel decisions their grandparents made and the resulting ways of making a living in this land are now traditions – cultural anchor points for their own identities.

It’s extremely difficult to see outside of your own identity, and most of us seldom feel incentivized to get this outside perspective unless we experience crises that have significantly extreme impacts on us. Without crises, it’s the rare person who would question their basic assumptions and challenge their fundamental understandings about what makes them who they are. These are things we all, mostly, take for granted. And so in this analogy, hybrid grapes are like an outsider that questions things that aren’t up for questioning.

In some ways I’m offering the solution to crises that, for Oregon, don’t yet exist with enough acuteness for winegrowers to question their membership in the Pinot Noir family. Family membership isn’t a belief. It’s not something you chose after careful reasoning. It just is. And that makes it all the harder to hear someone who tells you that you could be part of an entirely different family. This state of being transcends wine, of course. It’s why big change of any kind is so hard. I say all this to be as fair as I can to everyone in wine, because these conditions exist across the global wine community.

The understanding that I took into my presentation at the Oregon Wine Symposium was that Oregon winegrowers make wine with the greatest amount of care that is possible for any wine on earth. They carry on a beautiful tradition, and they uphold that tradition with the highest level of skill and generations of accumulated knowledge. That doesn’t mean they have no blind spots, however.

Oregon is one of the most monolithic wine monocultures on earth. Three varieties of a single species of grape (V. vinifera) make up over 83% of all Oregon wine, and most of that is Pinot Noir. All of the risks inherent in a monoculture that we attempt to keep from adapting in a changing world apply to Oregon wine. To me the question is not if but when the grapes will hit the fan for a state who has tied its wine identity to a single grape variety.

And while Oregonians largely care deeply about sustainability, and therefore use sustainable practices to grow their wine, the grapes they grow aren’t sustainable. Organic winegrowers spray (organically allowed) fungicides an average of 10 to 12 times, and sometimes more, per season or else their grapes, and therefore their businesses, will be severely impacted by mildews. That level of spraying would be considered unconscionable in most other forms of agriculture. Consider the positive impacts to vineyard worker health, soil health, environmental health, carbon footprints, and economic viability if you grew grapes that only needed to be sprayed once per year. Consider the industries you’d defund. Consider the time you’d get back… to do things like enjoy a stroll through the vineyard, have a glass of wine with your partner, or spend time with your kids.

Now to be fair the biggest cost to vineyards is all of the other labor besides spraying. And even if you didn’t have to spray fungicides, you might spray some foliar nutrients or compost teas. But wouldn’t it be great – especially at this point in wine history – to save even a little time, money, and wear and tear on the earth? How would it alter your psychology to work with grapes that gave you peace of mind rather than constant worry, whose treatment with anything was optional and flexible rather than obligatory and urgent?

In addition to these areas of concern for Oregon, I found that when I pushed on some of the philosophical undergirding of this way of doing wine there were unspoken beliefs i