Magical Winemaking - The Cunning Farmer with Todd Elliott

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy Harvest, Merry Samhain, and a Celebratory Equinox to you all wherever you are. This episode is about Magic, the cunning arts that have been practiced for millennia in most cultures.

Even if you have clear and strongly held thoughts about Magic, I think it’s important to consider for a moment the space between those thoughts. You don’t have to let go of healthy doubts to admit that any thoughts contained within words, like the ideas of this sentence, are quite limited… threads of logic spun across vast oceans of truth. Our net of language may catch fish, but can it catch the sea? Enlightenment, I’ve heard it said, is the space between thoughts.

The practices of Magic are as old as agriculture. And I think we can find something to hold onto in that word “agriculture” or “viticulture,” even as we follow my guest for this episode into realms that are unfamiliar to some of us, myself included. The root of “culture” in viticulture or agriculture is the same root of the word “cult.” It implies both turning or tending the soil, and worshiping, honoring, and caring for it. The same proto-Indo-European root gives us the words “inhabitant” and “servant.” And so we have embedded deep in the roots of our language a reminder that what we do as farmers, as winegrowers - the material work of caring for the soil-plant communities to which we belong – is simultaneously a spiritual rite of worship, of love, for this land, and that this land is our home and our role in relation to it is not to manage it but to serve it.

This understanding asks us to re-imagine, in a way that is both literally and figuratively radical, the kinds of perspectives and relationships that have come out of the reductive, materialistic approach to science. My guest for this episode, Todd Elliott, wrote a book to help us with this re-imagining. I see the approach he offers - the cunning approach, the use of Magic - as a way to help us re-imagine our relationship to the community of life as one guided by the ecological intimacy, the devoted dependence, and the deeply rooted love that is our true and ancient relationship with a world teeming with sentience.

Whether you believe in Magic or not, I think Todd and his book, The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magical Practices, Mythology, and Folklore, can help us approach our interaction with our local ecology, our land, our community, with more curiosity, more care, and deeper connection. And those are all urgently needed things. And re-engaging with our land, re-immersing ourselves in the wild and mysterious communities of life that surround us, may bring a bit of magic back into our wines and our lives. And that may be what actually saves us.

Enjoy!

Another great book:

Wine Liberated

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