I listened to my friend Isabelle Legeron, founder of the Raw Wine Fair, on a podcast recorded during the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival a few weeks ago.
What struck me, was how articulate and passionate Isabelle is, correlating wine with food, transparency with change, and how we are all products of an industrial change in agriculture that is positive neither personally nor for the health of the planet.
As well, how both the panel moderator and the festival skirted the larger truth.
How the tech journalists at the festival smartly built relationships between the future of work, technological platforms for change, genomics, guaranteed basic income, robotics—and missed completely how natural wine as an artisanal endeavor fits into this picture.
That’s because it doesn’t—or maybe—does in a very different and important way.
I blogged on this to my tech community focusing on the arts and the Etsifying of crafts but didn’t place natural and hand-made wine as squarely in this camp as I should have perhaps.
In general, the mass market understands what organic means, though certification does very little to truly either educate or police this.
It is a fact that natural wine, that is made from grape juice with no additives except some SO2, is growing in popularity and influence, filling the wine lists of the best restaurants, the shelves of the best shops, and the tasting tables of festivals everywhere.
The wellness consumer, has embraced ‘natural’ in our food as correspondent with healthy and fresh, and to a lesser extent, natural in wine as something different and more personal.
But the smallest percent of people consuming the tiniest percent of wine made naturally, understand at all how wine is made or the impact of monoculture on our lives.
And I doubt ever will.
But this same population is mobbing the green markets. Overflowing festivals like Raw, and brilliant approaches to people and wine that my good friend Andre Ribeirinho and his Adegga Wine & Food Festivals brings to people across Portugal and Brazil.
This is about culture’s embrace of the personal, the artisanal, the handmade as a necessary foil to the scalability and digitization of our lives.
That is why we love our winemaking heroes in a very unique way, as friends. When we crowd into these festivals as a celebration, touching flesh with others, letting the winemakers fill our glasses, tell us stories, transport us to their vineyards in spirit and share their love of what they are doing.
This is what the WSJ festival and most everyone, is missing. How critical the artisanal is to our lives.
Making handmade wine is an economically impossible task.
You can scale organic agriculture but natural or artisanal or wine is by definition hand harvested as it is only through that task that enables not adding the host of additives to counteract the forces that would spoil it.
And as Isabelle brings out clearly, making wine this way requires patience and time.
You must give back to the natural process the cycles needed.
If you have a generational vineyard, or hark from the Priorat let’s say, where the marginal cost of land, grapes, labor is small perhaps not. If you are from Santa Barbara, Berkeley, even Portland where you can never afford land, the economics of artisanal as a business is sketchy at best.
Though more and more artisans are doing this.
And more and more of us are supporting it, paying a bit more, paying admission to fairs to lionize these artisans, combining slowly the panache of wine with the embrace of artisans in the food world.
What we all need to realize, and what the WSJ should be talking about, is not whether SO2 is naturally in all grapes but to what extent and how our culture is evolving and tech’s economizing role in it.
How in the face of crowd-sourcing and decentralizing activities of every possible type, this is happening. How we can expect autonomous solar vehicles on the streets of NYC within a decade, yet it is arguably the center of the planet for natural wine consumption.
For eons, the same discussions have been had—and still are—about the arts.
And today, post industrialized agriculture, how we can support these artisans, these winemakers not only as emblems of something wonderful, but as part of that rising change that will spill over to larger solutions to food, drink and the environment.
We need to put the smartest folks on the stage of these festivals, to think out loud about how Universal Basic Income will impact both the arts and the artisans and their role in our culture.
How ideas like tokenizing belief and intent within communities of interest like this one, make the hand-made economic through the very value it brings to the greater community and society itself.
Tech in the hands of the truly stupid was the enemy of the people and the planet in the industrialization of agriculture.
Tech communities, the ethical awareness of movements for change that comes with them are the most powerful forces for change today.
And our best shot for a richer future.
