“If wine hasn’t been turned into a standardized beverage, there’s room for variation. There’s an appreciation for variation that has something to do with the taste of place. And there’s different vintages, if not manipulated to achieve a standard outcome, will be distinctive. You’re tasting 2009 compared to 2016. And that tells you something about how warm it was that year or things that are more complex than that”

Deborah Heath, a leading anthropologist of wine and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregan, chats (over a glass of wine, of course) with our very own Jodie-Lee Trembath at the 4S Conference in Sydney in late August.
Keeping with the theme of Deborah’s workshop with Mike Bennie, Natty Wine and Its Companion Species, they discuss the meaning behind wine by comparing the differences between commercial winemaking and natural winemaking, how chemicals used during the production cycle of wine create post-apocalyptic worlds around Donna Haraway’s “contact zone”, and about living with the trouble of anthropology, the work that can and has been invasive and has privileged our relative power concerning those that we work with.

(Just like our last panel episode, this interview was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality – what can we say, we like getting out of the office to learn from as many people as we can!)

QUOTES

“Wine doesn’t exist in nature. Grapes don’t turn themselves into wine without some sort of collaborative relationship with people who make wine.”

“The loose umbrella of so-called ‘natural wine’ is variously used to refer to wines that are manipulated less – wines that don’t have chemical inputs in the vineyard, which have become routine especially since World War Two, and that minimize interventions in the wine cellar” … “It’s pretty common practice to do what’s called chaptalization which means to add sugar which boosts alcohol, it’s fairly common practice to add acid, but a natural winemaker wouldn’t do either of those things.”

“Thinking about the other agents that collaborate in the growing of grapes and the vineyard and the fermentation process that delivers us with our delicious wine, there are opportunities to think about lots of different worlds that are in play in making this happen.”

“The travels that I’ve done to wine regions in different parts of the world have shown me these stark contrasts – you’ll see side by side vineyards that are managed organically and bio-dynamically, and those that are managed conventionally. The ones that are managed conventionally have been sprayed with herbicides like Roundup between the rows of the vines and they’re brown. They look like a moonscape. And next door is a thriving, teeming cornucopia of plants that are growing between the vines … So instead of there being a community of plants and micro-flora working in concert with one another, you’ve got … a disrupted circuit of communication.”

“Normally when we think of companion species, we’re kind of thinking about pets.”

“In a fully self-sustaining vineyard environment, there will be lots of other critters involved. If you have animals like sheep, chickens, cattle, horses, that graze on the property and produce manure, then that manure can then be composted, you’ve got their participation in this nutrient soil that also then contributes to the micro-flora in the soil.”

“Composting is described by those who do it as magical!”

“Each of us can decide what tastes good to us. And then again we’re in the cross-hairs of marketing.”

Jodie: “She told me, the kinds of white wines that you’ve been drinking are highly commercialized and not very refined.”
Deborah: “They’re highly manipulated.”

“People are only patients when they’re in the middle of an appointment.”

“We all strive to, as Donna Haraway says, live with the trouble, live with the contradictions of the work that we do that can and has been invasive, that has – many times – privileged our relative power, vis-à-vis those that we work with.”

LINKS AND CITATIONS

Haraway D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

You can read more about Donna Haraway’s book ‘When Species Meet’ here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/when-species-meet 

For an explainer about chaptalization, give this article on Vine Pair a read:
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/what-is-chaptalization/

Trubek A. (2009) The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley: University of California Press.

For a further explanation and exploration of affordances:
Rietveld E., de Haan S., Denys D. (2013) Social Affordances in Context: What is it that we are bodily responsive to?, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 36, no. 4.

And you can read Rietveld et al (2013)’s article here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251877658_Social_affordances_in_context_What_is_it_that_we_are_bodily_responsive_to 

The Brad Weiss episode Jodie mentions can be found here: https://reanth.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/ep-18-brad-weiss/

For more about noble grapes vs. marginalized grapes, give these a read:
1) ‘Noble Grapes 101’ from Virtual Vino:
https://virtualvino.com/events-and-articles/articles/noble-grapes-101
2) ‘The 6 Noble Grapes: Their History & Influence on Wine’ from Vine Pair: https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/the-6-noble-grapes/

If you’d like to know more about Deborah’s work mapping genetic knowledge, see the news post from Lewis & Clark:
https://www.lclark.edu/live/news/11972-anthropology-professor-explores-the-culture-of

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Show notes by Deanna Catto

Image: “Tasting Place″ by Jodie-Lee Trembath

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