Dread
and Joy

The grapevine is a liana.

In the wild, it favours the fringes of riverside woodland, those meeting places where light, water and vegetation give it room to thrive. It storms the trees, borrows their trunks and branches to reach the light, and spreads its foliage into the canopy.

The grapevine is a commensal.

The tree lends it support without gaining anything in return. This coexistence may turn to competition when their foliage vies for the light or their roots seek out the same resources. The wild vine finds its way through the extraordinary tangle of life, amid alliances, rivalries, opportunities and accidents. It struggles, it lives, it thrives, with neither god nor master, neither faith nor law.

We winegrowers have a very different fate in store for it.

We select it, propagate it, graft it, plant it in rows, prune it, tie it down, hold it in check. We impose a sedentary, bonsai-like, domesticated existence on this cosmic climber, this conqueror of interfaces, in an open, uniform space whose conditions we arrange down to the last detail. We deny it trees, steer its destiny and take its fruit. And with good reason: we want grapes. And we want wine!

To me, the winegrower is the shepherd of a motionless herd of plants. We ought to grasp the full measure of this arrangement. A vineyard plot is an environment profoundly shaped by human hands, held in a particular state of ecological tension. Without human intervention, other plants would soon move in. Grasses, perennials, bushes and eventually trees would carry the plot towards a forested future. The hardiest wild plants, perfectly attuned to the quirks of the terroir, would soon outcompete the domesticated vine.

If the vine's dominance in the plot, and the abundance of its autumn fruit, are largely conditioned by my interventions, I must acknowledge that most of what goes on in my terroir escapes my senses, escapes my awareness. I could try to monitor and control the ecosystem to the utmost, until nothing but vines were tolerated. Eliminate every competitor, neutralise predators and parasites, boost nutrition, and seek to anticipate and regulate every mishap in real time. The game hardly seems worth the candle. First, because the overwhelming majority of wines I have tasted and found moving did not come from vineyards under the rule of a despot. Second, because establishing and maintaining an agricultural totalitarianism lies beyond my physical, material and spiritual strength.

At the foot of Mourre Nègre, I grow my vines according to organic and agroecological principles. I make sure that Vitis is the dominant woody plant in the neighbourhood, but surrounded by enough checks and balances for the ecosystem to flourish along a ridgeline. My hypothesis is that the vine’s rootedness, attachments and struggles contribute to its vitality, its conatus and thus its overall balance. And that, first in the vat and then in the glass, the fruit of this ardour in the power struggles can be felt.

In practical terms, as spring draws to a close and the grasses have flowered and reach two metres, I make one pass with a flail mower. The thick mulch protects and nourishes the soil through the summer's scorching heat. Ahead of the first rains that carry the risk of infection, I make one or two precisely targeted copper-and-sulphur treatments with a backpack sprayer. In winter, I spend a few sessions hoeing to keep the broom in check, and devote great care to pruning and disbudding (I use a Dal–Bourdarias mix... I swear it can be done).

In the cellar, the same picture.

The grapes arrive laden with a singular biophysical and chemical potential, marking both a rupture and a continuity, like the leap of a waterfall or diffraction through a crystal. They bring with them a motley population of microorganisms, joined by those already in the cellar, on the equipment and in the vessels, caught up in unimaginable intertwined destinies. In the must, a new and turbulent ecosystem takes shape. Yeasts succeed one another; some gain the upper hand, others disappear. Sugars are consumed, alcohol accumulates, chemical balances shift. Cellar conditions (temperature, humidity, light...) are the equivalent of weather in the vineyard. They influence the pace of the processes. Bacteria take their turn, or sometimes work alongside the yeasts. Conditions never stop changing and, as a winegrower, of course I intervene and contribute to this variability. I am here to bend the current and keep the ball bouncing until it lands on delicious wine, rather than following its natural course into the vinegary or Brett-tainted drain that, for those who share my culture, spells ‘game over’. So I intervene, without the extraordinary arsenal of modern oenology, to steer things, sometimes successfully, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes (most often, I think) without any awareness of the immediate or latent effects of my actions. As long as the wine tastes good, the universe can recombine itself forever. Admittedly, my senses and my model of reality are hardly suited to direct observation of the phenomena I claim to manage in the cellar. Yet clues, and a few distinctly human tools and tricks (temperature and density readings, chemical and microbiological laboratory analyses...), let me follow the progress of this whole business and observe that microbial kingdoms are as dazzling as they are fleeting. Like a plot of land, a vat of must is a stage for ecological succession. At the height of fermentation, its carbon-dioxide uppercut gives some measure of the biological forces at work.

A cellar is infinitely more shaped by human hands than a vineyard. Here, humans seem to rule. Yet paradoxically, a mishap, a mistake, a spectacular collapse comes much faster here. A door left ajar, a fermentation cap collapsing, volatile acidity running wild, and it is all over. The economic consequences for the winegrower are far more serious in the cellar, because everything is concentrated. I know plenty of winegrowers who practise freeride in the vineyard, but almost none in the cellar.

I am convinced that the non-human part of nature has no particular plans for our vines, our grapes or our wines. The slope is there, indifferent. It leads to vineyards buried beneath brambles, and grape juice overcome by volatile acidity. For me, the winegrower’s honour, grace and joy lie in placing a clever diversion, a touch of human nature, of culture then, in that great, inexhaustible current, to try to redirect its flow briefly and locally in the hope of bringing about a delicious, intoxicating singularity. A diversion that must never become the Three Gorges Dam. So that wine can surge, crackle, bounce, whirl, set off lights, flashes and bells between the twin gutters of this pinball machine that will not let me go. Between vinegar — the ball lost down the centre drain — and Coca-Cola — the ball always travelling straight ahead in a completely rigged machine, where the wine, the ball, run like trains in Switzerland. And the same goes for the vine and its grower, who can choose to stand somewhere between primeval forest and the desert of intensive monoculture.

The exploration will continue. Into the influence of our companionships as holobionts. Into the intimate. Into emotions, attachments. Psychosocial games. Into beliefs, spirituality and metaphysics. I fear we may be reaching the open sea of the unsayable, where on these matters nothing can be said, only lived.