There is a lot that we admire about the wine world.
This is not to say that we do not admire the beer world deeply, or that we do not drink a lot of great beer. We do, and we do. Winemakers have a saying that beer is what you drink while you’re making wine. They are not wrong. The blog post about brewers is coming.
There is so much to be said, though, for what the wine world has to do to make a genuinely phenomenal wine. Two of the badges of honor in wine are the terms “Old Vines,” or in French, “Vielles Vignes,” and “Estate Bottled,” or “Mis en bouteille au Château.” That last one means, “we grew the grapes, we made the wine, and we bottled it on site.”
The set of steps that need to be completed to make a great wine that sports those designations is incredible. You have to buy or lease, and then prep a piece of land, and plant grape vines. (Or you could buy an old vines vineyard. That’s not “little”.) You have to plant varieties that will produce the best possible quality in your location, soil type and climate. After you’ve done that, and before you get any money from your vineyard, you have to build a winery. You need barrels, tanks, bottling equipment. Jump through all the government hoops. Own or lease storage for the wine for the two or three (or five or six) years before it will be released. You generally need an international distribution system.
Most critically, you have to possess mastery of two distinct and very different skill sets (using the modern business jargon that I despise so much). Someone at the winery has to know how to grow grapes really well. Beyond planting, they have to know pruning, and canopy and pest management. They have to know the plants’ nutrient demands, know ground cover and tilling management, how to plan and execute vine support, how to determine ripeness, and finally how to execute a harvest. That’s the Reader’s Digest version. It’s actually a lot more complicated.
The other requisite domain of mastery (there now, isn’t that better?) is how to make the wine. The adage about how you learn ten different ways to make wine is to ask nine winemakers. All of them may work. But there are many steps, many critical decisions to be made, and tons of manual labor (yeah, yeah, “literally tons,” but many, many vocations can use that joke). It is both highly skilled and grunt work at the same time. At small wineries, the same person can be the one responsible for both of these immense domains of mastery.
This making–the-stuff part, the brewers have, too, but the challenge of having a whole year’s worth of your product on the line with every step is not something they have to consider. Even if you screw up a rare, barrel-aged something or other beer in February, you can start another batch next week. Getting where you need to be to make that beer doesn’t take 30 or 50 years. When you’re making wine, there’s a lot on the line.
Wine requires a whole different level of commitment. It is why families are so important in the wine world. Those kinds of time scales mandate dedication and bonds that are hard to break. They reveal the kind of patience, respect, compassion and flat-out endurance that is most likely to be marshaled by parents toward their children, and the other way around. When you are living through the kinds and levels of stress that running a business puts on those relationships, it is really clear how much those families have given to their wineries, and for how long, so we can enjoy their wine, and make our lives a little better. To me, that is really admirable.