The Damage Done by Chasing Virtue
On the thoughtless disregard for the wisdom of generations
“Founded upon the desire to recapture a farming and winemaking culture that has all but faded away: a winemaking culture of patience.”
When I was younger, I don’t remember thinking my parents and their friends were idiot know-nothings that just didn’t understand the way the world worked. Sure, when my father grounded me for playing ball in the house with Princess and breaking a window in the process, I was sure he was just too out of touch to realize how hard it is to resist tossing a ball for a dog no matter what was earlier promised. And when Robin broke up with me after gym class and my mother wasn’t nearly as sympathetic to the fact that my life was ending, I just knew she was too old to understand love.
But I never recall thinking I’d discovered something about life or the way the world worked that my parents didn’t know or understand. Even in the warm pocket of youth, I didn’t possess that much hubris.
Cathy Huyghe always makes me think. A founder of the wine data analysis firm Enolytics and one of the most thoughtful people I know, Cathy is giving a talk in Paris on “Women, Wine + Innovation” at the upcoming VinExpo. I wrote Cathy and told her she has a tall task in front of her. Not because she is looking for innovations by women, but because innovations in the wine industry are so rare. She’s on the right track, however. She’ll do great and the audience will come away thinking what most others do when they hear Cathy speak: Now there is a careful thinker who is generous with her legitimate insights. Our short email exchange provoked me to think.
INNOVATION IN WINE AND THE CULTURE OF THE NEW
We reside in an age when new ideas, new thoughts, and new ways of doing things seem to be the golden ticket to a virtuous visage that can be used to clear a path to recognition and even fame and fortune. But there is very little that is really new. Most everything, most ideas, most products, most philosophies are derivative of something else that came before. But that’s enough. Progress is built over time and is a cascade upward where previous generations built the steps that let us successfully teeter as we place the next block.
The wine industry is generally walled off from real or pretend claims of newness and genuine innovation mainly because it is a naturally conservative business built as it is on hoping plants will grow and prayers to the weather Gods. However, this does not prevent some in the industry from running around and claiming to be in possession of the cousin of newness: rediscovery.
Claims by younger folks to have rediscovered some important principle or approach to winemaking that had eluded or been forgotten, or brushed aside by their parents and grandparents, have become more common in wine. Such claims, for example, are at the foundation of the natural wine movement.