Against Enclosure, Love: The Radical Poetry of Wine
Spring 2024 Wine Club Release
Welcome to the first wine club blog of 2024, friends! We are returning to the original wine club format to be a little more phone friendly, so take your time and enjoy this contemplation!
The Essay
Wine is precious; not merely as substance but as a process. How many of us dream of being a vigneron or vignolo walking fields and sampling in cellars day after day, guiding and coaxing beautiful nectar into being at its own pace? How often has our ache for a simpler and more connected life projected itself into romantic images of the winemaking process? But do we see how this ache and desire is actually part of the process, possibly even the driving force? Perhaps if we did, we could guide and coax that beautiful nectar of our dreams into a more joyful and liberated reality.
Joy is productive, scarcity is constructed
Wine is a joy to share. It’s something that we love that we get to share, and our joy is multiplied by its sharing. Wine is also an agricultural product that requires investment of time and resources, and carries the risk of disappointment and loss. It’s an expression of culture and history, in many ways a form of preservation and conservation. What I want to demonstrate is that sharing and connection is not only the producer of joy but also the prime mover of the production process itself.
Circuits of production
We try to spend our lives doing things that create joy for ourselves and others, including things that are difficult, unpleasant or uncomfortable. We choose careers, cities, and social groups that we believe will support us in this. The way that we understand and think about our lives, and our ability to dream and imagine new experiences, profoundly shapes these decisions. In turn, the way we understand the outcomes of our past decisions shapes the way that we think about our current ones. You may have heard this called praxis. You can think of it as a cycle:
It’s more helpful to think of it as a circuit, because action and reflection happen at the same time, in different stages, even when we’re not conscious of it; and there’s an energetic charge that flows throughout these circuits that moves us. It’s also helpful to view this process as a circuit because it only retains energy through repetitive cycles. You may feel a spark or a burst of energy and even be transformed by it, but unless that energy can ebb and flow, it doesn’t sustain.
Joy is productive when shared
Just like live wires, these circuits don’t flow without connection. Different kinds of connections, like friendships, relationships, and careers, bring different kinds of energies into our lives, and just like an electrical circuit, create a corresponding magnetic field that attracts or repels more connections. Some people view this process through a magical lens, calling it manifestation, or divine providence, but we’re going to take a more critical look at it.
Building on our last issue, you can see your life as a special kind of ecology. The patterns that recur there leave their impressions, and we are attuned to those tracks whether we know it or not. These can be patterns of physical activity like dance or desk work, patterns of thought and emotion like gratitude or blame, or patterns of relationships like mentorship or exploitation. Like rivers, these patterns shape our lives, working deeper, sometimes overflowing, sometimes changing course. Like rivers, we can attempt to shape these patterns, but only to the extent that we understand them, and never without consequence. And like rivers, these patterns are never ours alone but shared. A river cannot only have one bank.
When patterns flowing through many peoples’ lives converge, it draws those people together, e.g. to a wine bar, coffee shop, neighborhood or city. Even if these combinations are incompatible at first, shared patterns are reinforced and multiplied, and often adapted to their specific assemblage. In this way, people coming together generates new forms of enjoyment. However, this convergence is subject to limitation. To find each other and enact these shared patterns, people need to have certain things in common: space, language, understanding, free time, resources. When these conditions are met, people weave the patterns of their lives together into an immensely creative and adaptive tapestry. When parts are missing, that adaptation is similarly limited. And when our shared patterns are defined by scarcity, lack, and precarity, they tend to reinforce the scarcity that defines them.
Scarcity is constructed by enclosure of the common
The works of Elinor Ostrom and Silvia Federici present a deep and thorough analysis of what factors determine our ability to compose a life in common. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri present a historiography of these efforts and a geography that locates our pattern making squarely in common knowledges, codes, affects, and practices. They take it a step further by elaborating how our differences also contribute to the common, building on a concept of singularity. Each person has something unique to offer and the strength of our common bonds can create room for that offering to occur. However, these authors are not writing to catalog processes that are widespread but to advocate for processes that are endangered or emergent.
Writing as an inhabitant of North America, it may be that the experience we have most in common is that of scarcity and competition for resources. Although surrounded by abundance, the distribution of access to that abundance is unimaginably uneven, and the structures of distribution opaque and labyrinthine. Opening and operating Grandiflora has made that abundantly clear to me.
This process of creating in common is exciting and interesting. Wine and music are great examples of compelling art mobilizing people across geographic and cultural boundaries to support the emergence of new culture. Hardt and Negri argue that it’s becoming the prime mover of the global economy. But if this is the case, why don’t we see more of it? Why aren’t we producing necessities we desperately need like food and housing with this model?
The exciting thing is that we are. Like a newborn baby, it’s not pretty but it’s beautiful. Contemporary research is revealing that much of the world’s basic needs, specifically care needs, are being met outside of the formal economy — that is, without the exchange of money and outside of a market or employment relationship. This means that, for the most part, people coordinate care in exactly the way I am describing. This is a model that is flexible, adaptable, resilient, and responsive to people’s moment to moment needs. And any caretaker can tell you that this is indeed how most care is actually delivered — please ask them! Why, then, if this is such a great model, are caretakers and care workers — nurses, teachers, sanitation workers, and service workers — always exhausted? Let’s talk about enclosure.
The flexibility and adaptability of the commons model of production makes it attractive. However, it’s difficult to monetize. Can you imagine having to pay your friends, parents, grandparents, and other people that have cared for you over your life? Can you imagine billing them? Without even getting into how destructive that would be socially, it’s already a bureaucratic nightmare. Moreover, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, these informal bonds of reciprocity actually constitute society. Not only is it okay to owe each other something, it brings us closer.
I use care as an example because it may be one of the last commons, and it is under threat. Breathable air is another, plant genomes a third. But there are other commons we have lost that may yet be regained. What we now call intellectual property — music and knowledge — was a commons until the 20th century. Ocean fisheries and water were common until the 17th century. Forests and pastures were common until the 15th century. Each of these commons were enclosed — institutions formed to regulate access to them — at a definite point in time and place.
Enclosure is the act of creating an institution to appropriate the results of this process. Raquel Rolnick traces the way the creation of formal titling systems are being used today to enclose land. Elinor Ostrom and Robert Michael Pyle discuss the enclosure of water rights in the western US, and Ostrom contrasts this with Filipino irrigation systems, many of which remain common. Silvia Federici provides a compelling history of this process in Western Europe in Caliban and the Witch.
The enclosure of the commons produces wealth at first, but over time — as we have seen with forests, fisheries, aquifers, and soil — it erodes, sometimes literally, the source of its productivity. Although this process may seem inevitable and final, it is neither, and a multitude of movements around the world are fighting to protect and restore the common wealth of the planet.
This is a grim image, the consumption of the planet. But it’s a necessary view to understand why hospitality and wine are so important to us at Grandiflora, and to frame our next few wine club releases. The commons that we are trying to create and restore is agricultural literacy, and wine is the best way to do that.
Hospitality as immersive theater renegotiates enclosure
Most of the processes of enclosure — land, water, and music — we describe take place in a framework of rights and property. But at a restaurant, what is it exactly that you’re paying for? You’re paying for food and wine, yes. But rolled into that cost are so many other factors — inhabiting a welcoming and comfortable space, being surrounded by friendly people, perhaps lively music, beautiful art, and being cared for by knowledgeable and talented staff. You’re also contributing to the space through your participation. And you’re not getting billed directly for any of that, and that, surprisingly, is where the great hope for humanity lies.
Hospitality navigates between the private, the public, and the common. The licensing process for a restaurant places it in the public domain, and ownership of restaurants remains for the most part private. But the atmosphere of a restaurant is definitively a commons. Each singular actor contributes to the space in their own way, which is ambiguous and malleable from moment to moment. There’s no way to tally and bill the value that’s created in common through that process, but it is understood to have value. Most powerfully, this commons must be re-created constantly, every night, and its ephemerality provides its resilience against extraction and appropriation. The bill can only ever be an approximation, a guess at what this magic will need to keep re-emerging for another night, another month, another year.
As we get to know each other, this cyclical process of gathering and creating common joy gathers its own momentum and draws others in. This is not to say restaurants aren’t problematic — they are! Although for many, food and beverage service is a site of conflict and immiseration, its unique combination of material, emotional, and intellectual production provides the opportunity for us to create a new world every night.
Finally, Wine
While the magic of restaurants is based in the momentary creation of common joy, the foundation of the experience is the way that it connects people across the world to meet each others’ needs. You can inhabit a restaurant for a moment, the smallest commitment, and make a small contribution to that space. But the production of wine requires a deep commitment and deep understanding. Each vintage requires a person to be in the vineyard, in tune with the vines, and a person to raise that wine in the cellar.
With enough money, you can buy everything you need to make wine and have it delivered to you, including the grapes. You can force wine to taste the way you want with lab grown yeasts and chemical additives. You don’t even have to tell anyone. Wine no longer demands a connection to the earth and the workers. But removing the relations of force in the cellar by choosing to make natural wine has a ripple effect. If you’re not able to force the wine to conform to market expectations, you now have to represent what it is and why it is the way it is. If you’re not able to sterilize the vineyard you have to pay your workers enough to care. Natural wine is caring work, with all its messy ambiguities.
Because natural wine is care work and because caring must proceed in common, the value created by it cannot be fully captured. It’s not economic; it’s not competitive. This is why it falls to us to choose to nurture these connections and share them. That’s why we only carry natural wine, and why we’re so grateful to you for your support. May it be a joy to everyone involved.
The Wines
Cascina Val Liberata, Piedmonte “Cenerina” (Slarina)
Early wine club members may remember falling in love with Fabrizio Iuli’s cuvee of Slarina for our second release ever. Cascina Val Liberata is made by friends and neighbors of Fabrizio’s — Dierdre O’Brien and Maurizio Caffer. They are just the next hill over from Monferrato in Villamiroglio, and their Slarina was planted the year after the Iuli’s. They actually started their farm the year before and got turned on to Slarina by the same professors — Anna Schneider and Stefano Raimondi at the University of Turin.
As you know, we love Piemonte as a region, and feel particularly connected to it after our visit to Asti and Barolo in 2018 — before we knew we’d be opening a wine bar! One of the reasons to love this place is its proliferation of little niches — just like Pinot Noir in Burgundy, Nebbiolo in the Langhe has a different expression for every side of the hill, if you know how to coax it out. The refinement of skill this requires combined with the intense and unpredictable disease pressure from the fog leads to winemakers with intimate connections with their landscape. That’s why it’s so fun to revisit this nearly-extinct varietal, Slarian, and this region!
Cascina Val Liberata takes a more biodynamic approach than Cascina Iuli, making their own preparations with herbs and stones and using an astrological calendar to encourage the natural vigor of the vines. The Cenerina is named for the density of yeast on the grapes during the harvest, which looks like a layer of ash. It’s fermented in stainless steel and aged in cement for 6 months. Although this has depth and complexity centered by bright acid and floral notes, I pick up a rich earthy wildness throughout the palate.
Vinyes Singulars, Anfora Xarello White
by Erin
In January of this year, Erin and Jason visited Ignasi Segui from Vinyes Singulars, which makes this particular wine our first producer visit on behalf of the wine club and Grandiflora!
Ignasi’s family has owned the land that he farms on for 23 generations, so his knowledge of the land and the surrounding community is intimate and extensive. He walked us alongside one of his 70 year old vineyards and introduced us to freestanding bush vines of xarello. As we wandered around a small part of his property where his family house is located, we delighted in finding a lemon tree and a quince tree, as well as an olive grove across the road! We even got to follow his free roaming chickens around, reminding us of when we used to have a tiny flock of chickens in the woods of Washington state.
After showing us his beautiful, gnarled, yet very cute old vines, Ignasi brought us to his remarkably compact fermentation room where he had several oak barrels, steel tanks, and even amphorae for fermenting and aging his prolific cuvees. He also has an off site project where he collaborates with a neighbor to produce cider! For the next hour we tasted so many delicious wines straight from the source, delighting in skin contact whites and orange wines like xarello and macabeo, to lighter reds including sumoll and a refreshing co-fermented field blend.
While appreciating the scope of his vineyards, groves, and winemaking projects, the main question that we wondered was: who helps you to do all this work? We did encounter a couple of helpers that were friendly and very industrious, and Ignasi informed us of a concept that was intriguing and worth thinking about. In the spirit of the theme of collaboration, Ignasi actually unites with people who are qualified and willing to work in his vineyards and winery and provides them with housing in exchange for work. The folks working with him also get to keep a percentage of the fruits that they’re responsible for in order to pursue their own projects!
Now you probably want to hear about the Anphora Xarello, which is one of your four wines this quarter! We did get to taste the most recent vintage of this beauty straight out of the amphora, and this is one reason why we’re so excited to share this with you. It has seen some skin contact, but given the subjectivity on what qualifies as an “orange” wine (is it the color? Or the presence of a certain number of days on skins?) we’re just going to stick with calling it a skin contact white, as many wine makers seem to prefer. This is going to have some texture, depth, and vibrancy. It’s a great food wine (definitely recommended with fresh bread, olive oil, and a variety of hard Spanish cheese), but it also is great to enjoy around the table with friends. The amphora that this comes from is located above ground and is a little bit smaller, in contrast to those you might have heard about in Georgia that are buried in the earth and large enough for a person to enter for cleaning. All of Ignasi’s wines have a strong personality, and this one is no exception!
Barranco Oscuro Varetuo Tempranillo
Manuel Valenzuela, born 1943 in Granada, showed an early talent for science. The second to last of a large family, his father sent him to Barcelona to train as a professional chemist. There he met his wife Rosa, who had a dream of living on a farm in the country — this will become important. For undisclosed reasons which I can nevertheless guess, he was forced to flee the Franco dictatorship in the early 1960s. He moved to the south of France, but that wasn’t safe from Franco’s agents; he then fled to Paris. While living there he was introduced to the burgeoning natural wine movement.
After Franco died in 1975, Manuel moved back to Barcelona to resume his life and career. However, in 1979, he learned of an opportunity to buy a share of an old farm estate close to Granada and moved back home, just like us. There were no vines remaining on the property, but there were vats of wine. Manuel and Rosa shared this with their friends, who agreed it was so good they should try to make it.
Initially he was following the traditions of the region and learning from local growers, but he soon took a critical perspective on it, traveling around the Mediterranean and adopting organic methods. The perspective he picked up at the beginning of the French natural wine movement in 1960s Paris re-emerged in his work in the 1980s. Because his vineyards are the second highest in Europe, Manuel has continually had to adapt his methods in partnership with the place.
Eventually one of his bottles made it to Manuel Carillo, a local restaurant owner, who convinced them to bottle under their own label starting in 1984. Manuel eventually developed his own winemaking philosophy, rejecting both organic and biodynamic certification as subject to corruption by unscrupulous individuals. Instead, he has joined the associations Productores de Vino Natural and Vinnatur, both organizations based on membership and transparency.
This is a local variety of Tempranillo called Varetuo, the name of the cuvee. No herbicides, pesticides, or synthetics are used in the vineyard, and no sulfur in the cellar. True to Valenzuela’s style, it’s made with a very short maceration, and partial destemming, with no temperature control besides the cold nights for fermentation. And true to its elevation, this is a more delicate expression, with high toned spicy aromatics and a fine texture despite a robust body.
Sebastian Van de Sype, Emilia-Romagna Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Rifermenato
by Erin
We met Sebastian in December at an intimate tasting event at Sub Rosa bakery in Richmond. We were accompanied by our good friend Karine Varga of Chartreuse Bistro (who also happened to be the one who convinced us all to travel to Catalonia together in January). The tasting featured just three producers and was open to industry folk only due to the delightfully small nature of the space (if you haven’t visited Sub Rosa yet, you MUST add it to your visit list of best bakery in Virginia in Erin’s opinion, and I am very discerning, having been raised by a Turkish mom, and she is notoriously particular about bread. Also, Sub Rosa happens to be run by a Turkish owner named Evrim, which is also the name of my little brother. But enough of the random beautiful connections).
To be honest, the main draw of this gathering was an invitation to meet certain exalted winemakers via an excited email from Michael, one of our most joyful wine representatives. He was just so excited to inform us of the rare opportunity to meet with both Frank Cornelissen and Jean Pierre Robinot in Richmond within the next week. We of course promptly coordinated a visit to Richmond with Karine, and once there, happily encountered industry professionals at Sub Rosa from other lovely natural wine venues including Love Song, Pink Dinghy, Celladora, Second Bottle, Afterglow Coffee, Acid Fish/Hashi Chow, and Terroirizer among others.
While meeting with old friends and new, we all got in line to taste with a new producer that we had not yet heard of — Sebastian Van de Sype. He was pouring right next to Frank Cornelissen (of the celebrated eponymous Mt Etna winery), and was close to him because Frank was one of his mentors! Sebastian has just started producing Lambrusco in Emilia Romagna, so we did not yet have any expectations — but as we started tasting through his lineup and listening to his story of getting started, we found ourselves becoming more and more curious about his wine. I wonder about the pressure of pouring your brand new wine next to two world renown producers — I think I would have been quite nervous myself — but Sebastian’s lambruscos were delightfully dry and refreshing, reflecting the youthful vigor of 15 year old vines with an eye for balancing tradition with modern concerns for natural wine making.
Reserve: La Vigne Sauvage Chasselas, ‘La Sauvageonne’ 2019
David Humbert at La Vigne Sauvage farms very simply above Lake Geneva in the upper Savoie. With no machines and two small parcels, Humbert embodies the vigneron ideal that is fast disappearing. What this allows him to do is focus entirely on his relationship with the land, the vines, and the grapes, expressing extremely subtle nuances of the terroir.
Starting out in 2012 at Les Vignes des Paradis with Dominique Lucas, a Burgundian who came to Savoie to practice more natural winemaking, David has converted one of his parcels to Demeter certified biodynamics and is in the certification process for the other. The wine you are receiving this quarter is from the converted parcel in Marignan, one of the Crus of Savoie.
Although this wine club’s theme is collaboration, I want to revisit this classic vigneron model with that lens. David is trained as an agricultural consultant and was introduced to wine through his trade. His mentor, Dominique Lucas, however, comes from an old winemaking family and has managed prestigious estates. They met in Haut-Savoie because of their common interest in natural wine, and each has been crucial to the others’ success.
Focus, clarity, subtlety, and terroir expression are my key notes for this wine. 100% Chasselas, direct pressed to stainless steel. Bottled unfined, unfiltered, and without sulfur.
Reserve: Brij Wine, Nythia Cab Franc/Malbec 2022
Raj is a great example of the power of your network to create through you. Raj started as a chef in Calcutta before coming to New York for culinary school. He made his way out to California, falling in love with wine and studying under master somm Larry Stone at his restaurant Rubicon until becoming a master somm himself.
Raj’s resume is impressive, and it speaks to his ability to lead. Because he’s so well published, my research for this section really incorporates the evolution of his perspective. Two things stand out to me consistently: one, that Raj is quick to credit his influences, mentors, and collaborators; and two, that he’s always reading the landscape for necessary adaptations.
In contrast to David Humbert, Raj works across a broad range of disciplines based on mutual interest. His background in restaurants seems to be key to his interdisciplinary leadership, and my inspiration from his work showing up at Grandiflora! As you know, we create growth opportunities for our staff and our community by building bridges between perspectives.
What’s striking to me about this wine is its integrity. Tannin, fruit and acid are incredibly well balanced on the palate and finish, and a humming minerality sparkles throughout. Wild yeast, zero zero and organic from Massa Vineyards.
Well, that’s it for now folks! I hope you’re feeling inspiration and delight from this little detour. Keep an eye on your inbox for our next pickup event announcement. See you at the bar!
Jason and Erin
