#128 Why Humanists? Not Wine?

A reader wrote about last week's post: "Have you run out of things to say about wine?"

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Diana and I will be traveling for the next two weeks, and this Substack, Being a Boundary Breaker, will be on hiatus for those two weeks. It will be back on Sunday, April 13, at 6 AM ET.

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Last week’s Substack #127, was about one of the “humanists” that I have found on the Substack platform. After reading that post, a regular reader wrote me the following:

Hmmm, me wonders if you are running out of wine-related topics worthy of a post.

I didn’t mention wine in that post. He’s right. But here is the connection I was trying to to make with wine.

Last week’s post made a distinction between “humanists” and “technologists.” “Humanists” spend more time on the subject of humans. “Technologists” spend more time on machines.

Few of us spend our time entirely as a humanist or as a technologist. It is possible to operate simultaneously as both.

What I was trying to say is that it is possible to for these two inclinations to get out of balance. In the Substack that I referred to last week, The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia, gave several examples of where they are out of balance.

(If you want to read another such Substack post, this one goes deep on the human side of things. It is not behind a paywall. See Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack.)

In the Finger Lakes, there is a balance, where human beings grow grapes and make wine with the help of machines.

We use machines in the vineyard to manage vines, but not in a way that surpasses the human element.

In regions like ours, where winemakers are producing smaller volumes of wine, the human contributions exceed those of machines. Just as they do in the vineyard.

When it comes to making the most affordable wines in high volume, machines dominate the process. The final product—millions of cases of wine that taste uniformly the same—is standardized and commodified to be sold to the widest possible audience.

At this industrial scale, it is just not economical to make wines in these quantities by hand. And the wine can be perfectly fine. But it is not likely to surprise or delight you.

During one of our Winter Wine Exploration series two years ago, we poured mass-produced, box-wine, side-by-side with expensive, artisanal wine made from the same grape variety. We tasted them blind.

After tasting them, we asked our guests if they could tell the difference between the two; yes. they could. And, without disclosing which was which, we asked them which they preferred; more than half said they preferred the box wine.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying wine that comes in a box. It is consistent, inexpensive and appealing to all palates. And to many of our guests, it tasted very familiar, which is one of the reasons that they preferred it over the much more expensive artisanal wine.

But….

When you fill a glass from a box using the button on the tap, it is very hard to find the “through-line” between the wine in your glass and the human being that was responsible for it. When the machines are making 20 million boxes of wine, there really is very little room for the “hand-of-the-maker.”

As everyone becomes more accustomed to wines made by machines, what happens to wines that humans make, the wines that taste a little different, that show the “hand-of-the-maker?” They lose ground. (As they did for half the people in our blind tasting.) And as this trend progresses, wines from smallerproducers, the humanists, gradually become harder and harder to find.

The majority of us here in the Finger Lakes are humanists choosing to make wine on a small scale. We are up against some very large machines, and we could be on the wrong side of history. That is the predicament that Ted Gioia describes in his Substack, The Honest Broker.