Winemaking as Art

There is a common theme that runs through most arguments that deny that wine can be art. According to the skeptics, works of art are reflections of an artist’s intentions, especially the intention to be creative or original. By contrast, great wines are the result of healthy grapes grown in good soil under optimal weather conditions along with skillful management of the winemaking process. Winemakers intend to make good wine but they lack sufficient control over weather and other environmental factors and thus cannot precisely determine what the final product will taste like. Thus, the final product is more a matter of nature’s course than the winemaker’s intentions.

This argument, it seems to me, is bogus.

Of course, because of advances in winemaking technology, winemakers today have a lot more control over the final product than in the past. But wines made with too much technology are generally considered to be inferior to wines of terroir, according the reigning ideology in the wine world, and are thus not the best candidates to qualify as works of art. So for the sake of the argument less put winemaking technology aside.

The argument nevertheless  doesn’t work because it overestimates the role of intentions in the art making process and underplays the role of intentions in the winemaking process.

(1) Many works of art are not the product of the artist’s intention either because they allow chance to play an important role (for instance the work of Jackson Pollock) or because the final product is quite different from what the artist intended. Picasso once said:

“You start a painting and it becomes something different altogether. It’s strange how little the artist’s will matters.”

(2) Even when the artist’s intentions explain the final product, they still must work under the constraints of their materials. A sculptor’s artistic intentions are guided by the nature of the stone she is carving just as a winemaker’s intentions are guided by the nature of the grapes she is using.

(3) Some works of art, especially environmental art, employ the contingencies of nature as part of the artbmaking process, the work of Andy Goldsworthy for example. If environmental art is genuine art, why not wine?

Finally, (4) The most important intention operating within the process of creating art is a general intention to produce something of aesthetic interest with some degree of originality. Artists may not always have specific intentions to produce art works with specific features but they have general intentions to make interesting, original works.

But of course so do winemakers, at least the winemakers who care about quality. As Randall Grahm winemaker at Bonny Doon and Popelouchum Vineyards told me in an interview:

The genius of a grand cru or a unique terroir is its originality; in other words, wines from that place don’t taste like anything else out there; in crass commercial terms, that is their “value add.”

And no winemaker wants to hear that their wine tastes like the wine made down the street.

The fact that the originality is in part the result of the distinctiveness of their materials does not disqualify works of art. (see 2 above) Thus it should not disqualify wines of quality and distinction.

Wine doesn’t make itself and the making of quality wine is seldom an accident. A winemaker who doesn’t intend to make a distinctive wine probably won’t (exceptions notwithstanding).