It’s been awhile since I’ve seen this argument in print but it has really become standard fare. Tim James in World of Fine Wine used his recall of a fine Amontillado tasting to proclaim that regardless of how profound a wine is, it cannot be a work of art.
It’s possible, though, to think of more natural processes as equally wonderful, where human intervention is as crucial but more responsive and less defining than in art.
Winemaker’s respond; artists define or something like that.
Responding to this quote from Bernard Clavel—“Wine is the most beautiful hymn the earth, the wind, the sun, and the rain have ever written”—James writes, “I like that lyrical flight—but how to see nature’s hymn as human art?”
The standard objection arrives with the false clarity of a slogan: artists create; winemakers amplify. Painters, composers, and poets allegedly begin with a blank canvas and impose their will, while vintners merely coax what weather and soil have already ordained. Add the companion claim—that artists enjoy far more control over their medium than winemakers do—and the verdict seems foregone: wine can’t be art. But both premises are historically naïve and philosophically thin. The conclusion is supposed to be obvious; it isn’t.
First, if winemaking cannot be art because it relies too much on nature, then what about environmental art? Is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty that disappears and reappears with changes in water level not a work of art?
Secondly, the “blank canvas” is a myth. No artist begins ex nihilo. Every artistic medium brings dispositions—tendencies that become manifest under the right conditions—that resist and redirect artist’s intentions. Oils behave otherwise than watercolors; a violin colors a line differently than an oboe; painters wrestle with the flat plane of the canvas as surely as a vintner wrestles with a cool spring or a hot September. Art gets its friction from matter’s obduracy—from materials that don’t cooperate with the artist’s aim and require creativity before becoming expressive.
Third, control is not the litmus test for art. Some canonical art reduces control deliberately: Arp’s collages, Kelly’s chance-driven canvases, Pollock’s drips. If artistic value depended on micromanagement, half of modernism would be disqualified. Vintage variation, vineyard limits, ferment dynamics—these are not the enemies of artistry but the very pressures that give winemaking its creative spark.
And finally, intentions in art are not always specific target-states (“I will now produce elegance by increasing X”). Much of making art proceeds through general intentions—a cultivated sensibility that filters choices, establishes thresholds, and recognizes, at decisive moments, “that’s it. That is what I was looking for.” These stopping heuristics are often tacit, yet they regulate the artist’s work. An ear that says when a passage resolves; an eye that knows when a surface breathes. These are much like the winemaker’s careful observation and selection. Replace the caricature of the calculating mastermind with this more faithful picture of artistic agency—receptive, selective, criterial—and the difference between studio and cellar shrinks.
James writes:
With great old Sherry—as just one example—I think of wine made appropriately to its ultimate purpose: of careful human observation and selection; of our understanding how different yeasts work; and how, rather mysteriously, time works—deleteriously or with wonderful effect. I think of Antonio Flores quietly moving among the butts in the vast, dim, cool, human-constructed spaces of Jerez’s bodegas—sampling, judging, guiding, waiting, selecting.
As if careful observation, judging, and selection are not crucial to the artistic process.
In the vineyard and winery, tasting is the generative engine of imagination. Winemakers taste berries, fermentations, and lots; they project possibilities; they revise aims as the material answers back. Picking is not logistics; it is aesthetic authorship with consequences for line, tension, and contour in the finished wine. These choices are guided by background commitments (intensity, harmony, finesse, elegance), even when no single flavor target is fixed in advance. And then there is winemaking’s distinctive temporal profile: watchful waiting—the discipline of knowing when to intervene and when to refrain, when to rack, blend, or simply let the wine become itself. In wine, patience is a technique.
Terroir, too, is not a dictator but a score open to interpretation. If terroir “transcends” control, it nevertheless requires translation; two conscientious vintners will render the same site differently, and those differences are not errors but styles—the expression of a sensibility working with dispositions that the site affords. Originality matters here every bit as much as in painting or jazz; the point is not to erase place but to articulate it.
But surely,” the skeptic insists, “weather still trumps intention.” Sometimes it does—and sometimes the pianist’s cracked nail trumps Chopin. Yet winemakers have tools: blending from distinct lots, choosing élevage, managing extraction and oxygen, and when necessary deploying contemporary viticultural and enological technologies that refine texture and aromatic lift. None of this guarantees greatness, but it amply demonstrates that the cellar is not a passive echo chamber for nature.
The deeper mistake in the standard argument is metaphysical and aesthetic. It assumes that artistic value is a function of sovereign control and self-expression. But many artworks are not about broadcasting the self; they are studies in what materials can do when intelligently handled—light for the Impressionists, color for the Fauvists, the grain and body of paint in impasto. We admire not the artist’s ego but the fusion of idea and matter—the way an intention becomes legible through the stubborn qualities of the medium. Winemaking sits squarely in this tradition: a practice that foregrounds what grapes, microbes, wood, steel, and glass can do when guided by a sensibility determined to make them sing.
So the objection inverts the truth. Wine isn’t less like art because nature matters; it is artlike precisely because it stages the same drama art has always staged: receptive intelligence grappling with recalcitrant materials until, at last, the work says “enough.” Call wine a slow art—an art of duration and timing, of patience and surprise—where creativity does not shout but listens, and where the most decisive act is sometimes restraint. If that doesn’t count as art, then Monet’s plein air and Mozart’s silence are in trouble, too.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 