Many of our readers will be familiar with the pleasures of Europe’s small, family-owned restaurants; places where a husband and wife split the front and back of the house duties, one behind the stove, the other expertly managing the dining room. The idea is to minimize paid help and provide their clientèle with the kind of genuine solicitude and warmth that will keep them coming back. As a customer, you feel that your pleasure offers your hosts a satisfaction that can’t be accounted for on a spreadsheet.
Family winemaking properties are often run in a like fashion and on a similar, modest scale. They may take the form of a young couple who have fled the city to try their hand pruning vines and working a press, or they might be siblings whose parents have at last decided to hand over the reins of a centuries-old estate to a fresh generation.
In either of these cases, and their many permutations, it frequently happens that one of the pair will prefer to manage and maintain the vineyards, while the other is drawn to, and is more adept at, overseeing the transition of the resulting fruit into wine. Whether in the field of the cellar, the task will be challenging, and the forty or so vintages each generation gets to oversee in a lifetime of work may be scarcely enough to learn all there is to know about the singular character — the whereness, shall we say — of the place that is the theater of their labor. What Hippocrates said of medicine is equally true here: The art is long, life short.
Of course this model isn’t the only one in play. Wine has a long history of industrial-scale production dating at least from the slave labor-dependent latifundia characteristic of the mature Roman Empire, and later, in the hands of the monastic orders of the Middle Ages. Pious bequests and endowments allowed Benedictines and Cistercian communities to manage extensive, international networks of production and distribution., and to undertake much of the R&D and standard-setting that, for good or ill — or a bit of both — has made modern wine what it is. (See our “Prayer into Wine” here for more on this)
Institutions and corporations of this kind exist as counterweights to mortality. With their durable chains of organization, infrastructure, funding and fungible labor, the brief span of a single human life means much less than it does in the normal course of things. The art may still be long; but life — in the form of the institution — is indefinitely extended. This isn’t the only way in which institutions differ from persons, but it’s an especially significant one.
We continue to believe that the family winery provides the ideal conditions for producing the sort of wine we want to sell and drink: Wine that from start to finish is in the hands of people for whom work is both an extension and expression of their domestic lives and a source of personal and familial identity . . . and pride. I can’t think of a better way to describe wine like this, other than to say it is, above all things, humane.
Shall we have another glass? Things being as they are, we could all use it.