Is wine art or craft? It’s the kind of question that can seem fun to knock around when the evening grows late and the company is the sort to both have opinions and enjoy airing them. I’ve gone more than a few rounds with friends on this topic, and while I’m not sure I’ve been able to fully convince even myself one way or the other, the exercise continues to feel worthwhile.
My current thinking is that the art vs. craft debate is almost entirely a thicket of our own devising. At bottom, art and craft are each a kind of fashioning — something the anthropologists tell us is a peculiarly human obsession — with more in common than not. And while arts and crafts seem to have been happy to stroll along arm in arm for a few hundred generations, somewhere along the line we decided that art was a different, better sort of fashioning.In this view, art is something that begins in craft practice, but at some point transcends it. Craft is the caterpillar; art the butterfly, might be one conception of this surprising and unexpected transformation. With this shift came an elevation in our notion of art as something uniquely expressive, visionary and moving. The question is, what makes art (and artists) possible at all?
An answer I find increasingly compelling is that the potential for art is in the nature of the materials and work itself, and the degree to which they give freedom to the creative agent. The traditional fine arts: painting, drawing, sculpture, musical composition and literature all offer virtually limitless possibilities for creativity; while shoemaking, furniture making, metalwork, jewelry, and couture (to name a few) are by their nature far more limiting in this respect, in part because they must always be subservient to a specific function.
For me, winemaking falls into the second category. The processes and materials involved simply don’t allow for the kind of wide-ranging freedom of action art lays claim to. I regret to say no wine equivalent of either the Sistine Chapel frescoes (lampooned above) or something that could be said to be wine’s version of abstract expressionism is on the horizon.
Wine has always been and remains amazingly rich in variety, symbolic meanings and magical/religious allusion, not to mention its unparalleled pleasure-giving, mood-enhancing properties and the faithful service it performs at our daily meals. Its best examples have deep historical sources and are paragons of practical skill and sound aesthetic judgment.
And that’s more than enough for me.