The Next Vine

What the vineyard taught me about plans, markets, and not mistaking doom for wisdom.

The sweat starts at my forehead and runs straight into my eyes before I have made it halfway down the first row.

I wipe it away with the back of my left hand, which does not help much because the glove is already torn through in two places and has been damp since I put it on. I should have thrown it away a week ago, but I keep wearing it because it still almost works, which is apparently enough for me. The holes are where the vine rubs against my fingers when I push the new shoots off the old wood. Thumb, forefinger, a little pressure, a small snap if I catch it right. If I catch it wrong, the shoot bends instead of breaking and I have to come back at it again.

I should have brought water.

This is the kind of insight I am very good at having once it is no longer useful. The bottle was in the kitchen, or the car, or somewhere close enough that a reasonable person would have gone back for it before stepping into the block. But once I start something in the vineyard, I have a hard time letting the interruption in. No music, no headphones, no podcast to make the time pass. Just the row in front of me, the next vine, the next shoot, the next little mistake I can see from two steps away and somehow still feel responsible for.

The grafting is finished, technically. Two large blocks of Merlot have been cut and grafted over to Chenin Blanc and Savagnin, which sounds much cleaner than it looks in the weeks after. The new grafts are beginning to take, but the old Merlot wood is pushing wherever it still can. Low on the trunk, around the head, under the ties, from places I thought had gone quiet. It is not dramatic. It is just growth, which is to say it becomes a problem if you let it.

So I am out here cleaning it off.

Nobody told me to do this. Nobody is watching. The Merlot did not fail us. It grew where it was planted, on old roots, in a region that has made a long argument for the grape and does not need me to approve of it. But respect for what a place has done is not the same as repeating it. We came here because we thought we could sense something else in the place, and because we were stubborn enough, or maybe foolish enough, to bet everything on that as well.

So we grafted Chenin and Savagnin onto roots that spent decades feeding something else entirely. We will not know for a few years whether that was right. The vines will tell us, slowly, in the way vines tell you things, which is without any particular concern for your timeline or your anxiety.

Meanwhile the old wood keeps pushing back. That is what it knows how to do.

I have been reading a lot of doom lately about this industry. Not intentionally. It has a way of findsing you these days. Especially on this platform. The wine market is broken. Consumers are changing what they want, what they spend, and how much attention they have to give. Hospitality is hemorrhaging. LVMH is down. China is out. The US is uncertain. Younger drinkers are not drinking. The whole thing, depending on who you read, is either in terminal lucidity or managed decline or both.

Some of that is true. Probably most of it. I am not going to pretend the market we launched into felt welcoming, because it did not. We moved to France at the beginning of one of the worst wine markets in decades, which was either very brave or very stupid and most days feels like both. There have been moments when I have wondered whether any of this was worth it. Real moments, not the romantic kind.

The doom is very confident. It knows exactly how bad things are and exactly why and exactly what it means. It has data and precedent and a coherent narrative of decline. What it does not have, as far as I can tell, is much interest in what happens next, or who is already building it, or what it might look like when it arrives.

There is an economy to bad news that I think we forget about. It feels like seriousness or like facing reality. But after a certain point it starts to function less like diagnosis and more like weather, like something that happens to you, something you report on, something that explains why you are not moving.

I am not interested in that anymore.

Not because I have suddenly become an optimist, which would alarm everyone who knows me, but because I can feel what that loop does to my decisions. Last year we had one distributor. Now we have four. We are not where I want to be yet. I would like a few more, in the right places, and we are working on it. But we are where we need to be.

Our mailing list just bought out the first white wine we have ever released from this place. People who have followed us from Long Island and Texas and people who found us somewhere along the way opened their wallets for a small amount of Chardonnay from a young block in Francs because they wanted to be part of whatever this is becoming.

That is not a recovery story. It is not a unicorn story either. I am not good looking enough or weird enough to be a unicorn, and I have made peace with that. It is just a small business doing the work, building slowly, in a difficult time, without much patience left for the argument about what version of wine is going to win.

I do not think that argument is the right one anymore. I used to. I used to believe we were in a battle, natural wine versus mass production versus luxury versus whatever camp you wanted to declare yourself part of, and that one version would eventually prevail. I am less sure now. Not because the distinctions do not matter. But because battle language has a way of limiting the future before it even has a chance. It asks everything to choose a side before it has had time to become itself.

What is happening in wine right now is probably not one story beating another. It is more like the old stories losing their grip at the same time, and none of us are going to recognize the other side until we are already standing in it looking back. That should probably unsettle me more than it does, but here I am.

Instead I keep thinking about the aperos. In the last week alone there have been five or six wine dinners, parties, tables that started with a bottle and ended somewhere else entirely. Everything from a Soreli from a Southern France upstart to a 2009 Saute-Loup, bottles that had very little to do with one another except that someone brought them, someone opened them, and for a while they gave the room somewhere to go. New friends, or new-for-here friends, which in expat time means anyone who knew you before your last haircut. Nobody needed to announce what any of it meant for the future of the industry. That is not a business model. It is evidence of life. And life, as far as I can tell, is still where wine actually lives.

The graft either takes or it does not. The shoot either stays or it comes off. The vine does not care what I read that morning or whether I have found the correct moral posture for a time of creative destruction. It needs the old growth removed before it starts pulling energy away from the new shoots. That is all.

At some point I finally stand still long enough to admit I need to get out of the row. My face is hot, my glove smells like wet leather and vine sap, and the rows behind me are cleaner than they were, though not clean enough. They never are.

I walk back toward the car thinking about the water I should have brought and the work that will still be there tomorrow. The market will do what it does. The stories will keep circulating. The doom will find new data to confirm itself.

After lunch I will bring water. I may even take one row at a time, though I do not want to make promises I cannot keep.