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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
- [01:01]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [02:00]
Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Meg Bernhard to tell us all about her book titled Wine, just published from Bloomsbury as part of the Object Lesson series. This book deals with wine, right? It's an agricultural product, but it's also a cultural commodity. It's a drink of ritual, of socialisation, but also of addiction. It can be pleasurable, it can be painful. It's a drink. It's a liquid, really, that can do a whole bunch of different things and is tied into a lot of different aspects, many of which this book investigates. So, Meg, thank you so much for joining us to tell us all about it.
- [02:44]
Meg Bernhard
Thank you for having me.
- [02:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Before we dive into your book, though, would you mind introducing yourself a little bit and explaining why you decided to write this book about wine?
- [02:55]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah. So I am a journalist and essayist from Southern California, currently based in Las Vegas, though I move around a lot, so that might not be true soon. I decided to write the book because in 2017 and 2018, right after I graduated college, I moved to Spain to work on small family vineyards, vineyards that were producing minimal intervention. Natural wine, maybe that's a term that you've heard of, but basically wine without added sulfites made in small production. And at the time, I really knew nothing about wine. In college, I was more accustomed to drinking cheap wine out of coffee mugs or sort of binge drinking. It was more about the intoxication than the actual pleasure of the drink. So I was a blank slate, the perfect learner for wine. I arrived right after the 2017 harvest, which ended up being an interesting time to start working on vineyards, because really, that's right after the harvest is when vines are dormant. There's not really much going on. They're recuperating their strength during the wintertime. And so for the first several months on this small vineyard in central Spain, I was helping with cellar work, with packaging, with labeling, with bottling. But then over the course of the year, I got to see one year in the life cycle of the grapevine. So I started out knowing nothing. But over the course of the year, I sort of developed a theory of wine, because all these winemakers were telling me about, here's what to expect during the harvest and here's how fermentation works, and here's the different sorts of decisions that can go into making a wine taste a certain way. So I was learning the theory of wine, and then by the end of the year, I got to actually see that theory in practice. And I found that rhythm of life really fascinating. And at the same time that I was working on these vineyards, I started to observe different power dynamics and power structures that were influencing, you know, everything from picking the grapes, you know, like labor, to the way that we talk about wine, which is often bound up in class to the people who were making wine, which is often, you know, bound up in gender and race. And I was really curious about these power structures that inform everything from production to the consumption of wine. So I decided after I got back to the US I had all of this knowledge base about wine. I wanted to do a little bit more reporting and really wanted to examine in a book length essay these different power structures. So it's not exhaustive, it's a personal account, but one that is looking at all these different facets of wine.
- [06:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for introducing us to that context that very much traces a lot of the things that I think I'm going to now talk to you about in more detail. One of the. And it's interesting to think of it through the lens of kind of a power dynamic because I don't think that's often explicitly how it's discussed, but it very much is. Is this idea about talking about wine, about taking a sip and suddenly having this massive vocabulary of it. Oh, it tastes like, I don't know, pine wood and something else. We don't maybe think of that in terms of power dynamics, but it's is certainly inaccessible in a lot of ways or tricky. It's kind of not how we talk about other things. So how did you learn to talk about wine? And what do you think this process of learning taught you about how wine is discussed, how wine is described in these ways?
- [06:50]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah, it's so interesting. So like I said, I didn't know anything about wine coming into this experience. And I was also in Spain, which meant I was mostly speaking Spanish. I learned Spanish in high school and college, but my level of the language was pretty rudimentary. And so I was sort of learning two languages at once, the language of wine and then also Spanish. So funny enough, a lot of my wine vocabulary I learned first in Spanish and sometimes have a hard time translating to English. Like there's this term racking, which means to transfer wine from one tank to another. And I learned that first in Spanish as draciego. So that's sort of funny. But the way I learned both of those languages was I moved to central Spain, this town called Torrijos, with this family, the winemaker of the family, one of the winemakers, her name is Carmen and she pretty remarkably responded to an email of mine. I reached out saying, hi, my name's Meg, I'm in Spain. I had a grant from school. I want to learn about wine. I know nothing about wine. I also don't really know Spanish. Can I come Live with you. And shockingly, she said yes. So already my experience of wine was really welcoming and generous and. And she let me into her home. I spent a lot of sort of domestic time with Carmen. We would sit around the kitchen and she would teach me words while we were cleaning up. You know, that's how I learned the word for cabinets and towels and things in Spanish was just from cleaning up. And then at the same time, because I was working with her in the cellar and eventually would do wintertime pruning, she started to teach me about the language of wine. The technical terms that most people probably don't know and no one really needs to know, like racking or all the things involved in fermentation. But then what was interesting then was there's the language that we use in tasting notes like you were just talking about when you drink a wine. Often words come to people to try to describe the taste of a wine. And. And prior to being in Spain, I never really thought much about food or assigning words to food. Usually my metric was, this is good, this is bad, this is, okay, I will eat this more or I will drink this more. But as I got deeper into this world and then later as I was reporting on wine, I found, yeah, the language that we assign to the way something tastes and whether or not we find something, quote, good or not good, is totally bound up in power and class. Our tasting notes for wine and the smells that we think can derive from a wine are really bound up in our sense memories. And smell is the sense that is most deeply tied with memory. And so our subjective experience of the world, where we grow up, how we grow up, what foods we ate, growing up, is totally going to shape the way that we experience a wine. So often, historically, because wine is, at least in the United States and in Western Europe, a lot of it, because it's a luxury good. Many of the people who have access to wine, who have the expendable income to drink wine, are going to be the ones sort of defining and creating these tasting notes. So often you get tasting notes that are white and western centric, like a lot of people associate cabernets with. Oh, my God. Sorry, I'm totally blanking. What is the berry? What is the berry? Blackberries, Blackcurrant. I'll start that over. So often in the United States, people associate the taste of cabernet with black currant. And black currant, actually for much of the 20th century, and until today as well, was illegal in a lot of the United States because of various diseases. That grew on blackcurrant. So unless you have traveled abroad to the uk, you might actually not know firsthand what a blackcurrant tastes like. So the people who have decided that Cabernet Sauvignon tastes like black currant, you know, have access to travel, for example. So that's one way that tasting notes are sort of bound up in power and class. And there are some really interesting writers and wine professionals who are trying to free the language of wine from the sort of standardization that was created, you know, when a certain group of people, you know, more affluent, you know, white, wealthy, Western folks were establishing this wine language. And these wine professionals are interested in rooting the language in a more subjective experience that's more about storytelling. So now you see often tasting notes that are like lychee and flavors that you might see in South Asia or South America that are not what we've heard traditionally. So people are trying to bring the language back to something that feels more equitable and more rooted in their experience. And the way I think that language can be more communal is just by sharing stories. We recognize the problem of language is trying to communicate one subjective experience to another person. And it's always going to be impossible. You're never going to taste the exact same thing that I taste. But if we can tell a story about what it is that we're tasting, maybe that will bring us closer together. So that's sort of how I think about tasting notes. And. Later in the 20th century, there was this movement to standardize wine language to make wine tasting notes a little bit more of a science of a metric of, you know, check boxes and rate wines by point systems. But ultimately, as I've been saying, wine is extremely subjective and it feels limiting and, yeah, perhaps classist to rank wines based on numbers and rank wines based on a really narrow set of sensory experiences.
- [13:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for taking us through that. Absolutely fascinating to consider. Well, hang on. How do we know what things taste like? And if we're doing that inherent comparison in the word like, kind of. Well, hang on. What libraries are we drawing on? Yeah, on the theme still of power dynamics, when we think about wine, perhaps the language one is less obvious to people, though probably not now that they've heard your answer. But one that has been reported on more is talked about, more is who's making the wine. And as your book details, for example, in Spain, but also wider afield, there aren't a lot of women involved in wine making. It seems very male dominated. Can you tell us about the sort of gender power dynamics in the making of wine, in the buying, the tasting, the kind of whole wine ecosystem.
- [14:50]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah. So when I lived in Spain for that year, I met very few women winemakers. And then when I returned to the US To California, I similarly saw a few. But I think those numbers are growing also in terms of consumption, Women are increasingly, at least in the United States, taking up a large share of the population who drinks wine. And I think on the winemaking side of things, women are. And people of color are less likely to be making wine because the barriers to entry are so high. Just the upfront costs involved in making wine are really high. And yeah, you have to have a lot of upfront cash to be able to start this enterprise. Culturally, in Europe, I think winemaking was often in the past considered a man's domain. Somewhat recently in France, I think I cite in the book this writer, Anne B. Massasart. She writes about how women in France were often banned from the cellar because it was thought menstruating women would spoil fermenting wine. So all of these very strange and old fashioned and flat out wrong ideas about women influenced where they could go in the winemaking process. But like I said, increasingly, I think more and more women are working in that world where you see a little bit more of a lag is in more of the service side of things in sommeliers, the people who serve you wine at a restaurant. When I was reporting the book.
- [16:41]
Marshall Po
I.
- [16:41]
Meg Bernhard
Think the year before, yeah, the year before I started reporting the book, the New York Times published this big story in 2020 about the court of master sommeliers, which is this big certifying body in the United States. People who. A body that deems, you know, who is the most knowledgeable about wine and who is equipped to serve the general public wine. There was a major sexual assault scandal where a number of really powerful men in that organization were accused of harassing and sexually assaulting women that they were mentoring. And when I talked to some of the women who came forward for that New York Times report, they told me about the complex power dynamics of studying for that exam and gaining accreditation with the organization. Essentially, there was no, at the time, there was no curriculum. So in order to study for the exam, you needed a mentor, someone who could show you the ropes, who could teach you about wine. And often there was coercion involved in sharing knowledge. So if there was an older or, you know, professionally more advanced man, he would offer his knowledge in exchange for sexual favors. And I think with. With that aspect of the Wine world knowledge hoarding and gatekeeping is, is really the way that people keep and maintain power and, and men traditionally have been in those roles and are continuing to hoard knowledge in order to maintain power. Again, I think that's changing because more women are speaking out. But the barriers to entry in all of these spaces are really difficult to surpass. And when you have a gate kept system that favors or rewards the accumulation of knowledge, there are people who've been left out of that knowledge accumulation system in the beginning, from the beginning. And the people who are more likely to have obtained such knowledge earlier on are generally white men.
- [19:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is, I suppose, still within the realm of power dynamics. But I'd love to kind of add in one of the other big themes of your book, which from my reading of it, is the environmental aspect of it. The fact that wine is literally stuff that's grown out of the ground in different places and that this is part of what's happening here. So I guess to start with this part of my set of questions, could you tell us about the two epistemologies of wine, the structural and the ecological?
- [19:39]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah. So when I was in Spain, I sort of began to see time on two different registers. And the registers I'm drawing from are from the anthropologist E.E. evans Pritchard, who examined the world through these two different sort of realms of time, the structural and the ecological. He defined the structural time as time that moves according to our social worlds. And, you know, you and I are talking this interview that, you know, this is encompassed in structural time. Going to church or seeing friends or going to school. These are all elements of the human world. And ecological time is time that moves according to the rhythms of nature, the cadence of nature. You know, agricultural communities who live by seasonal harvests or who are waiting on the weather to change in order to do certain things to their crops. They're living mostly in accordance with ecological time. And I found myself in Spain living on both of those registers. As I was existing in the world of wine, I was moving through ecological time because my year was defined by the different seasons of the crop. In the wintertime, there was wintertime pruning, where, you know, you are cutting off excess branches in order to allow the grapevine roots to really sort of reserve their strength in order to build up sugar and photosynthesize and so on, to grow leaves for the spring. And in the springtime, this sort of work involved in that season was springtime pruning, where you're cutting off excess leaves to try to make sure that the grapes grow evenly, that one isn't too shaded, you know, that one doesn't have too much sun. And the summer is often for watering and fertilizing and keeping out wild hogs, which is very unique to Spain, but maybe in other parts of the world, too. And then, of course, the fall is all about the harvest. When you determine at a certain point the grape is mature, it's reached a certain state of acidity and sugar that you deem perfect for winemaking. And so you cut. So, yeah, so my life totally shifted in accordance with those seasons. But then, of course, there was also the structural side of things in wine and winemaking, in which you go to restaurants and you go to wine fairs and you're trying to sell your wine and communicate all of that labor to the general public. I found that. I found in winemaking, the epistemologies of wine, the structural and ecological. The ecological tended to relate to, you know, talking about wine in terms of where it comes from, the environment, how a really particular place shape the taste of a wine. When we talk about terroir, for example, so much of that comes from what type of soil the grapes are grown in and how that soil affects the growth of a grapevine and its roots. We talk about whether or not the vines are facing a certain direction, which means they might get more sun. We talk about wind and how wind patterns and cold and heat patterns might affect how the grape grows. So that, to me, is ecological, the ecological epistemology of wine. And then the structural, the sort of social knowledge of wine is more about work that stems from the cellar. So after you've gone through that whole year of agricultural production, you go to the cellar with the grapes, you crush the grapes, they start to ferment. And then at that point, winemakers make decisions as to, you know, when they decide to bottle their wine, how long they decide to keep their wine in the bottle before putting it on the market. And the social world of wine drinking, I think, is more interested in that seller side of things, talking about how much time the wine spent on the lees, which are dead yeasts, how much time it spent in the barrel, how much oxygen contact you gave the wine in the cellar. And that that sort of information generally goes to the. To the public. I think that world of wine drinking, that epistemology of wine has. Has spawned sort of a culture of performativity, which suggests that certain people are often more authoritative than others. They can talk easily about the style of wine. And I think probably in the general public, less Valued is knowing about where the wines came from. More and more when I'm out at these fairs or restaurants, you hear about how much time the wine spent on its skins and its volatile acidity and so on and so forth, like words that. That are more associated with the cellar. So that's sort of how I think about the two different ways of thinking about wine and talking about wine and the registers on which wine sort of tends to fall.
- [25:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for taking us through them. I think it's. Each of them is really interesting to think about. And then also the idea is, as you said, living in two at the same time, these two in particular is interesting, but also kind of that idea of thinking about registers and hang on, which one are we in? Expands more broadly than beyond just this context. Thinking about ecology, thinking about, as you said, the importance of terrar, the importance of the soil and where the grapes are. Obviously that's under a particular threat at the moment. And when you first started, you know, going to Spain and working on wine, and obviously since then it's gotten even worse. Spain has been hugely affected by climate change. California, France, etc. All these places that wine is from are struggling. What impacts from climate change did you find when you went around to various countries and places to speak to winemakers in the process of this book?
- [26:12]
Meg Bernhard
Oh, gosh, so many. And it's sort of surreal to be talking about climate change right now because I'm currently in Portland, Oregon. I live in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is under a heat dome. It's going to be 118 degrees Fahrenheit when I return home. The state of Vermont is totally flooded. There's flooding in India, there's. It just every summer seems to spell disaster for the world. And I think grapes are a really interesting agricultural product to examine climate change through. If you're looking for some vessel through which to understand the way that the climate is changing, grapes and wine can really help. They're sort of like a pedagogical object that can teach us so much about the way the world is changing. So I, in the reporting of the book, talked to a lot of folks in Spain, talked to folks in France, talked to folks in California, and that's a limited grouping of people because wine everywhere around the world is changing as a result of climate change. But I can talk to those three places. So in Spain, I arrived, like I said, to the vineyards in Central Spain in 2017, and that was at the time the hottest year or the, rather the driest year on record for Spain. Since I think it's like 1965, they were in the middle of this big drought and there were these really evocative stories that came out as a result of the drought. You know, first crops were ruined, but also abandoned villages that had been inundated by man made lakes. The ruins of those villages started to rise. I mean, it. Things were looking really drastic. And Carmen, when I, when I came to the vineyard in central Spain and she was telling me about how difficult 2017 was, that's where she explained to me that wine made in this particular way, made with limited intervention, tells the story of a year. It can tell you the story of the heat and the drought, of floods, of freeze. It's like a memory keeper, a record keeper of one particular time on the planet. What happens during drought with grapevines is the grape is only able to produce a limited number of grapes. They produce fewer and smaller grapes. And the grapes, because there are so few, the sugars tend to get concentrated in those grapes. And people often think that drought wines taste sort of good because the sugars are more concentrated, leading to sort of a richer, more concentrated, more alcoholic wine. So Carmen's wines from that year are pretty high in alcohol content. You can just taste the heat in them. And she makes wine from these grapes, Graciano and Tempranillo, which are pretty hearty red grapes. At a certain point a couple of years ago, she decided she had to start making lighter wines because her wine, the alcohol in the wine just kept creeping up and up as temperatures were heating, as drought was getting worse. Another thing with heat is grapevines can't photosynthesize after a certain temperature. I can't remember exactly what it is in Fahrenheit. It's somewhere in either the high 80s or low 90s, where grapes just cannot produce fruit. So that's obviously an issue as places get hotter and hotter. That's Spain. In France and northern Spain, an interesting and sort of tragic series of sort of weather changes over the past couple of years have looked like this and have really devastated communities. The winters in much of France are tending to be warmer, which leads to an earlier bud break. And that usually happens in the spring, but it's happening earlier and earlier in the spring. And the bud break is this really key moment in the growth of grapes where the buds, as the name might suggest, open up. They open up and begin to flower, and then from that flower emerges a grape, eventually over a period of many months. So the buds were beginning to break earlier. But then like in April, for several years, unseasonable frost and hail destroyed a lot of those buds. You'd get frost and hail in April when you don't expect that sort of weather to happen. So farmers, winemakers in France have lost, like I've talked to people who lost 80, 90% of their crop during a certain year just because it was a really inopportune moment for hailing. The grapes couldn't grow after that. And you get one chance a year for grapes to grow. They don't just grow again the next season. So that sort of seesaw between heat and frost is really affecting France. In California, it's drought, it's extreme heat, and it's also wildfires that are affecting the. The taste of wine and the ability for winemakers to harvest and to even make wine. Elsewhere around the world, there's frost, there's flooding. If you get rain at inopportune times of the year, the grape can become really diluted, which is an ideal. Here's an interesting case study. So there's this winemaker in Vermont that I visited in 2022. She, you know, when you. When you think of wine and winemaking, you often don't think of Vermont. Vermont is a really cold state. Grapes tend to like hotter temperatures. And the grapevine is, all things considered, generally pretty drought resistant. So it doesn't usually need or want a lot of water, even though it does need water. But there's this winemaker, Deirdre Hieken, who has this wine label called Garagista. She started making wine with hybrid grapes ages ago, a couple decades ago. And hybrid grapes are the Vitis vinifera. That's the wine grape grape hybridized with local indigenous grapevines found in places in Minnesota or in New York State, really cold areas. So you hybridize those and you create a more cold, hardy grape. So that's how she's able to make wine in Vermont. But she was telling me a couple years ago, there was this hurricane, Hurricane Florence, in the sort of southern part of the United States. And usually yearly migration for birds happens before her grapes are mature and ripe. But the timing of that hurricane was such that the winds were really strong in the south around the time that her grapes were ready to be picked or a little bit before that. And birds who normally would have migrated south had to stay back because the winds were just too strong for them. And they were hungry. They needed something to eat. So they ate her grapes. They totally stripped the vines. That's sort of an unexpected way in which climate change is affecting grape production. And then the last thing from her that was really interesting is she noted to me that she often gets bugs, different sorts of insects, but those tend to die off in the winter and they don't really affect the growth of the grapevine that much. But now the bugs aren't dying off as much because her winters are getting warmer and warmer, so. So there's all of these different. Yeah, like, really interesting sort of seemingly small events that actually have much greater impact and are representative of the ways in which climate can change a whole process. So good, so good, so good.
- [34:46]
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- [35:10]
Meg Bernhard
Today we find Vecna. We end this once and for all together on December 25th. We have a plan. It's a bit insane. Everyone in. He knows where we are. Watch out.
- [35:24]
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- [35:27]
Meg Bernhard
We stay true to ourselves, stay true to our friends, no matter the cost. Found you.
- [35:36]
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- [35:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'd love to ask you about one of those things in more detail. Obviously, you mentioned California. One of the things is wildfires. And there's kind of some obvious impacts, Right. If your vineyards burn.
- [35:52]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah.
- [35:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right. No wine. The same way that if you get hailed. No wine. But wildfires are interesting because unlike some of the other things that could happen, you don't have. Your vineyard doesn't have to be in a fire for a wildfire, nevertheless, to have an impact on your grapes. So can you tell us a bit about kind of the wildfires? Not, you know, beyond the sort of. Okay, well, if your vineyard burns, then you don't have any wine. What's the impact of the wildfires been on wine, even when it doesn't get burnt?
- [36:25]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah, it's really fascinating and really timely. I'm thinking about it so much this year because I think there's some concern in California that it might be a bad wildfire year. Who knows? But it was a really rainy year which produced a lot of vegetation. Right now there's this heat dome in California. All that's going to dry, and that's just ready to burn. Other winemakers have told me, though, that because there was so much rain this year. Trees just have more water that contain more water. So maybe they're more naturally fire breaks. Who knows? Remains to be seen. But I don't know if you've ever been in wildfire smoke. I happen to be in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago or, you know, a month ago when the big fires from Canada were raging and the air quality was horrendous. It was like 400. I can't remember what the metric is, but, you know, particulate matter per square meter or something. It was. It was really bad. So if a human can note how terrible the air quality is, how it affects your body and your brain, and you just feel lethargic and tired and you have a headache, certainly that quantity of smoke is going to affect really everything, including grapes. What happens during wildfires with the smoke is smoke can bind with sugar, with the sugar molecules in a grape, which is. Those are found in the skins and those are used for fermentation. So sort of important for winemaking. So it's when wildfire smoke infects grape, it is really hard, pretty much impossible to get out because you need the sugars for fermentation. And if you don't ferment, you don't have wine. So that's. We've been seeing that happen In California in 2020, I want to say 40% or the quantity of grapes that Napa Valley winemakers crushed so that they decided to press was down 40% because they just decided either not to cut their grapes that year or that their grapes were too infected with smoke. And in the sort of world of prestige wine that is often associated with the Napa Valley, people are. Winemakers are wary of damaging their reputations. So they don't. They often don't bottle wine that is infected with wildfire smoke. And natural winemakers, which are the folks that I tend to know and the folks that I've worked with, they sometimes do bottle that wine. And I've had some of the. The smoke tainted wine before. No one knows about the health effects. People are uncertain what it. What it means to consume smoke wine. But it is really interesting the sort of lighter wine. The lighter smoke wines taste a little bit like a campfire, a little smoky. It sometimes actually tastes sort of pleasant. But on the other end of things, when you get a lot of smoke in a wine, it can taste like, I don't know, like embers or a cigarette, but. Or someone described it to me as like the smell or taste of water doused or steam made from water doused over A campfire. People get really creative with their language here, but it's not really pleasant. And then there's also the human side of things that we have to consider, which is it's really dangerous to be in that sort of air. And if winemakers are trying to pick their grapes, they often have harvesters, many of whom who are undocumented from Latin America, who might not speak English, who don't have a lot of worker protections, who are going into, if not evacuation zones into areas with a lot of wildfire smoke and are, you know, putting their lungs in danger. So there's the taste side of things, but also the human side of things, which is this is really dangerous to work in. And is that worth it? Probably not.
- [41:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, so you've given us the kind of, in some ways, the positive example in Vermont of working with hybrid grapes to try and adapt to the changing conditions. What other things have you seen in terms of how winemakers are trying to prepare for further impacts of climate change?
- [41:18]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah, so mention the Vermont example. It's sort of quirky. We'll see how this ends up working. I'm really curious. A quirky example in California is with wildfire smoke. Some folks are trying reverse osmosis to try to somehow extract the, the smoke from the sugar molecules. I don't really know how successful that is, but I'm curious, I'm curious to see what sort of science comes about because if you, you know, if you can't prevent the smoke, is there a way to still save the grapes? I'm not sure. In France, in response to those sort of icy spells, I've seen winemakers do what seem like really dramatic and sort of tragic preventative measures where they're trying to keep the frost from dam their vines. They will light these really big antifreeze candles in the vineyard, or they will light fires in the vineyard, or they'll use these sorts of fans. And they're trying to suck the warm air from the bottom of the vine to the top to try to circulate air better, which again, those sort of images really speak to the desperation and the futility, the futility of trying to combat climate change on that really small scale. But generally, when I talk to natural winemakers, these, these folks, their philosophy is, is they really want to respect the land and caretake for the land. And in order to do that, they want the land to exist in its wildest and most natural state possible. So no pesticides in the vineyard. They encourage cover, you know, like grasses and native plants, often non natural or conventional winemakers will try to just kill off all the plants in a vineyard because they don't want those plants to compete for water with the grapevine. But natural biodynamic winemakers, their philosophy is just let the vineyard live and let whatever grows in it grow. They see the, the vineyard as a single organism made of plants, plants and animals and the humans who tend to the crop and the bugs. And I think that sort of agricultural style makes for more resilient and healthier grapes that are more adaptable. They're able to adapt to more extreme conditions. Not, you know, they can't change the fact of smoke, but maybe they're more drought resistant, or maybe they will proffer something that the vineyard needs. Going back to Vermont, because I love this winemaker. This isn't climate change specific, but she told me a really interesting story about vineyard sentience. Like the vineyard knows what it needs in order to heal. So she told me this story of one of her vineyards got a Japanese beetle infestation at some point. And she didn't really know how to handle that because she doesn't use pesticides. So she didn't want to keep kill them with chemicals. But she found one day that a chrysanthemum had sprouted and grown in her vineyard. And she was curious. She'd never seen a chrysanthemum there. And then she googled around a little bit and found that chrysanthemums were sort of natural antagonists of the Japanese bark beetle. And so what she did was she crushed it up and made a spray. And that solved her problem. And I thought that was a really beautiful example of how a vineyard tended to this respectful and environmentally conscious way, is adaptable and resilient, and can often respond to its own sort of existential problems.
- [45:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fascinating. What an interesting idea. Thank you so much. I guess I'd love to ask you something of a personal question, if you don't mind. The book that throughout you talk about, obviously all the things you've been telling us about, right? Learning all these things, exploring these things. You also talk about your relationship with wine and kind of the different stages you've gone through with it and many of the things you learned and how you figured out what memories from your childhood it was drawing up when you were smelling it and things like that. To what extent did becoming involved in the process of wine, in learning so many of these things, including, as you said earlier, kind of the technical behind the scenes stuff that most people don't know. How much in what ways did Becoming involved in that process. Change shape, improve, increase your appreciation of wine.
- [46:06]
Meg Bernhard
Yeah, it's a good question. As I mentioned in the beginning of the conversation, I had a pretty limited understanding of wine before I moved to Spain in college. My experience of wine was through binge drinking, drinking to get drunk, not drinking to savor. And that I should mention that the book is at times really personal, highly so. And it talks about my complicated relationship with. With drinking and binge drinking and also with alcoholism in my family, and the ways in which wine can be really painful, in the ways in which wine and alcohol were very painful to me personally. But living on these vineyards, the one in central Spain and this other one in northern Spain on the foothills of the Pyrenees, really helped me slow down and savor and appreciate the place where this wine was coming from, which I think is really special in any sort of commodity. When you know where the thing you're consuming comes from. I think generally you have more respect for it if you know about all of the labor and the love and the anxiety and the hope and luck that went into this drink. I think that, for me, at least, helped me respect it more. In Spain, there's this really beautiful concept called the sobre mesa, which literally translates to over the table. But I came to think of it as to savor, and that soba remissa is a period of time, sort of after the formal meal has ended, but before. Before you're ready to go. So I would spend time in both of these vineyards, eating a lot, eating with family members, spending hours and hours at the table, having meals. But then, even after those meals, we would pick at the food, pick at cheese. We'd have dessert. The host would bring espresso and coffee and cookies, and they would bring more wine, dessert wine, the sort of heavier, more viscous wine, and we would just talk, talk and talk about literally anything that came to mind. And I think in college and often in the US My life was very rushed. Very much I have to go from one place to the other and not slow down and not pay attention. But the sobre mesa, which I think is really bound up in at least Spanish wine culture, and I'm sure so much other wine culture around the world, that that concept really helped me slow down and pay attention to what I was drinking, to what I was feeling, to the world around me. So I think my. My experience with wine went from, you know, being sort of negative to being more positive, from. That pain to pleasure. And then, of course, it also became more complicated, too, because I was Experiencing the romance of wine and wine drinking. But then as I got deeper into the world of wine and learned about all of these systems of power, we were talking about labor and. And class and climate and so on, and, you know, the inequity in the wine world. Of course, my relationship also went from romance to reckoning. And so I'm able to now hold these sort of complex truths about wine. At the same time, I can really love it and enjoy it, but understand what went into it and the ways in which power has made the production and consumption of wine just a lot more complicated.
- [50:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for sharing that with us. I think in a lot of ways, that's obviously very specific to your experience, but also I think something a lot of people can understand and identify with. And I think that's one of the really interesting things often about books in the Object Lesson series, and I think your books are really amazing. Example of it is tracing a journey, tracing a process, seeing change, and understanding kind of how people interact with things and what that means. So I guess in a similar sort of vein, who are you hoping reads this book? What do you want them to take away from it? Kind of, I guess. Who were you imagining when you wrote it?
- [50:43]
Meg Bernhard
I sort of, funny enough, I was sort of imagining my younger brother when I was writing it. And I'll explain that and the broader audience. But my brother is one of the many people who is patient with me, is I blab on about wine. And he's not a particular wine lover. He doesn't know that much about it or care that much about it. But he accompanies me sometimes on, you know, like going to bars or we've been to vineyards together. And he's sort of borne the burden of just listening to me blather on. And I thought, man, if I can get a book that, like, gives my reason, gives my brother a reason to drink it and to pay attention to it, then I feel like I will have succeeded. But generally, I wanted the book to be as accessible as possible. I tried to define my terms wherever possible because like we said in the beginning, wine can often be really inaccessible, and that inaccessibility is bound up in class, who can afford to drink it? So I wanted to make it a book that felt easy, like an easy entry point for anyone who has even the slightest of curiosities about wine. And also, I hope for people who know a lot about wine, I hope there's something that they can learn and appreciate too, whether that be, you know, maybe not the sort of technical aspects of winemaking. But maybe folks haven't really thought about, for example, how expensive it is to start making wine or what land costs are like in California versus in Spain and how, you know, in Europe, folks are more likely to inherit land and not have that upfront cost. But in California and elsewhere, you have to find these really complicated, creative ways of making the money work. So I'm hoping general public, anyone who's interested in wine can find something to latch onto and appreciate. And even if you don't drink, it's a cultural history of an object. I mean, not like a comprehensive cultural history, but it is a literary examination of an object that is present in the world around us that you're likely going to encounter. So if you have any interest in this object and in power and in pain and pleasure and memory, I hope that the book is for you, too.
- [53:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
What is your relationship to wine like now? Right. You've had all this exploration. You've talked to all these people. The book is available. I mean, where are you at now with wine?
- [53:30]
Meg Bernhard
It's really funny. I have been doing a book tour in the United States. I was on the east coast for a bit, going to different cities where I have friends, and then I've been on the West Coast. Like I said, I'm in Portland right now, where I had a wine event like a week ago, and I've been doing all these events at bars, and it's been really delightful because, gosh, what a dream it is to have people read my book and also drink. Like books and wine. My two favorite things. That said, I've been drinking a lot of wine recently, and it would probably be good to take a tiny break besides, you know, besides this sort of weird moment in my life where I'm drinking a lot more than I usually do. My relationship with wine is one of such pleasure. I think my favorite thing about wine is that it's just so. It's meant to be shared. I love bringing wine to the park with friends or to parties or having friends over to drink. And it's such a great entry point into conversation. You know, we don't have to spend the whole time talking about the wine because that's sort of boring. But maybe a conversation about tasting notes can open up one's sense memory to. Or the tasting note sort of opens the conversation up to sense memories, which are often about childhood and where you grew up. And it's just an easy way to facilitate conversation. So, yeah, I still. I'm loving drinking wine and sharing it with friends. And learning more about how people are engaging with it. And two, I think wine has really helped me appreciate the places where I am visiting. I travel quite a lot and even if I'm not traveling specifically for wine and looking for vineyards in a certain place, I do think wine and knowing how it's made has helped me pay more attention to the world around me and to appreciate landscapes and ecology. It even I write this at the end of the book, but it even sort of reshaped my relationship with my own hometown. I'm from a really dry town in Southern California called Temecula, and when I was growing up it always seemed to me a place defined by what it lacked. You know, it lacked rain, it lacked vegetation, it lacked all these things. And now when I come home, because I I've been sort of trained to see by working with the grapevine, I see so much abundance where I wouldn't have otherwise. And I sort of understand how the weather system works and how the climate, the microclimate works. And I'm really interested in that in every place I visit. So wine has really reshaped the way that I see the world and I'm grateful for that.
- [56:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
How wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. On the topic of sharing, my final question might be a bit bizarre. The book has just come out. You are currently going all over the place telling people about it, but is there anything you might have your eye on to work on next, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's about wine, that you'd like to share with the audience?
- [56:43]
Meg Bernhard
Funny enough, despite the fact that I wrote a book about wine, I do not primarily write about wine. It's definitely a sort of passion project. Usually I'm a magazine journalist and over the past several years I've primarily written about grief and loss and death, which I think probably can be seen in the wine book. But yeah, most of my work, especially during the pandemic, has been about how we cope with large scale losses, what language can help us understand the losses that we've experienced and what it means to sort of move on from the pandemic when so many of us are still struggling. So that's been what I've been writing about lately. I'm doing a little bit more death writing in the future. I have a couple magazine assignments. I'm writing about secrets, which is exciting. I'm really, really interested in psychology. No confirmed book projects yet, but I'm starting to put out feelers for ideas and for reporting on some of these bigger topics. I'm interested in, like, grief and loneliness and how our world has been reshaped by the pandemic. And, you know, whether. Whether the pandemic reshaped us or. Or really put up a mirror to who we already were. So I'm starting to feel around for that. I welcome any suggestions on what I should be looking into.
- [58:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, very interesting. And while you do all of that exploration and who knows, maybe get suggestions from listeners. Of course, the book we've mainly been talking about is titled Wine, published by Bloomsbury, part of the Object Lesson series. Meg, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [58:36]
Meg Bernhard
Thank you so much, Miranda. I appreciate it.
- [58:51]
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