Curious George, Single Vineyard Wine, and the Brothers

Was reading a Curious George story from the late 1950s to our young son the other day. In one of the scenes is an image of a reporter carrying one of those old-time cameras, the boxy ones with the big flash on top, looked like she was looking down on it to take the picture instead of holding it to her eye. You know what I’m talking about? Anyway, I soon put our little guy to napping and came downstairs thinking of that camera, about how in many of my favorite children’s books I share with Sam there are a good many dated items like the telephone in the big green room, or this box camera, or horse-drawn wagons, etc; in essence, objects from the past that my son might never come to know because they are no longer relevant to our cultural landscape.

Alone with my cup of coffee, Scott across the table finishing up Hugh Johnson, A Life Uncorked (look for a book report soon – I’ll try to get Scott to expand on his thoughts for this one), I began to think about something I had read recently in the March WS, about an idea from the past that I wonder if more and more people might never come to know, or even worse, to dismiss: the farm-to-wine connection.

It was from this statement,

“Monks in Burgundy started [the single vineyard craze] a few hundred years ago,”

written by James Molesworth, that got me thinking, and got me more than dismayed that yes, this connection just might be on its way out in the mainstream wine world.

Obviously James was trying to correlate how (and when) the Burgundian Monks saw that parcels in a single vineyard yielded different wines than others—yet I can’t imagine it took those astute Brothers 700+ years before they saw the differences in their vineyards, thus starting the single vineyard wine “craze” only a few hundred years ago. James? Really? I digress.

Sure, we all know how Monks theoretically created the first SV wines. But more importantly—and here’ s where I feel James’ irreverent connection of Monks and today’s SV winemakers do not match up at all—is the point that Monks farmed the grapes with which they made their wine. Do a quick and dirty Internet search and it’ll soon be clear that the bulk of today’s SV producers do not. So what if people buy their grapes, that’s not the point; everyone has their own philosophy about wine, and diversity is what makes an industry tick; and who knows how long chasing the SV “fad,” as Molesworth refers to it, lasts, since multiple labels can source fruit from the same “SV” vineyard. What we’re talking about here is the farm:wine connection, and when equating Monks and all their farming work to the phone-farming SV fad of today’s industry, that connection becomes so greatly minimized, even by Molesworth’s few words.

Look, the Brothers not only established a vineyard:wine connection, one on which today’s SV wines are based, they cemented a farm:wine:people:culture philosophy that has lasted for centuries, only now being ever so slowly done in by business plans that disregards its importance, and chipped away by words from people like Molesworth. I mean, someone’s gotta stand up for those risk-taking, hard farming Monks (AND for my home state of New York, too, with that slap he gave the Finger Lakes…Geez! I’m still trying to get my head around that)!

I’ll just end with this: Wine making and farming are inseparable; there are very few industries where you can go from farming or mining the raw material and making a finished product. And even fewer who take it on. It’s a shame, but more and more of what I read leads me to believe that today’s producer-to-land connection, one that those brotherly Monks strived for centuries to keep alive, is becoming disregarded, and at the minimum, greatly diluted. And I just wonder, why?