(Funny how reading this, I want to rewrite the whole thing, but it is too late, it's going to be in print before I know it)
The Principle of Nature
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.—alice walker
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To go ahead with my foolish idea of making Sagrantino in California, I had to do it as Jason Lett had suggested, according to my “principles.” Yet I was queasy with placing too much emphasis on principle. How one treated a wine was not a moral issue, after all. Wine in a vat was not the same as a chicken cooped up in its cage. Wine was not a goose being force-fed to fatten its liver. I didn’t intend to strike up a debate about the “piety” in a wine’s source, as in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. I liked my wine free- range, but still, a bottle of Pineau d’Aunis couldn’t stare me in the eyes and lick my face, and if I abused a Gamay grape, its drinker wouldn’t scream in horror. Still, when a wine has been manipulated, I, as the drinker, would scream or at least decline the wine and reach for a reliable alternative, like gin or scotch.
I came to my so-called principles because the wines I enjoyed the most were made under a guiding philosophy based on nothing added and nothing taken away. This actually sounds like a delicious ideal, yet the relevance of the ideal, and the wines, seems to be endlessly debated.
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