The Roots of Wine Are in Relationships

I had the pleasure of opening this year’s Wine Writers Symposium, hosted by the estate of Meadowood Napa Valley. It’s my first year in attendance, though I was graciously reminded they tried to get me here a couple years ago. We are a mix of veteran, mid-career, and emerging writers and editors, columnists and content creators, marketing and business ops leaders, hospitality professionals, retailers, and more. I’m grateful that timing aligned this go-round.

As one part of a three-part keynote address, my talk was followed by winemaker Dan Petroski (Massican), and Elaine Chukan Brown, author of Wines of California. We managed to deliver distinct, but connected messages about wine’s relevance, which was our only guidance as speakers.

Dan spoke about the historic production cycles and viability of wine as a business being tied to our economic standing as a country. And Elaine channeled her work as a self-proclaimed “recovering academic philosopher” to discuss the need to talk about wine to people who don’t think they care about wine. It sounds funny, but it’s a sharp approach to most effective storytelling.

I began by framing wine and the stories we tell about the people who make it as a result of our shared relationships and collective genius. I heard from many attendees about how much they enjoyed the talk as a fueling way to open the conference. Several folks told me they cried from a sense of recognition. I loved sharing this perspective in a room of celebrated colleagues, many of whom are charting new paths. I hope it leaves you similarly reflective and revved up for whatever changes you have on your horizon.

I am still on a cloud from last night’s fifty-ish person festive winemaker dinner at the Louis Martini Winery, where they opened bottles of the 1976 Monte Rosso Cabernet Sauvignon, and we tasted wines presented by the heirs of the Valley’s oldest winemaking families.

I’m on a panel today about collaboration in book publishing. We’ve got another vineyard tour this afternoon, a slew of panels and a workshop, and amid the group sessions, the organizers pair speakers with writer fellows, so we have one-on-one time to discuss their goals, obstacles, and questions as storytellers. My life has been enriched by similar moments of being affirmed by folks whose careers mattered to me, especially at times when others didn’t have capacity for my nascent, scrappy, and non-linear ideas.

I am thankful I had dear ones in my corner who intentionally read my early work, talked with me and not at me, acknowledged societal failures that affected the choices available to me and my generation, treated me softly, and seconded my instincts long before it looked sexy on paper. I always tell folks, professional bios are the highlight reel. It’s marketing. Bios aren’t the biography. It’s an honor to serve others on their journey.

Delivered on February 20 at the Wine Writers Symposium in Napa Valley

Good morning.

I'm grateful to be here with you on our first full day of programming.

We've been asked to consider wine through a discourse of art and science. I'd like to open by framing wine as one of the earliest reflections of our being in relationship. Our relationships are made up of shared histories—the cultural, personal, and professional histories we've inherited, borrowed or adopted. The ones we've been taught to ignore. In speaking with you about how we create through our relationships, I’d like to speak with you today about our genius. I actually want to do more than just speak of our genius, I want to remind you of it. Yes, I said our genius.

I can see, you’re wondering about this phrasing, “our genius.” This isn’t how we usually talk about it.

In the United States, where I am from—we're actually in the state where I was born and raised—in any dominant global culture that relied on colonialism as its primary growth strategy, genius is not typically referred to in the second person.

It's not a descriptor that we are encouraged to embrace as a shared experience. In fact, genius almost always carries with it a sense of separation, isolation, angst and anxiety, being misunderstood, mislabeled, under-appreciated, fraught and devalued until—almost always—someone else comes along and makes profit and pattern out of a once unexpected notion.

We're not encouraged to call out our genius. Genius can only be ascribed, right? Typically from one man to another man, or from one entity led by a man to another entity led by a man.

But I'm not interested in that old narrative today. Partly because it isn't true. True genius does not make itself!

True genius is not the product of stolen innovation, stolen labor, the destruction of communities, of one-up one-down power dynamics, not of fear, or belittlement, or shaming. I'm not interested in that narrative because the old story is absolutely boring. It's violent, tragic, hierarchical, and if you look around, it's largely ineffective.

True genius is for the collective One. Everyone. True genius is nurtured, blessed, protected, channeled, modeled. Infinite. True genius is our birthright.

And our access to that genius is in who we are as individual souls and who we become in relationship to one another. Your genius, my genius, is the byproduct of who you are within the connections you serve.

I'm come to you today as a writer, an artist, a storyteller, a practitioner, a daydreamer. I live in a world that doesn't much care for these types of terms. So I channel these gifts into these “important” arenas. Journalism. Publishing. Marketing. Communications. Strategy. Project management.

The outcome has sometimes been impressive. I've written for most major publications in the country and several others. I've appeared on streaming platforms, news radio, podcasts. I've been instrumental in bringing other people's dreams to public view.

I imagine stories and find places to make them live. I observe connections and I make stories out of what those connections mean. I identify the figures who are doing this work in often invisible ways, and I try to widen the aperture of the systems that give them deserved visibility.

Might sound noble, but it's imperfect work. It's layered in personality management and personal discipline, and the need to constantly be educating, correcting, and trying to live beyond the veneer of surface platitudes.

My work relies on relationships. My work relies on meaningful connections with human beings. Note that I didn't say my network. I'm not talking about my contacts. I'm not describing transactional exchange. I'm not describing dropping in to "do" a place. You know y'all who like to DO places! (You did Paris. You did Mexico City.)

I'm talking about real listening. Genuine curiosity. Real follow-through. Personal interest. Not recording. Not taping. Not for posting. I'm talking about what it means to have a code, embodying an ethos.

This type of creation demands seeing yourself and other people beyond a job title, company, or brand affiliation. This is a demanding ask for many. It might be a demanding ask of you.

We're in a timeline shift right now. Many people who have relied on the infrastructure of the system are losing that foundation. Whether it's due to the collapse of industries, the gamification of corporate life, the evangelism of automation, or just being tired of pretending to care about things you don't care about. More and more people are finding it's harder to show up for the story you don't believe in. The story of your household (the one you live in or were raised in). The story of your country. We maintain relationships inside a container of untruths.

My work looks like writing a feature about the intersection of food and art in Philadelphia. It might require that I spend several days jumping around the city from omakase to Mid-Atlantic tasting menu to speakeasy. But it might land me at FDR Park at the Southeast Asian Market that city officials spent decades trying to shut down. Raids and sweeps and confiscating vendor supplies and equipment, like your grandma’s deep fryer for the lumpia. Then the market became nationally recognized as a centerpiece of culture and cuisines, and now the same government that tried to erase the market gets to charge permitting fees for the pleasure of giving the city it's good reputation in food.

The work might look like being invited to write about American wine and directing a readership to small producers on the East Coast. There’s been a drive to engage local, indigenous grape varieties with hybrids and some vinifera to build new wine cultures that embrace traditions only possible in the Americas, and therefore including people from the Americas whose farming hands and tasting palates and language and ritual are connected to fermented dishes, spiced dishes, ranging from the delicate and ephemeral to the robust and hearty.

These creations require relationships. Knowing the farmer who grows the grapes that makes the wine. Knowing what a farmer like Kathline Chery believes in, knowing that she turned to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in crafting the Marquette-driven wine, The Bluest, and that her reading of the texts—the literary and the liquid—is informed by a lived experience.

The tapestry I'm describing is one where as individuals we choose to become parts of a whole. Before anything of merit can be a product to consume, to share, to sell, human beings must choose to be in relationship first.

We must identify where and how we fit together. Is the foundation that we're building on steady? Are our needs being met? Have we entered into a space seeking validation and rescue? Or are we doing our own internal work to recognize what parts of us still need healing, acknowledgment, safety, or encouragement? Are we up to the same risks?

We've been asked to consider wine as a discourse on art and science. I would argue that art as a practice and science as a discipline are only separate in a state of the world where I am separate from you. They are not the same, but they are part of that collective One.

Science and art need each other to exist. Science is spirituality in form. Art is one's interpretation of practicality as expression. Your genius exists in a world where I get to have my own, too. Not like, “everybody gets a trophy.” More like, you have a belonging here. Your soul showed up in this moment at this time. And what you may be seeking is yourself.

Your access to self is in who you are for others. Relationships our are definitive mirror. They tell us what we are prioritizing. They show us where we have invested our energy. They indicate where need to pull back, and come back to ourselves.

The next few days I'd invite us to think about our histories. Histories are made up of the relationships we nurture and the ones we return to the elements. Our lives depend on this tapestry. We survive, our stories survive, by our embrace of collective genius. ⭑