2023 Closing Keynote, by Miguel de Leon
The last two and a half days of wine writing programming I learned crucially that one day was not enough and three would be too many.
Firstly, I want to thank the board of the Wine Writers Symposium, the Napa Valley Vintners, and the programming team under Sarah and Maryam for taking this kind of chance because the product of this room is the future of thoughtful, intentional, and purposeful wine writing. Secondly, to the entire team at the Meadowood, thank you for restoring my faith in what warm, gracious hospitality can do to nurture the soul, and what a generous snack bar can do to nourish my snack habit. Third and most importantly, to the fellows, thank you for having an open heart and an eager pen ready to fill the many blank pages ahead of you.
Like all of the fellows here, I was tasked to answer the question of why wine is important, so here’s my practical short answer: it is what helps me pay the bills, it’s the reason for my employment, and it is the cornerstone of my career.
It is also one of the things that makes me supremely happy simply by existing; it soothes on days that take too much; it inspires when the inevitable block begins to creep; it makes food infinitely more delicious and complex; it induces emotions that make memories long-lasting.
The romantic, long answer starts like this: the capacity of wine to bring people together is greater than any other conduit of empathy that I know. A bottle warrants sharing, the moments in our lives we consider remarkable call for it, it is what brings us from all backgrounds and circumstances into this very room. It’s the lens we use to consider our passion, our hobby, our careers; it’s what keeps us up at night and what makes us get up early in the morning; for some, it is the way they connect to their deep roots in a place, and for others, it is a north star that guides how they derive purpose from the earth. It elucidates our human condition because of all the values we attach to it; it is a superb vehicle for the quest for a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos.
We often talk about how wine gives us a chance to manifest history, geology, anthropology, culture, and art, and how what’s in the bottle collapses thousands of years into a single sip as we experience the multitudes of decisions turning stardust into alchemy. The nature of wine is that it is all in hindsight, that from the moment we choose to open a bottle it turns into a piece of performance art that we experience singly and all that’s left after consumption is our own devices. In vino veritas, we say that wine makes light of our subconscious and teases out truths. Even the apocryphal mythos of a full breath blown into glass as the size of a bottle of wine gives us some idea of how linked and mystical our connection is to this beverage, and it unlocks some sort of answer in answering what our higher purpose is. How wonderful to think of an ideal, that somehow when we drink the mysteries of the universe might fall away.
I can tell you that my mom, whose bottle of Arbor Mist Peach sits in her fridge, has a life that is rich and meaningful without any of this – or at least, without some of my intervention, her requisite bottle of Lambrusco for Christmas because we barely celebrate Thanksgiving. She thinks that when I look at a label I’m looking for nutrition facts, or a number that will tell me how inebriated I’ll become, or that I’m translating what it says so it’ll make sense to me because of my previous life as a linguistics grad. She herself doesn’t speak French or Spanish but she does speak English because it’s her third language, like mine, and she is not a woman you would call simple. She is well-traveled, open to experiencing the wonders of the world, and not for one second has she thought that wine was a significant part of her life. In all honesty, I don’t think she considered it to be this significant in mine – in a parallel universe there is a Miguel out there who is an architect with two kids who doesn’t know the crus of Beaujolais or the complications of Anbaugebiete and the Prädikatswein system and he is very happy – but thankfully I’m in this timeline, where I do know how to articulate the subtleties between a village in France that has grapes to another village in the same part of France that has the same grapes. (I promise I’m a sommelier, just not today.)
But there are countless people like my mother, people we love who are dearly unaware of the magic we see, living wonderful complete lives without ever so much drinking a drop of this stuff, let alone countless more strangers whose cultures don’t include wine or whose socioeconomics prevent them from peeking into this rarefied world of viticultural subzones and varietal expertise, so again I’ll ask: why is wine important?
