2024 Opening Keynote, by Andrew Jefford

January 31, 2024

WRITING AT THE EDGE

Hello friends, colleagues, future friends and future colleagues.

Here’s an invitation.

I live in the South of France; I live near an edge. Actually it’s a summit, a peak, a Pic (in French), with a very steep northern edge. A cliff.

The peak’s called Pic St Loup, and it gives its name to the vineyards all around it, which form Languedoc’s most easterly appellation. It’s a fun hike to the top, where there’s a little chapel, and some great views which help you to understand the appellation, and the setting in which its aromas and flavours come into being.

So … I always say to the wine friends I make around the world – if you’re passing by, let me know and we’ll hike together to the top and have a picnic there. I’ve done it many times, I’ll do it many more, you’re all invited. It’s beautiful, even inspiring.

As you probably know, the wind often comes from the north in the south of France – that wind and its variants are called the Mistral, the Cers, the Tramontane. Very good for vineyards, except sometimes at flowering.

The Mistral slams into the edge of the Pic, and updrafts. There’s an airfield for gliders or sailplanes near by. A taxi plane pulls them up, lets them go, and they soar. They soar thanks to the edge. In the same way as you and I can come to understand the appellation and its wines, thanks to the edge.

The village my family and I moved to in 2010 had a splendid bakery: people came to it from miles around. It had a real edge over the local competition, thanks to the skills of the couple that ran it. He was the baker: big, quiet. She ran the shop: small, smart, with a strange, sardonic sense of humour. The bread was so good I wrote a piece about it. I described the different loaves, but it was really about the idea of ‘bread and’. If you have great fresh bread, you have a meal. All you have to do is add the ‘and’. Provided the ‘and’ is delicious – cheese, saucisson, olives, tomatoes with a little wild thyme and oil — the meal can be as simple as you like. It’ll be a great meal.

Then one Christmas we saw flowers all around the bakery. There was a notice in the window saying “Stéphanie nous a quittée” – Stéphanie’s left us. She was the baker’s wife. Shortly before Christmas, she’d thrown herself off Pic St Loup. Off the edge.

***

Well, let’s step back a bit. Make some definitions. Think first of all about what edges are, and then about what writing at the edge might be. Think about the edges of our time, which are suddenly multiple. Think about what the value of writing at the edge might be, and the perils, before celebrating the edge in practice in your work.

I hope by Wednesday lunchtime you’ll all have defined your own edge, and be ready to thrive there. It’s certainly the most creative place for a writer to be.

What is an edge? The edge is not the main stream.

It’s a place where something touches something else, rubs up against something else, collides with something else. It’s where water meets the bank. It’s where one continental plate shudders into another. It’s where a limestone cliff meets empty, windy air.

It’s a place of definition, but simultaneously a place of happening, of change. It must also be a place of mystery, where certain knowledge stops. For all these reasons, the edge means risk; being on the edge involves discomfort. It may help you soar up into the bright blue sky. Or plunge down, into the void.

So … what could the edge mean for us? Who are we, anyway? Let me guess. We’re people who like to write, which means using silence and paper – and nowadays a keyboard and screen — to craft messages about the world for our fellow human beings.

And we love wine: its perfumes, its flavours, its broad smile, its cultural richness. So … many of our messages are about wine.

But that cultural richness means that wine interfingers and enfolds many other topics, too: food, pleasure, place, agriculture, climate, earth sciences and systems, politics, society. Wine is richly freighted.

Are edges good for writers? I think they are, because that’s where you can find difference, achieve insight, see afresh. That’s where you can be creative. So I’ve spent my writing career trying to get as close to the edge as I could.

I realised early on that if I couldn’t feel creative in what I was doing, then what I was doing wouldn’t be worthwhile to me.

I wanted to do something worthwhile; not waste my life. Even if that involved some discomfort.

Many wine writers, by contrast, want to belong above all, and thus to move in the main stream. They’ve seen what’s gone before; they’re happy with it; they want to duplicate it. There’s money to be made in the main stream, much more money than you can make on the edge; there’s companionship and acceptance.

And the wine world likes its followers and message-carriers bobbing in the main stream.

The wine world doesn’t like too bright a light shone on its edges.

The wine world isn’t used to criticism; it’s used to adulation. So the edge can be a lonely place.

But if you choose the edge, it will be your edge; you’re choosing a distinctive voice.

You may have trouble finding those prepared to commission you, at least at first.

Those who commission with imagination, embracing risk, are rare. Edgy writing disconcerts, especially in a conservative, self-congratulatory milieu like wine. Independent reporting is suspect: you may upset the advertisers or the power-brokers; you may lose access. But there are two compelling reasons to follow this path.

***

The first is that we now live in an age of generative artificial intelligence.

Generative AI may eventually engage with the edge, but for the time being it’s gobbling up all its lessons in the main stream. Like a pike swallowing minnows.

Its attraction for users is the ease with which it swims in the main stream. It doesn’t always trouble to tell the truth; plausibility is all. The bot reporter just wants to please.

But truth is under attack from all sides today; it’s no longer a universal value, if indeed it ever was. Many prefer comfortable, dishonest messages from within the silo to uncomfortable, truthful ones from outside the silo. They like the ingratiating bots.

In the wine world, too, what value accrues to a probing for truth when so much wine discourse is now reduced to sample reviewing and the writing of sighted tasting notes? The focus is microscopic, subjective, repetitive, laudatory.

Writing of this sort resists audit, validation or fact-checking. It’s assertion. And it’s deeply virtual. By which I mean that 99% of those reading or skimming tasting notes will never taste, buy or own 99% of the wines described.

The primacy of the sighted tasting note in current wine discourse strikes me as an enigma. Its practical benefits are chimerical. It’s a kind of mad granularity. For most readers, it brings nothing but doomed aspiration: an echo chamber in which fulfilment is forever postponed.

There are consequences. Once AI has learned reputation, tone and lexicon, and absorbed wine hierarchies, it will happily set about generating tasting notes, even without sensory apparatus of its own. The audit never comes.

It will eventually write features with ease, too, since much of this is un-critical and edgeless: perfect AI fodder.

As the Italian journalist turned cartographer Alessandro Masnaghetti recently observed, much wine writing is not true journalism, which implies a critical engagement with the topic, but a transcribing of received messages. Why pay journalists to transcribe, if AI can do it for you?

In an age of effective generative AI, all that will be left for human cranial jelly to explore … will be the edge.

Out on the edge, there are no large models or datasets for AI to gobble up. Writing at the edge needs a brain.

***

The second reason for cleaving to the edge is that we’re all now living on the edge.

Climate disorder, species loss, and the anthropogenic extinction episode underway at present will make this the most dangerous millennium for human beings since the last glacial maximum, 21,000 years ago.

They make it the most dangerous millennium for life itself since the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 65 million years ago. This is astonishing. I never dreamed, as an adolescent exploring geology and long time in the 1970s and the 1980s, that I would ever find myself saying such a thing.

It’s SO astonishing, and our understanding of our own predicament is so recent, that human beings seem … incapable of processing this knowledge and acting on it.

Our systems of social organisation, notably the nation state, flounder in addressing a planetary challenge of this sort. Our economic systems can’t re-gear at the necessary speed.

Our economic thinking neglects environmental costs. It has no way – yet — of costing an atmospherically compromised future world, or of reimbursing the unborn for the environmental destruction the present generation is causing.

The planet will certainly recover, and evolution slowly resume following this extinction episode, as it always has. We don’t need to save the planet. Earth can digest us.

But we urgently need to save present-day life forms on the planet — by addressing a chemical inbalance that we’ve haplessly created in earth’s atmosphere, and by treating our biosphere with respect.

And if this isn’t an edge, I don’t know what is.

It means, in fact, that the premise of the main stream is a flawed one. It’s the untroubled Niagara River making its way past Grandyle Village, Navy Island and Sandy Beach. Everything seems fine; everything seems normal. But the edge is coming, even for the main stream.

What can little wine writers do about this? We’re totally insignificant, aren’t we? Isn’t our job just to help fellow wine lovers get the most out of their hobby while we can?

That’s a point of view, and if you’re happy with that, fine. But if this universal threat does bother you, and if you feel that all human beings need to respond in some way, there are two things that we little wine writers can do.

We can bear testament, and we can act accordingly.

Those who write about wine are in fact in a privileged position. We can help change the world.

It’s true that wine grapes are not a global commodity. It’s true that wine grapes are not essential for life. They do nonetheless stand at the apex of global agriculture — in one sense. The most prized of these harvests – Musigny, Margaux, Napa’s greatest sites — furnish the world’s most valuable agricultural crops. The land these crops grow on constitutes the most valuable agricultural land in the world.

Wine grapes may also be world’s most mediatised and written-about agricultural crop. Every nuance of crop performance is closely scrutinised; every detail of each growing season is seized on. Top winegrowers are the world’s superstar farmers; we hang on their words. Wine vintages in Burgundy, Bordeaux or Napa are newsworthy in a way that no other harvest is.

This spotlight makes wine production a kind of litmus for climate change. This is an edge for those who write about wine. We can track these changes with some precision.

We can tell the story of ever-earlier budbreak, of shortened dormancy.
We can point out the risk of frost, now that melting arctic ice and dissipating albedo help dislocate the polar vortex with increasing frequency.
We are listened to if we talk about drought, about heat spikes, about hail storms and floods.

The figures are all there; there’s a history of mishap.

We can point to harvest dates running backwards, to alcohol levels running upwards.
We watch the forests nearby burn. We can help our readers understand that smoke taint in wine may be the taste of human failure to face up to, and to tackle, climate change.

How, though, do we act accordingly? Everyone needs to make their own mind up about this, and reach a position with which they feel morally comfortable – when they look their own children and grandchildren in the eye.

What’s certain is that the wine world has much to feel uncomfortable about. This is true in structural terms – since the international wine trade is based on the shipping of heavy liquids on long sea routes, packaged in energy-intensive glass.

It’s also true in promotional terms, with its flaunting of luxuriously unsustainable lifestyes. I’ve seen Champagne houses fly journalists from Australia to Europe and back for two days in a hotel, simply to launch a new vintage of a Prestige Cuvee. This is climate crime, in that the environmental cost to future generations goes unpaid.

Since established wine writers are lavished with travel opportunities, there are some who write about wine at least in part to feed an addiction to hyper-mobility, and thus to mimic the lifestyles of the ultra-rich.

”I can live the life of a billionaire,” I heard a friend and valued colleague say, “on the salary of an assistant bank branch manager.” And it is possible to justify such actions — as business as usual.

There is, though, no usual any more. The world has left its steady state behind. Even for those floating down the main stream, the edge is coming.

***

Two more points, before we finish with edges.

As writers, we can only go to the edge if we have freedom to go to the edge. Democracy guarantees that freedom.

In the year 2000, 54% of the world’s population lived in electoral or liberal democracies. Those within such democracies are free to write from the edge if they wish.

By 2019, that 54% had dropped to 32%. By 2022, that 54% had dropped to 29%.

Democracy is under global attack. Attack from without; attack from within. Lose democracy, and the edge becomes a forbidden zone. It’s already a forbidden zone in some significant wine-producing and wine-trading polities: China, Turkey, Russia, occupied Crimea, Hong Kong. There are serious threats to published freedom of expression in others, even in today’s Europe. Hungary is an example.

There are those who say that wine is beyond politics, and that those who write about wine should confine themselves to wine. This may be the view of the main stream. But it’s self-censorship. There is no frontier where wine ends and the world begins. The purchase of a bottle of wine is a political act.

Simple proof: what are the tariffs that make headlines, and are chosen for that reason? Wine and spirit tariffs, of course.

So abandon the edge of expression at your peril. One day it may be taken away from you.

***

Finally, you’ll note that I’ve talked so far about the edge as a choice, a place you might or might not wish to go. We should remember, though, that many in the wine world have no access card to the main stream – because they don’t look right, because they have the wrong sort of name, because they can’t afford the entry tickets, because they haven’t passed the expensive exams. They’re condemned to the edge.

But they too may be inspired by wine’s beauty,

by its extraordinary relationship to place,

by its consoling force in hours of darkness,

by the intimacy with which it is sewn into multi-millennial cultural traditions.

They too may wish to share that inspiration with others via the printed page or screen, and

especially with others who

also don’t look right, who

also have the wrong sort of name, who

also can’t afford the entry ticket, or who

also haven’t passed the expensive exams.

So the edge is precious not just because it’s a place of choice, but because it may also be a place of obligation … and eventually of liberation.

***

Now let’s swing back to wine writing, and discover some of the ways in which an embrace of the edge can be exciting and inspiring. This discussion will continue over the next two and a half days so I’m not going to speak for much longer just now; it’ll be more fun when we talk about it all together, and I’m looking forward to that. But here are a few thoughts to set the discussions in train.

Everything begins with a pitch or a commission. Of course.

The key to a pitch is to understand the psychology of those you are pitching to, both in person and corporately. What are their problems and needs? What are their tastes and interests? Your challenge is then to find a place on the edge from which to meet those problems and needs, those tastes and interests.

In principle, originality and freshness is an unrivalled asset in pitches, but remember that there must be confidence and trust, too.

This sometimes means that an edgy topic needs to look just a little like something in the main stream, in order to inspire that confidence and trust.

If, by contrast, you’re given a commission, then take it to the edge. Even if it’s been fished out of the main stream. Turn it upside down and shake it. Turn it inside out. Don’t read what everyone else has written on the topic; go to great lengths not to read what everyone else has written on the topic.

Only think about what it means to you, discovering something for the first time.

Investigate its fundamentals. Understand them. Be astonished; be surprised. What are the strange things here? What are the unique things here? What needs saying, upicking, drawing attention to? Where do the contours and the edges of this subject lie? What is true? What is bull?

Remember that most of those reading what you write won’t know the things that you know, so the challenge is for you to think yourself into being a co-discoverer of your topic with your reader.

Nothing is less attractive than the assumed mastery of those who know it all, dispensing coded knowledge from above. This is contemptible writing. A joint journey of discovery is always the most compelling. Walk arm-in-arm with your reader.

Don’t forget, either, what are the most interesting subjects to read about in the wine world.

There are two of them. The first subject is people. The second subject is place.

Did you get that? I didn’t say ‘wine’ or ‘wines’. Readers can do the wine. They can explore for themselves. Your job is to take them there — by intrigue and inspiration, by joy and astonishment.

It’s people working in places that makes wine happen. Nothing else. No magic; just work. Without work, no wine. Without distinguished, propitious places, no great wine.

Let’s begin with people.

People like to read about people: this is the primary generator of all our narratives. How d’you describe wine people?

Well, you could gush, flatter, transcribe the carefully crafted PR line. This is to float down the main stream.

No true portrait is ever made in this way. A true portrait has edges, contours, patches of light and shade. Where there is work, there will be setbacks and failures as well as successes. We don’t believe in success until we hear about the failures and setbacks.

Remember, too, that you’re different from your subject; you are the medium through which your reader is meeting your subject. You have eyes, ears, a brain, intelligence. Use them. Don’t deliver cardboard or cellophane; deliver a person. Don’t transcribe PR; tell a story.

But keep ego in check, too. We’re interested in your intelligence. We’re not interested in your self-love, your image, your reputation or your achievements.

Why do we cherish wine? Because of difference. Not because of “excellence”, whatever that may be; not because of scores; not because of grandeur of ego; but because of difference.

It’s places which generate the most compelling differences in wine: that is terroir. But the print of terroir is a quiet one, a kind of watermark running through all wines, but one that is easily squashed, stained, occluded, rinsed out.

There are noisier differences than place, notably that of misplaced, misguided or misjudged work itself. This is why it’s so important to listen to the story of place and tell the story of place once you have heard it.

If work is effacing place, call it out.

Money comes and goes; marketing comes and goes; owners come and go.

The only thing that endures in wine — is place and its uniqueness, revealed by skilled work. The differences predicated on place are the only differences that can never be reproduced elsewhere. Learn to be sensitive to and faithful to place; learn to tell the story of place.

Learn, too, to see place in its broadest context. Yes, of course the place of a vineyard is primarily a hillside or block in a village or municipality. It’s growing degree days, an annual rainfall pattern, prevailing winds, a soil and a bedrock. These all matter; a wine’s potential is inscribed inside them.

But at the same time place is a region, a country, a culture, a history, a political framework. These contexts govern how well that raw potential is realised. Or not.

I’m not saying that these larger contexts must be there in every story you write; that would be to overburden what may be light, dainty or necessarily granular topics. But never write without holding these contexts in your mind. They matter; they inform.

Indeed in many cases, in our field of endeavour, they may be the edge itself.

***

OK, last thing. Learn to seek out the edge in the most important place of all in your work: inside your sentences.

I’ve spent 36 years writing about wine, and in all of that time no other writer has ever quizzed me about what I regard as the most important topic of all for writer. Writing sentences.

What is a sentence?

There’s the technical, grammatical definition: a complete set of words, containing a subject and a predicate [something about the subject], and consisting of a main clause sometimes complemented by subordinate clauses.

If your mind just blurred over there, don’t worry.

What I’m thinking of are the units of meaning in your text, built out of your lexicon, your choice of words, and assembled by the syntactical means at your disposal. [your arrangement of words and phrases].

How you say what you want to say, in other words.

Readers consume sentences. Sentences can be well-crafted – in which case they bring immense pleasure and keep the reader reading – or they can be badly crafted – in which case they make readers struggle.

Like wines. Good or great wines are easy to drink; bad or boring wines aren’t.

But the words are sometimes worse than the wines. Too much wine writing, and especially tasting notes, is made up of sequences of catastrophically poorly crafted sentences.

In a sense, this is understandable, as text of this sort is generated and published hastily. It’s speed writing, and for most readers the score matters more than the words.

But this is still not satisfactory, since it convinces the rest of the world that wine writing is arcane ephemera, and only of interest to a clique. Our beautiful subject deserves better.

There’s no formula for a well-crafted sentence, by the way. If there was, AI would have got it by now.

A well-crafted sentence can be both formal and informal; it can be literary; it can be plain, brief, dense, limpid and Orwellian; it can be gonzo; punk. But in each of these cases it takes work, discipline and revision.

This is the great danger threatening those who arrive at wine writing via blogging. Bloggers have never felt the tough love of a copy-editor; that ruthless, scalpel-wielding scrutiny, that ferocious hunger for concision, is a skill they must therefore learn for themselves. Many never do.

So my final remark is that if, as a wine writer, you write well-crafted sentences, sentences that draw your reader in and detain her or detain him, you’ll already have an edge. It’ll be an edge that even those in the main stream might appreciate. Don’t be so distracted by wine, in other words, that you neglect the craft of writing itself.

Ok, that’s enough from me for now.

Remember to come and visit. My email address is andrewjefford@gmail.com. The path up Pic St Loup awaits.

ASSORTED FACT CHECKS:

CLIMATE and ATMOSPHERE

2023 “warmest year on record by a wide margin”. Every day at least 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Almost half the days in 2023 were 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Two days in November 2023 more than 2°C warmer than pre-industrial levels.(source: NikkeiAsia/FT)

July/August 2022: parts of Iraq 50°+C daytime and 37°+C nighttime for a week(source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cited NikkeiAsia/FT) [Human body temperature 37°C.]

Current policies (= if countries abide by Paris Agreement commitments) mean that the world is on track for 2.9°C warming by end of C21. Emission cuts of 28% needed by 2030 to keep to 2°C warming; emission cuts of 40% needed by 2030 to keep to 1.5°C warming. Emissions so far in 2020s have risen annually. (sources: Noaa/UN environment program/Statista)

World liable to breach 1.5°C by February 2024 based on current warming trends (December 2023) cf in March 2045 based on trends at time of Paris Agreement (December 2015) (source: CopernicusECMWF)

Top 10 per cent most polluting people in society are responsible for almost half of the annual greenhouse gas emissions behind climate change. Top 1 per cent of global emitters responsible for nearly a quarter of the total growth of pollution between 1990 and 2019. Top 10% of North American emitters (= highest emitting global region) over 60 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per capita cf bottom 50% of North American emitters circa 10 tonnes. (Bottom 50% of sub-Saharan African emitters less than 1 tonne.) (source: World Inequality Lab)

World’s richest 1% emit as much carbon as the world’s poorest 66%. (source: Oxfam International, November 2023)

EXTINCTION

[Mass Extinction Event defined as 75% species loss in 2 million years] Biodiversity declined by 69% globally 1970-2018.(source: Living Planet Index Database, 2022)

Current species exitinction rate estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than background rate (source: World Wildlife Fund, nd, downloaded Jan 24 2024)

More than 75 per cent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (source: 2017 study, reproduced in https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809)

Study of 71,000 animal species found 48 per cent were declining, 49 per cent stable and 3 per cent rising (source: 2023 study, Biological Reviews)

1 million species on the brink of extinction. 881 animal species extinctions (confirmed; 1473 suspected) since 1500. (source: Reuters, 2022: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/EXTINCT/lbvgggdgevq/)