Wine Liberated

What can wine become when we free ourselves from the belief that our current idea of wine—dominated by a monoculture and the product of colonial capitalism—is the highest and best version that  it can be? 

Over the last eighty years, wine has developed into a global monoculture, with just a few varieties of a single species of grape dominating a majority of the market. Millions of acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and a few others grow across every continent and many countries. While this trend is seen in other crops, wine has a unique history of legal enforcement and propaganda that created and propagated this dominance. When you think of wine, what you probably think of is actually a product of colonial capitalism founded on prejudice and sustained by pesticides. 

Yet few who fall in love with “wine” are aware of this. The dominant concept of wine has been so successful that other ideas have mostly been marginalized into invisibility… until recently. Since 2019, winemaker and popular podcaster Adam Huss has been seeking out, interviewing, and learning from an unorganized group of wine producers who are pushing wine beyond the boundaries of the dominant culture’s hegemony. The impetus for many of these folks originates in ecological appropriateness and the desire to build authentic local wine cultures, and the results are revolutionary. The influence of the ideas behind these unassuming rebels’ approach to wine has begun to liberate wine from the damaging confines of the dominant wine culture, of which their wine is a living critique. 

Wine Liberated explores large questions about what wine is—and can become—through the perspectives and ideas of a selection of these producers. The first section of the book discusses the producers who are freeing wine from the single-species focus on Vitis vinifera, experimenting with other grape species that are ecologically appropriate in their geographical contexts. The second section looks at producers who push beyond the limits of the industrial production idea of a vineyard by thinking of ecosystems, polycultures, and living spaces for many lifeforms as systems that can grow wine. The third section explores producers who allow wine the freedom to listen to the land and express whatever it does best, even if that isn’t grapes. By the end of the book, Adam will present the reader with a definition and a vision for wine that is much more ecologically minded, diverse, and hopefully delicious than the current dominant wine culture.