Nocturnes (Nightlife of an Artist Wine Producer)
Recently my friend told me she never went out at night, and it really threw me for a loop. I was appalled that she would knowingly deprive herself of half her life, half the world, and an entire grab bag of novel sensory experiences. I’d never thought much about other people’s night walking habits. I had assumed until that point, if you live in the country, and the moon is shining, then you’ll go walking. Now I wondered if I was an anomaly and marveled at what unknown losses many were suffering by huddling around artificial lights all night. If you knew where the fountain of youth was, wouldn’t you point the way? The burden of spreading the good word about night walking falls on me.
My time spent in the dark side of the day fortifies me for when I’m under the microscopic glare of the sunshine. It gives me strength to look back into all the eyes of all the thinking and needing people throughout the day. Nighttime is an essential counterpart to the day, for my soul, my life of love, and my vocations. I’ve unpacked for her (and I apologize for the exhaustive methodology, but I wanted no stone to go unturned) the expansive nightlife of an artist wine producer. And I’m sharing it here, just in case you too, do not go out at night. Now you can live vicariously through these words or bravely follow the moon’s siren call.
Luckily, I have at least one other friend who shares my views, and I will speak for them, because vines don’t have mouths. They bear fruit for our mouths and speak directly into our minds and spirits. That’s such a pathetic sentence, but I feel obligated to elevate and uber-honor the sequence of transformations that is, regrettably, commonly known simply as “wine production”. Let’s pick it apart so we’re all aware of what is encapsulated in that term. The vine interacts with its environment with intelligence and complexity, then it bears fruit that displays the marks of that interaction, that fruit makes a liquid that bears the marks as well, that we imbibe, at which point the marks can be read by our tongues and nose, and interpreted by our minds, then felt on our souls. The effects of night on a grape and in the wine are critically essential to the type of marks that end up getting transferred. But night’s influence is often overlooked by the enticing allure of daytime’s role in ripening. The subtle drama of the dual influence of the day/night dichotomy is condensed into a microscopic production of only a few seconds, the time it takes to take one sip of wine. That teeny time carries the palimpsest of the 180 days and nights that ripened the fruit.
When producing wine, I’m the chaperone (with opinions) for information that gets transferred from environment to vine, to grape, to wine, to soul. That is four transfers, as many as the print process when I draw from life. The model’s image is part of the environment that I witness, and is transferred by my eyes to my brain, and from there onto copper, then onto paper, and then to someone else’s head. They both start with environmental factors, transferred and interpreted a few times and then into human sensory receptors. Art and wine share a pathway into existence. I’m often compelled to write about the parallels between art and wine. I think it’s to justify to myself and the world these seemingly disparate passions of mine, beyond the obvious. I think a lot about art and wine when I walk around at night, a time for my brain to make sense of and gain the upper hand slightly over the doings of the day. It is a safe and quiet space.
My dog does five times the distance that I do at night, making a rolling radius around me. Sometimes far enough away that I don’t see him for fifteen minutes, then he comes ricocheting back. His pattern keeps most animals at bay so that I don’t feel threatened, except for when he rouses the occasional skunk. He spreads his scent all over the vineyard which discourages other vertebrate pests throughout the days that follow his whirlwind track. I have so many thoughts at night, walking in those hours of darkness, where I’m safe from the activities of the day, with the buffer of dark and quiet around me. A time when activity is discouraged.
The vineyard also needs the night. However, it remains under-acknowledged in the marketing of wine and terroir, and the consumption of wine country lifestyle. Sunshine gets all the glory, photosynthesizing and framing faces in photos. It perpetuates a partial understanding of vine growth and fruit development. Night is actually responsible for the more nuanced aromas and brisk acidity that make a wine standout. Under the orchestration of night, flavors from all corners of the aroma wheel stack into an accordion paraded by juicy, dancing acidic peaks across the tongue. Where are the wine magazine spreads of moonbeams on vine canopies rustling in the night breeze? Full berries so dark they absorb even the moonlight, their waxy skins barely showing a reflection, so they look like black holes instead of plump spheres. Sometimes when I walk my moon shadow is so crisp I turn around and check if a car is creeping up on me.
Shadows throw objects into relief and give them depth. Dark/light contrasts in paintings exist on the single plane of the canvas and in one moment of the time continuum. Shadows are added to a composition to pop objects into three dimensions. In wine, the influence and usefulness of the night/day pairing is stretched across time and cumulative, the length of a growing season. We finally experience it in the bottle, once it is no longer visible to the eye, and years or decades behind us. However long it has been, aromatic depth from that dark/light pairing is felt on the palate, and the acids of cold nights pop the layered aromas into relief.
The time I spend at night, tying together my disparate activities of the day, farming, mothering, winemaking, drawing and reading, feeds my need to tether them all to one point. They all get their shadows painted on at night, so that my time spent on them during the day as busy work, can pop out as real, tangible and meaningful. For the most part, the doing of the things during the day escapes attention by virtue of needing to be done expediently. Unfortunately, I have the need to re-frame, a need that plagues most creative people. It takes up a lot of my time. But fortunately, I have that need, so I never get bored and I stay off the TV and the too many glasses of wine. And if I can turn the thoughts over to you, as something compelling, as a way to see and get to know any of those activities afresh by seeing them through the perspective of a dissociated discipline (art through wine, agriculture through art), then the time is well spent. If not, then there are many hours of TV for me to catch up on, and wine as well.
Although the night is my time for painting shadows on my daytime activities, the opposite is achieved for grapes. It’s the time when acidity gets preserved, generally known as “brightness” in wine-speak. That is the element in the sensory wine experience that paints a highlight on everything else going on in your mouth. The mark of white paint in the iris to make the eye glisten and shine. Cold nights preserve acidity in the grapes, because heat degrades acidity. I can’t explain further because scientific research has nothing else to tell me about it. I’m amazed how often in wine you can dive into a scientific explanation and it just peters off as not yet conclusive enough research to explain this phenomenon that ends up actually sounding like alchemy.
There are environmental factors that are important to note that explain why we have cold nights. Sonoma County is on the ocean side of the Mayacamas, providing regular summer-long cold night temps. Like sticking the grapes in a fridge overnight. Alexander Valley has near ideal mean daytime temperatures of 72 F during the growing season that spans April through October. Average nighttime temperatures are in the low 40s. The coastal exposure also brings many foggy mornings, which mean longer cool periods in the 24 hour cycle. These especially occur in August, post-veraison, when the skins are accumulating the phenolic compounds that give flavor and color to wine. Fog extends till noon all along our steep banked stretches of the Russian River, at the Southern end of Alexander Valley, where the river channel is narrow and lined with hills and trees that catch and keep fog like velcro.
After the day is done, and night has arrived, and all the monkeys are off my back, then I can walk and think. But it’s also a time for writing. I do most of my writing after everyone has been put to bed, even my husband, even the dog. The cat however goes outside, and sometimes comes on the walks with me too, scurrying between shadowy underbrush for protective cover from coyotes. With everything else on pause, I can find my flow and open it up onto paper. Looking out the window from inside my home, with a desk light illuminating my living room, I can only see void. No matter how much of a moon, the contrast to the artificial light is always deep darkness. I’m in a ship on dark water severed from land and things and people. There’s no horizon, nothing to hem me in.
At night photosynthesis in plants is also paused. The protein pathways that activate photosynthesis are on idle without light to turn them on. All night the leaves stop throwing sugars into the plant, stalling their accumulation in the pulp of the berry. The berry’s skin however continues to mature, producing phenolic compounds that give pigment and aroma to wine. Grapes requiring long maturation periods for full expression (like Bordeaux varietals) want regular cool nights to extend their hang time, lengthen their stride so to speak, and get their flavors all out there on display without relentless high temperatures sky-rocketing their sugar levels.
The vine still ages at night, all growth processes other than photosynthesis continue at night. It’s supple tender green shoots begin to lignify at the base, the woody brown creeping up towards the tendrils over the course of weeks. Then into the rakus that holds the cluster to the shoot, making it easier to sever with the scycle shaped harvest knife snapping the crisp stem rather than knawing laboriously through meaty and tenacious young green plant material.
It always makes me think of something about us humans, the ageing of the human mind. Its calcification that lignifies our youthful drive and ability to be supple. The older we get, the stiffer we become. We become more careful and more risk averse. Fear dominates the decision-making process, and luckily for teenagers starts with the frontal cortex finishing its maturity to make for slightly more rational 20 yr olds. But when I went from my twenties to my thirties, I felt a very significant drop in my courage. Where previously I had an unlimited amount of confidence, blindness to consequences, lack of fear, I suddenly had to dig deep and call up much more strength to muster a fraction of what I had before. As a result, I did fewer daring things. I’m quite afraid of the shift from 30’s to 40’s will bring another drop so I’m scrambling to get out what I can before my brain lignifies more and I decide its nicer to sit on my ass and garden rather than dredge up midnight thoughts for you. I hope to form a good habit of being brave so my mind doesn’t lose that option. Art is constant training. So are my two other risk related past times: skiing and bridge. Laugh not, when you crest a ridge and commit to pointing your skis downhill which is the shortest path to your death, it is not unlike assessing your hand for success against your opponents and then playing to meet what you declare as the highest potential of the hand that you are dealt.
My girlfriend has been practicing going out at night, with some success, the fear of night is a real one: nyctophobia. And the cataphonic howls of a pack of wild coyotes can feel like they are on top of you, even if they are miles away. Nocturnes in the history of painting prey on the allure of night, the mystery of our fear of it and the fecundity it holds for a whole other world right where we tread all day long. Who reigns there at night? My favorite night paintings are by Le Douanier. Someone who bucked the calcification of the mind trend and switched careers from customs officer to painter at the age of 35. Magritte as well, a master of penombre, or twilight. A special time when an artificial light from a distance seems incongruous and superfluous to the remaining glow after the setting sun. But that contrast is only apparent at a distance, because if you are in the range of where the artificial light casts its glow, you perceive twilight as pitch dark already, despite the glowing horizon’s remaining natural light. Such is the double edge of comfort. The porch light keeps the creeping darkness at bay, but it deepens it as well, exacerbating the threat.
Another genre that excels in nocturnes is the western. The glow of a campfire glinting off a silver saddle buckle, a coffee pot, and a holstered six-shooter. Remington and Russell’s western art has an array of lavish but limited palette night scenes. They are qualified as romantic. I think I fall into that trap. A delusional romantic. I love to walk in that palette, following my moon shadow, my dog an indistinguishable black blur searching for rabbits. This time of year, mere weeks before harvest, the vines are deep green like a velvet curtain dress, their illuminated leaves like the more rare type of light jade. The grapes are pitch black, like pendulant voids, unless it’s a white varietal, then they are magically translucent as honey, the moon glowing from within an amber shell.
Nighttime is also harvest, and it must be so, to get the fruit off cold enough so that it arrives bacteria free to the winery, and not degraded by heat. The grapes are refridgerated by their own internal temperatures and insulated in a massive heap of themselves. Harvest is like theatre, with suddenly so much stage lighting during the pick right out in the middle of the blocks. Lights that glide around on tractors, silent from afar but roaring up close. Following the action diligently as the pickers comb their way through the rows, one hand on a cluster, the other hand cutting with a clean slice, hands moving in the opposite direction to create opposing forces on the rakus. The knife doesn’t always go from bottom up, it just goes whatever way you can get a grip on the cluster, head and shoulders deep in the canopy of the vine, where it is dark despite the stage lighting and a headlamp is necessary to rode-out the fruit.
I walked down to drop some bread at my dad’s house last night around 9:30. He said I looked beautiful, but didn’t I need a coat? A light? Beautiful? Everyone is beautiful at night, and I’m sure I was shining from finally having the chance to make sense of the day. A coat? The earth warms me by radiating it’s heat collected throughout the day, held in its gravel and rocks. It makes me feel upside down, since we are usually warmed by the sun from the top downwards. A light? The moon and the stars are my light. But really, I could do it blindfolded anyways I know the road so well. As kids we used to make a train and I would love to lead, to walk around at night, hands on the shoulders of the person ahead of you, a snake of blind kids winding up a hill to our camp. Then we grew up and discovered (part of) the joy of wine and we stumbled back down that hill, through the poison oak that we carefully avoided as children, to fall madly into the river. The river at night is as black as India ink. It is also welcomingly warm, especially to a naked body full of wine. The river warms up all day long in the sun and releases its heat slower than the earth. A warm gently moving body of water in a cold night.
I still get naked at night, but not while I’m walking around. For sex. Sex is mostly a nighttime activity these days, and between sheets. In addition to the obvious reasons for it, sex is also a ritual of grounding in depth the rote motions of being in a partnership with someone. It’s the opportunity to be raw and vulnerable, to tint the single note of daytime getting-doneness with the unknown and give it some shade and therefore complexity. It’s a time when the boundary between people disappears, and they too exist on a dark sea, with no horizon in sight. That’s great in itself, the feeling of sex. But also, as a counterpart to all the time spent talking, negotiating, making shit happen for a family and working, it is as vital as adding shadow to one side of a triangle if you want to turn it into a mountain on your paper.
I find all that happens with my partner in the daytime to be in one color, a color that sits in my throat near the top. Where the sound of my voice is that of action and readiness to pounce, to survive. But with sex, and this is not a sexual innuendo, I get to feel my voice deeper in my throat. Sex brings the shadows into a relationship, the good shadows. It gives the color in which that relationship resides all day long a good stroke of darkness. So that when its in that monochrome state hour after long hour of the long day and the days pile up until it vibrates with monotony, there can be reprieve. I guess that’s why it’s called fucking. And I think that’s a good way to put it, a base word that does justice to the complex shadowy depth sex gives to the monochrome monotony of a day of partnering.
Everyone likes a more complex wine too, so just remember you have many dark cool nights to thank for it. There’s never acknowledgement of the night in wine consumerism. Nighttime gets allocated the dirty side of wine only. The jug wines, or the bagged wine spiked with cheap whiskey, (what, you’ve never?), the wasted glasses of fine wine on abused palates. Night? That’s just when the drunk part of wine happens. The refinement part is pictured as the afternoon terrace-bound sipping of a conservative tasting experience. It’s grossly over-common and disrespectful of the labor night puts in so that the sipping can blow your mind. Don’t forget the night next time you are secure in the dappled sunshine of a winery patio. Try it against a full moon glass of wine, alone with your thoughts.
Image by Keith Boadwee, Club Paint, 2020
